It's been more than a year since I penned, "Before Making the Leap to Agile", an article intended to guide everyone from C-level executives to IT project managers on the adoption of Agile. The goal was to offer up some of the lessons I learned through actual implementations, so that readers could avoid of some of the pitfalls associated with Agile adoption.  While a few saw it as an assault on Agile, many understood that my goal was to assist Agile adopters and thanked me for writing it.

Five-thousand-plus page views later on the last article, and I've finally cleared my plate enough to address an equally important topic, why people, and organizations, are making the shift to Agile from the more typical Waterfall. After all, Agile is a revolutionary approach to software development and it continues to grow in popularity, so I think it's important for those who do not yet use Agile to understand why others have embraced it.

Why are people abandoning Waterfall and moving to Agile?

1. Agile is Adaptive. For the project team, as well as the business, Agile enables you to make quick changes in direction so that your software product and your business can respond to a rapidly changing business environment.

How? Agile teams use two-to-four week iterations, often called sprints, in which to develop and then release a working product.  At the end of each sprint, the team uses retrospectives to look back on the work completed and see how productivity can be improved; the team also works with the customer to determine which work should be accomplished during the next sprint.  One technique enables continuous improvement, the other enables the business to re-prioritize work based on changes in the business climate.  Together, they make Agile highly adaptive when compared to a Waterfall approach that effectively locks the team in to both a process and business strategy for a number of months.

2. WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Development. Many of us are familiar with this wonderful cartoon that shows how projects really work -- at least in a Waterfall world. Notice how there's an enormous disconnect between the first image, "what the customer asked for", and the last, "what the customer really needed".

Arguably, this happens because those of us in software development listen dutifully to what our customer says, document their words in the form of requirements, and then go off and build it, assuming all along that our customer knows not only what they want - but what their end customers want.  In reality, many of us have a rough idea of what we want and often less of an idea of what our customers want, particularly with software products that serve the masses (sure, focus groups and usability testing make a big difference, but still fall short in many instances).

Agile takes an entirely different approach to requirements gathering. Product features are identified for development and then the team works together with the business customer to build the features cooperatively. In many cases, user stories are written, screen mockups are drawn and simple business rules are written, but nothing too sophisticated. Instead, the Agile team relies upon heavy interaction with the customer or product owner to elicit requirements on-the-fly.

For example, not sure what the business customer wanted on a particular screen? Show them what you've got and see if it fits their expectations. Even if it is what they asked for, see if it's going to serve their customer's needs as they intended, or if it needs some refinement. Either way, if they want a change, change it. Using this nimble approach, there is little risk of misinterpretation of requirements and even less risk that the finished product misses the mark.

3. Shorter Time-to-Market. Let's be honest here - who among us hasn't reported to a C-level who has a great idea and wants something on the market - yesterday. (Heck, I've been guilty of this myself). Using a Waterfall approach, delivering anything to the marketplace takes months and sometimes years. But, by taking an Agile approach, the bare-bones features of a new product can be delivered in weeks, then, further enhanced to provide a truly robust solution. Again, the secret to shorter time-to-market lies in the use of iterations (sprints), with the end of each sprint another opportunity to deliver more features to the customer. Agile has this - Waterfall doesn't.

4. Greater Employee Satisfaction. One of the oft-cited byproducts of Agile development is greater employee satisfaction - both by the project team and the line-of-business responsible for delivering the product. According to Steve Greene and Chris Fry, Salesforce.com reported an 89% employee satisfaction rating after adopting Agile when compared to only 40% before adoption.

In a similar vein, research by Grigori Melnick and Frank Maurer from the University of Calgary showed 82% of employees at Agile-adopting businesses were satisfied or very satisfied with their jobs, while only 41.2% were satisfied or very satisfied in non-Agile shops (2006, Comparative Analysis of Job Satisfaction in Agile and Non-Agile Software Development Teams). 

5. Higher Quality. By most accounts, adopting Agile reduces defects and results in higher product quality. While personally I have seen Agile projects head in the wrong direction and suffer from higher defect rates initially, many sources have noted significantly higher quality on Agile projects. According to a 2008 survey by Version One, 68% of respondents to a survey on Agile adoption and corresponding results reported improved product quality as one of the benefits (3rd Annual Survey on the State of Agile Development). Similarly, David Rico, et. al report on average a 75% improvement in quality by adopting Agile (The Business Value of Agile Software Methods, 2009, J Ross Publishing).

6. Higher ROI. If there's one single reason for the corner office to be sold on Agile, it has to be higher ROI. Because Agile reduces project overhead, delivers beneficial work more quickly and produces higher quality products, Agile also delivers a higher ROI to the businesses who adopt it. According to research that compiled data from multiple different sources, including Microsoft, Version One and the University of Maryland, Agile projects average an 1788% ROI when compared with Waterfall projects at 173% (The Business Value of Agile Software Methods, 2009, J Ross Publishing). While these numbers appear to be skewed toward the low side for Waterfall because the comparison only included CMMI-adopting organizations, that hardly makes up for a 10-fold difference between the two. 

With all of this evidence residing squarely in the corner “for” Agile adoption, it's sometimes hard to understand why Waterfall is still practiced. But the truth is, adopting Agile takes a paradigm shift in thinking that is not easy for individuals, much less organizations, to make. It also takes experience not only in practicing Agile, but also in managing organizational change, two qualities critical in Agile consultants.

This is why the Cedar Point Consulting team tailors its Agile implementations to each organization, choosing the tools and techniques that best match your industry and needs so that you avoid many of the pitfalls and have a successful adoption. It's also why I have personally put so much time and effort into making Agile even more robust, not only by exploring Agile at Scale, but also by off-setting some of Agile's weaknesses with common-sense approaches that nearly every business can implement.

So, go ahead, make the leap to Agile. Just be certain you're taking the right approach to Agile adoption for your organization before you begin.

Donald Patti is a Principal Consultant with Cedar Point Consulting, a management consulting practice based in the Washington, DC area, where he advises businesses in project management, process improvement, and small business strategy. Cedar Point Consulting can be found at http://www.cedarpointconsulting.com.