Why do agile methods interest me? Read the title of this post again.
As a developer for 13 years I have come to realize that what I write generally has a very limited lifetime (as opposed to the car I drive). I have noticed however a pattern that really bugs me and it is this: We can't deliver only part of the application!
For whatever reason, someone has decided on a thousand features and can't deliver a single one until they are all completed. This became painfully clear to me a couple of years ago when the consulting company I worked for was called in to help develop an application. There were definitely some issues with the clients that we were trying to solve. Anyway, we took down a list of requirements and disappeared into the closet to develop the application. Four months later, we re-emerged to find we had a little more work to do for usability. Two months later we were ready to begin training, however by this time, our client had lost their biggest customer (accounting for 85% of their business). When talking with the client, I found that we could have solved their biggest pain point with the customer in the first months of development.
I was talking with another developer facing the same issue. 95% of the users need function A, only 5% need functions B-F. The problem comes in that function A can't be rolled out presumably because it is not functional for the 5%. We are talking about several thousand users.
But this seems to be “status quo” in the majority of companies that I have done consulting for. It's acceptable. Is this a carry over from waterfall developer that became managers? Here is where “AGILE” interests me. I don't care whether you talk XP, Scrum, etc. If you talk about delivering value you have my attention. If the discussion is about features, you've lost my interest.