I was listening to the Javapolis Inside the Agility Cube session and snorted at the following excerpt:
I know of a project that went into a kind of death march chaos and all kinds of other things. The project that I guess you could have.. probably take twenty to twenty five people to develop. At the last count there was something like seventy people involved. So.. slightly off the objective there. And they had originally instituted a two week cycle. And what happened.. eventually the management decided to shut down the agile process pump and one of the reasons was they said they didn’t like hearing bad news every two weeks.
I have a four year old boy who is just learning the trick of putting his fingers in his ears and saying I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you. He hasn’t learned it too well but that is very much what went on at this company. “I don’t want to hear your feedback. Your feedback is not good. I thought that you guys said you would do Agile development and give us this feedback that it was always going to be good news”. No news is good news. This is not what it is about. The whole point of an agile process. The whole point of an iterative and incremental – or in their case decremental – development is you fail fast. If you’re going to get it wrong you may as well find out sooner rather than later. And you have to be prepared for that.
Its tough working with a business partner or customer that expects to hear “good news” all the time. Its just not workable. To guarantee “good news” all the time, the performance bar needs to be set really low – and that’s not in anyone’s best interest.