Agile Software Projects - Possible Reasons for failure

Agile's attractiveness with short-burst development cycles, sometimes overshadows the preconditions to rapid-development. The belief in agile is that it's quicker to refactor the product along the way than to try to define everything completely up front, which arguably is impossible.

Potential Reasons for Agile Software Projects failure, keeping Agile Principles in view -

• Product owners non-commitment to being actively involved throughout the project


• Not effective collaboration with business colleagues or customers


• Requirements emerge and evolve, results into Scope changes, creates the risk of ever-lasting projects. Sometimes, No documentation, whatsoever.


• Wasted Effort on deliverables that don't last


• Less predictability, at the start of the project and during, about what the project is actually going to deliver.


• Design flaws - Constant requirements change within short durations, and shorter delivery spans, doesn't allow scope to detailed design. Also, not being aware of high level requirements at the start, doesn't allow to have high level design understanding.


• Testers needed throughout the project - To ensure quality, additional cost to the project for testing during regular short releases.


• Development Team Burnout - Agile development is rather intense for developers. The need to really complete each feature 100% within each iteration, and the relentlessness of iterations, can be mentally quite tiring so it's important to find a sustainable pace for the team.