Seven Paradoxes of Agile Software Development

Agile software development has many very common-sense ideas in it, but if it was all common-sense we'd have been using it long ago. Agile also contains counter-intuitive ideas: paradoxes that make it hard for people accept. For example, the notion that we go fast BECAUSE we take quality to the max is paradoxical for people. They are used to having to trade off speed and quality. On the other hand the idea that those who do the work are best placed to estimate it is seen as perfectly sensible. How can a coherent design emerge if design is done one iteration at a time? Another paradox. But it's easy to accept that when you build a system iteratively, you can learn more quickly from your experiences - that's common sense. We'll explore the 5 other paradoxes, and you'll see how a grasp of these helps you to take your agile practices to the next level.

About the speaker

Nancy Van Schooenderwoert is Principal Coach at Lean-Agile Partners Inc. Lean-Agile Partners demonstrates to their customers ways to use and adopt agile practices in their organizations. They "teach their customers how to fish" by training customer staff to coach agile teams. Working with both their customers' management and technical teams, Lean-Agile Partners helps companies design, plan, and implement their Agile adoption programs. Customers get the benefit of Lean-Agile Partners' experience while staying in control of their Agile transformation.She holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology and is a regular contributor of articles and advisories for the Cutter IT Journal. Nancy holds a Scrum Master certification, has edited a column for the Agile Times, and served on the IEEE 1648 committee to define a standard for customers of agile teams. She has been a regular presenter at various Agile-related conferences since 2003, and also at the Embedded Systems conference. Her work in applying Agile methods to embedded systems has been referenced by Jim Shore and Mary Poppendieck in their recent books. She speaks at numerous software professional gatherings, and is currently active on the board of Agile Bazaar, Boston's agile professional community hub.

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