Drawbacks of Agile Methods and Managing Them Effectively.

Since the development of agile software engineering in mid 1990’s agile method has travel a long way down the road. Currently a wide range of organization claims to be agile or interested in adopting agile methods (Laanti, Salo & Abrahamsson, 2011). Agile method is an “umbrella” term for several iterative and incremental software development methodologies (Visionone.com, 2014). Agile approaches are generally used in software development to assist businesses respond to unpredictability. The most widely used agile methodologies are Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum. (agilemethodology.org, 2014). Adoption of Agile methods proven to challenging task (Laanti, Salo & Abrahamsson, 2011) due to various reasons such as Cultural issues, resistance to change, poor communication and unavailability of the people with right skills. (optimation.co.nz, 2014). Companies tend to adapt agile methods while they have these barricades on their way. When practicing agile method in the company, company will experience numerous disadvantages regarding agile methods. The main reason for this issue is most agile adapters don’t have a complete idea about what agile method is and how wide it applies. Therefore managing these disadvantages will also become vital to the organization. (178)
Companies experience numerous disadvantages and risks while they practice agile methodologies.
Disadvantages and effective disadvantage management
First identified disadvantage is that agile methods are lack in documentation (. This often considers as an advantage of agile systems however it is also a disadvantage. The reason behind that is the fluid nature of agile methods (www.multimedia.telos.com, 2014). Therefore design gets changed more often according to the user requ...

... middle of paper ...

...y, more than 50% who involved did not want to go back to the traditional way only 12% said they would prefer to go to the old way. This concludes that the agile users prefer to use it regardless of the limitations. The main reason behind this could be the flexibility of agile methods because for an agile based project the pre requirements are less such as defining project scope, requirements planning etc. However for the most of the issues that occurs when using agile methods can be avoid by having a predefined scope and requirements. Most disadvantages are related to the disorganized manner of the agile methods. Agile method is more suitable for small and medium sized projects because those unorganized but effective methods are really productive in short term. The quickness and the unorganized methods are not suitable for large scale, multi million dollar projects.