Five excellent excuses why not to be agile

Sure, everybody says: be agile! But what if you don't really feel like being agile? You need some excuses. And here are five excellent ones.

Recently, I've read a book about usability testing, Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug. In my opinion, it's not a good book but I like its Chapter 11.

In Chapter 11, Steve Krug describes what designers say when you ask them to change something. And I've realized that it's not about usability testing. It's about agile development, and about life in general.

Here are five excellent, absolutely essential lines. Learn them, use them, and you don't need to be agile again.

• If we're going to fix it, we want to do it right.
  
  
• It's a core problem. There's no easy way to fix it.
  
  
• That's all going to change soon anyway. We can live with it until then.
  
  
• It's going to end up feeling like a kludge.
  
  
• We can't fix that right now. We don't have time.
  

How often I have heard these lines!

And you know what, here's a neat trick. Don't keep them just for you. Tell everybody in your company about them. Make them visible, write them down in big letters and post them high so everybody can see them all the time.

And then just wait until somebody says one of them. Enjoy that moment, point at the lines, nod, and say: Chapter 11. You'll be surprised how it works. Because excuses cannot be excellent if everybody knows them.