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Submission + - Why your users hate Agile (itworld.com)

Esther Schindler writes: What developers see as iterative and flexible, users see as disorganized and never-ending. Why your users hate Agile development (and what you can do about it) shares how some experienced developers have changed that perception.

...She's been frustrated by her Agile experiences — and so have her clients. "There is no process. Things fly all directions, and despite SVN [version control] developers overwrite each other and then have to have meetings to discuss why things were changed. Too many people are involved, and, again, I repeat, there is no process."

The premise here is not that Agile sucks — quite to the contrary — but that developers have to understand how Agile processes can make users anxious, and learn to respond to those fears. Not all those answers are foolproof. For example:

Detailed designs and planning done prior to a project seems to provide a "safety net" to business sponsors, says Semeniuk. "By providing a Big Design Up Front you are pacifying this request by giving them a best guess based on what you know at that time — which is at best partial or incorrect in the first place." The danger, he cautions, is when Big Design becomes Big Commitment — as sometimes business sponsors see this plan as something that needs to be tracked against. "The big concern with doing a Big Design up front is when it sets a rigid expectation that must be met, regardless of the changes and knowledge discovered along the way," says Semeniuk.

How do you respond to user anxiety from Agile processes?

Comment Re:While I hate someone advertising "Unlimited" (Score 1) 573

I agree, I personally don't like "unlimited" advertisings for many products when they have limits but in this case I would have to side with the FIOS guy... 77 tb of data is huge. Whether he charges for it or not is irrelevant, the guy's service is no different than a business. They asked him to switch to business... it seems reasonable to me as well. I actually find they were rather flexible if they let it reach 77tb

The interesting data here is he is consuming 30,000 more than the average user. which would mean the average user uses between 2-3 gigabytes of data.

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