Yesterday I ran a session for another group at my current client introducing them to agile. The first part of this session helped me get a better understanding of what they thought of, or had heard about, or applied about agile and during this I noticed a few comments they touched on (and I hear numerous times from other people) that I thought might be worth sharing. I have found that when people observe and even when people practice some of the agile practices, it can be easy for them to incorrectly draw the wrong conclusions. Here’s a few of them and my thoughts on each:

Being agile means we don’t have to write documentation
I have never heard any agile coach nor practitioner ever say this, nor encourage this form of thinking. The agile manifesto states a value is “Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation”, with the thinking that people would rather some delivered instead of being given a document telling them what they could have had instead. You will find people trying to avoid writing comments in code because most of the stuff people write is redundant (it tells someone what the code does, when they can read the code right there and then – if it can’t be read, then maybe you have a bigger problem at hand). There are situations where comments are invaluable (libraries APIs given to external parties, or even commenting why something may not be obvious to a reader because of some bug/library/performance reason). I have found that sometimes having general diagrams with some descriptive phrases and a brief narrative is much more useful than any 300 page document might give. Consider that an hour spent in a conversation about what someone wants can be more productive than an hour spent writing and then another hour spent reading a document hastily put together.

Being agile means we don’t do design
Avoiding Big Design Up Front (BDUF) is a popular term but so easily abused. Not practicing BDUF is not about not doing *any* design and is even worse for a justification of a *poor* design and is a very big judgement thing. We have found that some good discussion about an approach helps (whiteboarding might be involved) can be useful, but in reality the implementation will be greatly different from the original design. It is sometimes better to just do things, and refactor to patterns or a better design (otherwise referred to emergent design) because you cannot anticipate everything. UML and class diagrams may help for *communicating* ideas, but not a great idea for trying to generate the code from it as the code tends to move faster than what the diagrams can keep up with.

Agile doesn’t work with old projects
There is no reason why inheriting someone else’s code automatically implies you cannot apply agile principles. You might find that some of the practices might be more difficult to implement such as talking to the people that originally wrote the code, or find the system difficult to test, but it shouldn’t stop you from trying. It does not mean that when you get new requirements, you cannot involve the customer more, it does not mean you cannot write your tests first and it certainly does not restrict you to release changes early and get more feedback. If you find there are problems, the old project is unlikely the cause and is more likely other processes such as the release procedures or the way your operations team works. Blaming agile or the project is not the answer.

Agile is no different from other processes, we do testing in RUP (etc)
I’ve never heard any agile practitioner say that testing is not executed in other processes. Testing in agile is different because there are different levels of testing and there is an expectation for the testing to start as early as possible. By focusing on testable, releasable and value-added units, more things can be achieved by the team such as getting better feedback, and getting more value earlier rather than in one big bang at the end (that may or may not happen).