[cowls]

The article mentions this as a question if you want to confine the amount of money you spend: “How much do you want to invest before we stop?”

I think this is one of the fundamental issues with Agile, if a client wants to hire a consultancy to complete a project, they want to know how much it will cost and what will actually be completed.

Forming the question as: “How much do you want to invest before we stop?” requires a large amount of trust in the consultancy, personally I have worked with a number that supply below par developers and so asking “How much do you want to invest before we stop?” gives the client no guarantees and the consultancy no obligation to what will actually be delivered.

I think agile can work for in house software teams but not so much for consultancies, where in reality there are normally 2 or 3 of those variables mentioned in the article fixed.

[dmadden]

Yes, it does require trust. I have personally seen Agile work for consultancies (It works well for my consultancy, Stride). The trust factor is paramount. We take a lot of care and implement many practices outside the contract to ensure we deliver what the client wants.