Why Agile Projects Fail (Joseph Pelrine, MetaProg and Jiri Lundak, Löwenfels Partner AG)

Agile projects fail. All the semantic manouvering around the definition of "failure" still can't hide the fact that some Agile projects do "crash & burn". Why does this happen, how can we recognize it, and what can we do to prevent this from happening? The more popular Agile methods become, the more we as a community will have to address, and find answers for, these problems.

This talk will present a taxonomy of Agile project failure modes and causes, and will present a forum for attendees to share their experiences, be they failure, or success.

About the speakers

Joseph Pelrine is C*O of MetaProg, a company devoted to increasing the quality of software and its development process, and is one of Europe's leading experts on eXtreme Programming as well as Europe's first certified ScrumMaster Practitioner and Trainer. He has had a successful career as software developer, project manager and consultant, and has spoken about it at such diverse places as IBM, OOPSLA and the Chaos Computer Club. His work focus is on field of organizational complexity and its application to Agile processes.

Jiri Lundak is a senior software engineer and development team lead with Löwenfels Partner in Switzerland. He has over 20 years of software development experience as programmer and architect and is a Practicing Certified ScrumMaster and as such heavily propagating an Agile software development approach. He is currently writing a book about why Agile projects may fail and what to do about it.