-1

Why do teams that work in a mainframe environment barely use an agile working methodology? What are the key factors of not doing this despite all the technology available?

If so, which agile methodology would suit a mainframe environment the best?

user52999
  • 47
  • 5

2 Answers2

1

I would suppose there are two factors which lead to this:

  1. Mainframes are used for applications for which Waterfall is usually more suited:

    • Many mainframe applications are business-critical or life-critical: those projects require a lot of paperwork and don't fit well with Agile.

    • You rarely see mainframes in start-ups. Mainframes are rather used by government agencies, healthcare sector and financial institutions. Those entities have a habit of using Waterfall, defining the cost of the project prior to its beginning (as well as drafting the requirements specification).

  2. Mainframes are used by developers who are habituated to Waterfall more than Agile. They worked with Waterfall for decades, and may not necessarily accept to radically change their methods.

    In the same way, guess where would a young developer interested by Agile search for a job? In a start-up or in a government agency?

Arseni Mourzenko
  • 134,780
  • 31
  • 343
  • 513
  • The equation "not agile" = "waterfall" is not correct. There are many non agile methodologies that are not waterfall, and one of the first papers mentioning "waterfall" (Managing the Development of Large Software Systems, Winston W. Rovce, 1970!) speaks about it in very critical terms. The contrast agile-waterfall has been created artificially in the recent years to promote agile as something completely new, and leads to incorrectly describing non-agile fans as waterfall-fans. See e.g. Chapter 3 in the recent book http://www.amazon.com/Agile-The-Good-Hype-Ugly/dp/3319051547 – Giorgio Feb 21 '15 at 13:33
  • @Giorgio: note that in my answer, the equation is not "not agile = waterfall", but rather "waterfall = not agile". In other words, mainframe projects use Waterfall, *therefore* they are not using Agile. – Arseni Mourzenko Feb 21 '15 at 13:35
  • user52999 stated that mainframe projects do not use agile, how does this entail that they use waterfall? If you did not derive this information from the question, what source suggests to you that mainframe projects mainly use waterfall? – Giorgio Feb 21 '15 at 13:37
  • @Giorgio: What source? Well, people that I know who worked on mainframes. Blog posts I've read. Unfortunately, I haven't worked with mainframes myself and I don't have any authoritative reference like a book or official statistics; so if another answer will be posted providing those, I'll be glad to upvote it. – Arseni Mourzenko Feb 21 '15 at 13:43
  • I encourage you to read Chapter 3 of the book I have cited: waterfall is often incorrectly used as a synonym of "predictive process". It may well be that mainframe teams (or other mission-critical software projects) use some kind of predictive process which is neither agile nor waterfall. – Giorgio Feb 21 '15 at 13:47
1

There are many reasons:

  • Mindset: Many of the developers working on mainframes do their work for decades. They 'grew up' with water fall and aren't exposed that much to new ideas as other environments where the average developer has maybe 5years experience and brings lots of new ideas to the table.

  • The environment: A lot of stuff they code is tightly bound to a database. Also the components they create a often tightly coupled. This hinders automatic testing a lot, which is one of the important foundations of agile approaches.

  • Tooling: The tooling they have to live will is often horrible. They often don't have any testing framework nor a version control that would be acceptable for other developers. Automatic builds as a Java/C#/whatever developer expects are unheard of.

Of course the different reasons affect each other and normally enforcing them even more.

Jens Schauder
  • 1,503
  • 8
  • 13