Friday, May 14, 2010

How much agile should we be?

First, I should make it clear that I'm talking about building a middle size website, such as, say for a news agency.

Until now, I thought that it's so great to be agile.
Yay, let's sign the contract with the customer, for a slightly overrate price, screw documents, we'll play by ear, the customer is always there (phone call, frequent meetings), so no worry.
But....
I've learned that particularly bad things will happen to you if you do this, especially when you tell the customer about agile, and change and so on.
What happens, is basically, that the customer will ask you to build a different site each iteration, most likely because they have no idea what they want, and what a usable website looks like. They will progressively destroy the nice, clean design your CSS team has made (they will hate the whitespace, and keep adding more and more ads). After that they will also delete any sort of logic and flow there may have been.

I have found the following changes, most devastating to such a plan:
. Changes to page layouts: Adding boxes being the most frequent, changing around places, etc.. will have your CSS team confused, and you will be monkeypatching your html templates in no time.
. Changes to database schema: Call me old school, or whatever, but changing your database schema, will take time. More time than it's worth, especially if you need to change; I mean not add or delete something, but change things, and already have lots of data to migrate.
. Changes to "types" and "categories" that the website handles: Often special functionality is required for each "type", each shows in a box, some are searchable, etc... Each comes with it's own newly made (in 3.2 minutes by the customer) business rules that most likely don't make sense or fit in with the other rules (each made up in 3.2 minutes).
. Overhaul of the UI style: Doesn't fit well with having a separate CSS team.

So, guess what?
For the next project, I will do some requirements, and have the customer sign them. Wants these to change? Too bad, next contract. I don't have that sort of time, for that sort of business style.

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