Is agile an excuse for sloppy project management

I was listening to one of Scott Hanselman’s podcasts this morning and Scott made a comment about people thinking that agile methodologies were and excuse for sloppy project management (NOTE: Scott wasn’t of this opinion, he just stated that some other people thought this).

I am fully bought into SCRUM, and whilst we don’t implement if fully at work (we have our own handcrafted way of doing it that really works well for us) I think it brings great benefits.
One of the real stumbling blocks with people adopting SCRUM / Agile is getting over the mind set that they can determine the delivery dates and that they can force the development team into delivering everything they want by that date. I truly do not believe that it is possible to fix both scope (requirements) and timescale (delivery dates) in a software project, even having done lots of design up front. I have written before on the perils of this approach…

Giving up all control of dates is something that takes quite a psychological leap of getting used to, but when you are there, you see all the benefits. Let me give you an example…

Think of The Beatles.
Their ‘products’ were (obviously) their songs, they were all passionate about what they were doing (providing great music to the masses) and they did it really well – everyone loved their product.
When Lennon and McCartney (and Harrison) sat down to write a song, if they’d had a limited time then the quality would have suffered. They were not limited in time and they produced great things.

That is one of the things you have to accept in agile – crafting great software products is an skill and an art, for the developers sometimes their creative juices flow in abundance, sometimes they don’t.
To meet strict timescales, something has to give, and that something is scope (or quality, but you don’t really want that do you ??…)

GEO 51.4043197631836:-1.28760504722595