Thursday, February 5, 2009

You call this Agile?

I started a small project recently with a company that touts its Agile development process. The assignment was straightforward enough: determine why callers aren't completing what should be a simple registration process using a speech IVR.

A couple of things you probably already know about Agile. If done correctly, it's faster than traditional waterfall methodologies for getting projects completed. It also de-emphasizes the creation of documentation during the project. Of course, after the project is over no one wants to hang around and create documentation from scratch.

So, a week after the start of the project, no one has been able to produce any documentation of the existing system - no grammars, no call flows, nothing. This makes it just a little hard to review. This is one of my least favorite aspects of Agile.

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