Chasm revisted

A few people commented on yesterday's blog about my assertion that there is no Agile chasm.

I agree mostly with what they've written - they're very clever folk.

But the examples they've raised - e.g. the UK government - or the assertions they've made - some people will see even the simplest evolution changes as disruptive probably apply to the "laggards" - they're way out on the right of the bell curve.  The chasm happens between the innovators/early adopters and the early (pragmatic) majority, not the laggards.

So, when I say there's no chasm, I'm not saying that everyone on the right side of early adopters will find it easy or buy in ... just that agile can easily be done in a way an  evolutionary way which (according to "The Chasm companion") the early majority like.  They'll still question it of course - that would be pragmatic (their other name is the "pragmatists")  but so long as it feels like a relatively smallish change many of them will do it because it is the pragmatic thing to do.  I don't mean that they'll embrace it without a little persuasion though.

The laggards - like the UK government as Dave pointed out in once comment - are just a fact of life, but they're not sitting next to the chasm.  I should have been clearer in my original blog

To be fair: I wasn't entirely truthful yesterday.  There is a chasm, but only because people see Agile as being disruptive, when it doesn't need to be.  It's a perception thing, so it's about marketing, which I guess was the reason why Crossing The Chasm was a marketing book.  That's my point: in order to make loads more people happier in their work and to make businesses LOADS more money, we have to show them the easy, incremental version, not the scary, disruptive, extreme version.  They'll value the version on the left far more than the version on the right.

Comments

[David Peterson]

Hmm, yeah, I realised that after I wrote it. I still think there is a chasm, though, and agile methods are disruptive - you can't expect success with agile methods in the long-run without quite a lot of new knowledge and new techniques.

Many organisations (not just the UK government) will have no qualms spending 12 months "building a scalable software architecture" before they even started developing the stuff that their users' need. Going from big-up-front architecture to YAGNI is a huge change in mindset. It's disruptive. And unless you have automated tests, clean design, etc. you're going to come a cropper. I think that underplaying the changes required to be agile is going to be detrimental to agile in the long-run.

I've blogged my suggestions... http://blog.davidpeterson.co.uk/2008/05/how-do-we-widen-agile-adoption.html