Found some old notes of mine about agile, almost a decade old (note I am referring to Agile as new 🙂 ), but surprisingly the core question I was pondering upon a decade back, still holds true. The question development teams still struggle to solve is – how much time is sufficient for the design phase when one is following Agile practices.

Agile is new, bold, and sexy. Everyone wants to be Agile. Every resume I have seen of late has “Agile Development” mentioned in one form or another.

But the question is, what is Agile? Now some would say Scrum is Agile, having status meetings every day is Agile, and development in Sprints is agile. Well, if you look at the dictionary, agile is “able to move quickly and easily”. And Scrum, Sprints, TDD, etc are just some tools to get things done faster. I have shared my thoughts on agile development here.

With Agile development, I have seen too often teams trying to jump on development from day one. Design and architecture sound old-fashioned. Why spend time on something that will not show up on the screen as the end product? Why not instead spend time developing something which one can demo to clients, and get appreciated for fast work?

When you are driving, speed is attractive, but it needs better clarity, stability, balance, and most importantly synchronization if we have a team. By pushing the design to the back burner, we are saying “let’s start driving, we will figure out the route map on the way”, and before we know it, every member of the team comes up with a different route map and is sitting miles away from each other.

As would not stop people from developing unless the design is complete, but definitely some ground rules should be set beforehand.