As part of the follow-up to our recent Agile/DevOps webinar, I spoke with a life/annuities carrier struggling with stakeholder expectations related to its new Agile rollout. It’s a common “teething pain” with Agile—business was unhappy because the project was taking longer than the Agile team had estimated based on early requirements, which were high-level and half-baked.
What was interesting is that Agile had recently been adopted with the promise that the project could be delivered much faster than if the established Waterfall process was used. Besides the reality that adopting anything has a cost (and that some initial slowdown is to be expected), it also seems like a classic case of “silver bullet syndrome.”
Silver bullet syndrome is a fallacy first coined by Fred Brooks in 1986 and revisited by Steve McConnell in his seminal 1996 book Rapid Development, written before Agile was even a thing. It’s a book full of insight, and it is considered a milestone in the timeline of the Agile explosion.
To quote McConnell, “The biggest risk associated with software tool use is undoubtedly silver-bullet syndrome—the naïve belief that a single tool or technology will by itself dramatically reduce development time. Switching to a new programming language, trying out a CASE tool, moving to object-oriented programming, adopting Total Quality Management—these have become classic exercises in wishful thinking. The desire to believe in silver bullets on rapid-development projects is especially strong.”
Sure, some of the details sound antiquated today. Many won’t have heard of TQM or CASE tools, for example. But the underlying wisdom is timeless, and it applies as much to methodology and process as it does to development languages, frameworks, architectural approaches, and software tools.
It’s easy to get swept along by the current of hype that accompanies the latest technology trends, but carriers should be on their guard for exaggerated promises and silver bullet claims. And while there is often waste than can be eliminated, custom development is essentially complex. There is no silver bullet (except maybe general artificial intelligence) that will change that overnight.
To read more about Novarica’s research on Agile, see our report Agile in Insurance: Expansion and Key Issues.
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