One of the most commonly used practice for developing software businesses is agile. At its core, agile is a process of iterating on a product. The industry has been heavily relying on agile for years it became the defacto way of building software. Even if a said organization didn’t adopt agile, they use some variant of it. What happen when agile fails us.
I have long been keen to collect feedbacks about why tech startups have failed in Sudan. I know the trivial answer would be financial reasons: lack of access to funds; inflations and market uncertainities. But what if the problem was much deeper than that. Tirhal at some point was evaluated for 7 figures (4M dollars), but now they are barely able to pay for their own employees. That definitely doesn’t comform to our trivial answer.
Today i want to discuss just one part: how we deliver software projects and how that relates to the tech startups in Sudan.
Most of companies in Sudan follow agile, or a variant of it. Agile is quite reasonable and intutitive if you think about it. It allows you to gracefully fail and call your failures next sprint. That’s a huge potential if it was unlocked properly. We start with an MVP and then we We divide deliverables into software development cycles and at each cycle we tackle this very well defined set of problems. The epic of our performance should fix as many issues and implement as many tasks. That works magic! But it has its drawbacks 1.
But what if
Focusing too much on smaller tasks will eventually diverge teams from the bigger pictures, developers’ focus will be around completing a sprint than actually understanding what users really want. But all that might be just my own biased view about agile, and to be honest, it is not too obvious that the alternative methods to agile can offer any better solutions either. ↩︎