And these are all wonderful things. But, from the inside I think we forget the single best thing about agile software development:

Agile means your customers no longer want to throttle you.

Don’t forget this: it keeps everything in perspective.

My first real software development job out of Uni was at a small technology company. We had a core product, an expert system runtime, that the company was built around. We were organised into two major divisions: Products, who worked on the core technology; and Solutions, a traditional consulting division who delivered projects (usually) based around the core technology. Products would have been about 20% of the company’s employees. The rest, admin staff and Solutions.

I worked in Products. I like to think we did good work: during the four years I was there the product became much faster, finally ran on more than one OS, supported multiple platforms and countless other features were all delivered. Delivered on a three month release cycle. We had a roadmap of releases covering the next year and a half or so, with features allocated to each release. And every three months there’d be a new, mildly tested, release that had some of the planned features, some last minute features and a bunch of bug fixes and improvements for features from the last couple of releases.

At this point I would like to remind the uproariously laughing peanut gallery that this was my first job out of Uni and I knew no better. Clearly, neither did any of the managers.

I can still remember the moment of revelation when I discovered that all of Solutions hated us. Hated the Products staff, hated the product. One wag had joked that the company was divided into Solutions and Problems. How could this be? Our technology was great! Really! It was genuinely the best of its kind in the world. Why did they hate us so much? How could they hate us so much?

It’s obvious now: Solutions were trying to win new business and then deliver projects on time and budget. Invariably they’d find bugs in the product, or new features they needed. And our response? “It’s too late for this release; we’ll try to include it in the next one.” In four months time.

Now on an agile team what would I say? “OK, we’ll include that bug fix in the next iteration. You’ll have it Friday week.” That’s a bit glib of course. In reality there will have to be a discussion about what is going to get pushed out of the next iteration, and estimation of how long the new work will take. But when your answer can honestly be in terms of tested, working software and a couple of weeks delay, everyone is happy. And in particular your clients are not going to be frustrated and furious.

On only a couple of occasions since have I had to be the client to a waterfall team. And every time I’ve ended up wanting to throttle them: “How can it take as long to plan the work as it’s going to take to do, ferchrissakes?” And every time I have to remind myself that they’re not trying to be difficult — they genuinely want to help — it really is just this hard to turn the boat.

April, 1997 – Still at University, just started my second year of a computer science degree. I save up the cash and buy the first computer of my very own: a Performa 6360. I get it home; I set it up, including copying all my work off the family computer: there must have been 80 megs of data! I’m about to go downstairs and delete everything off that shared computer, whe I stop. Nah, I’ll do that tomorrow. I shut my brand new Mac down, I go to sleep. I wake up in the morning and one of the first things I do is turn my new Mac on. To be confronted with the dreaded flashing disk icon. My Mac couldn’t find a disk to start from. Uh oh… Even booting from a system CD showed nothing. In the end this wasn’t even a disk crash, there was a bug in the disk driver. It completely lost everything meaningful off the disk. Nice. Good thing I hadn’t deleted my backup. Words to live by.

July, 1998 – For our third year project we decided to write a TCP peer-to-peer IM system for Apple’s up coming new OS: Rhapsody. The beta didn’t run on my 6360, so I sold that and bought a Power Mac G3, one of the original (or so I thought) beige ones. Turns out it wasn’t quite ‘original’ enough: I scored a motherboard rev that wouldn’t boot the developer seed of Rhapsody that I had access to. Argh! We still got our IM system working: we wrote it using the cross-platform environment Apple released for Windows NT. Everyone else in the class wrote Access databases.

March, 2004 – Time to finally upgrade the now ancient G3, so I order an iLamp G4. It arrives, complete with a nice line of purple pixels all the way down the screen. Fortunately, it was declared DOA and a complete replacement was sent.

Hmmm… all Macs so far. Why do I keep buying these?

July, 2005 – We’ve now started a startup. We know .NET, so that’s what we’re writing it in. I buy my first Windows PC – a Compaq Presario. It came with XP Home, so I buy an upgrade to XP Pro at the same time. At home that night, running the upgrade – and it just stops. No upgrade for me. And even better, it deleted the old XP Home installation, leaving me with an unbootable PC. Sound familiar? I got my computer back with a clean installation of XP Pro. Except that didn’t include any hardware drivers at all. Instead of just using VGA 640×480 resolution on my 19in LCD monitor, I spent the evening finding, downloading and installing all the right drivers. That is also my only experience of trying to convince someone I had willingly bought software from that I was not a criminal. Thanks, Microsoft Software Activation. This computer lasted barely two years before a very fatal disk crashed, ended that incarnation.

So, it’s not the computers, it really seems to be me. Those are the only computers that I’ve bought. Seriously, no other computers were hidden away in there. I’ve also had zip drives inexplicably and suddenly give the click of death, lamps leave scorch marks on my desk, monitors catch fire (really! there was smoke), printers refuse to power on and USB devices make my machine reboot right now. Maybe I just have a special relationship with hardware? I’ve definitely got a reputation for it… But, I’m a software guy, and there are uncountable software disasters tucked away in there.

Now, it’s that time again: I need to replace my four year old iMac. I’m planning on getting a laptop, hopefully a MacBook Pro. Doesn’t sound dangerous too me, what could possibly go wrong?