The Death Star was an Agile Project

Mar 7 2011 12:00 AM

Did you know that the second Death Star was an Agile Project? Yes, as odd as it may sound, the Empire was one of the early adopters of Agile. Who knew?

It’s pretty clear, as Darth Vader boards the new Death Star that the project hasn’t been going well. Development is running behind schedule, the managers are blaming a lack of workers, and, quite frankly, upper management doesn’t care. They just want the thing done, as do most clients who are tired of paying huge development costs with nothing to show for it. Oh, and they have plans to demo the thing at an upcoming event, so it HAS to be ready by the deadline.

Enter Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith and Project Manager. He is here to put this thing back on track. The Client (in this case, the Emperor), doesn’t want to hear any more excuses. They want results, and they wanted them yesterday.

So, Vader takes an Agile approach. He prioritizes the features list (“Look, we really need the big laser thing; our customers will just have to come to us at first.”), and he works in vertical slices. At the end of the movie, it seems to have paid off. There are still huge pieces missing and construction is nowhere near complete, but “Those weapon systems are operational!”

And clearly this comes as a shock to the Rebel Alliance, who were used to the old waterfall design and construction process for Death Stars. They had no idea that the weapons systems could be made to work before the outer shell was completed and the contractors had signed off on all of the items in the final walkthrough. (Remember, the faster you can get SOMETHING completed, the faster your client can start benefiting from that new feature.)

Of course, in the end, it didn’t work out well for the Empire. But that was more due to a lack of flexibility on the part of the client, rather than a failure of the product. (Remember to be Agile the next time you are commanding an intergalactic battle.)

Now, if only most Project Managers could have the presence and command the respect that Darth Vader did… “You WILL be Agile….”

37 Comments

  • Display Name said

    Gah! If the Death Star was Agile then you are letting Agile off too easy. Agile is also responsible for the gaping design flaw in the Death Star, the lack of a firewall over external ports, the lack of checking of input to see if it's the right type, the trust in external inputs.

    If you're going to claim the Death Star was Agile you need to admit that Agile's focus on the top priority ticket can lead to horrible design flaws.

  • Kai Chan Vong said

    It did the job though.

    Have you read the books after the movies? If you have, you know the Imperial empire pretty much kicked ass from then onwards.

  • Guest said

    Leah and R2D2 smuggled out the plans. How could you build a gigantic spherical megastructure wrapped around a mega-power-source without plans? Perhaps the final phases were agile and iterative, but certainly the first 90% was much closer to waterfall.

  • Pulse_instance said

    Those were the plans for the first Death Star. This article is talking about the second Death Star.

  • Danzaland said

    But the Empire didn't learn anything from the first Death Star. The DS2 had a Spaceship sized access hole to the reactor vs. the port hole in DS1.

  • Luke said

    As if any 'system' could take the credit – it boils down to the quality of those following the system, and their ability to improve any system cooperatively and enthusiastically. All projects developed by 'Dark Lords' will end up like the death stars, because frankly, who wants to do business with heavy breathing sociopaths.

  • DoctorOwl said

    I had no idea. Where can I find some more info on that? Is there a specific book or Wiki entry… I searched “star wars empire after the last movie” and it didn't turn up much.

  • Vader said

    That was because it was not completed. If the outer shell had been completed there would be no access to the reactor core.

  • Luke said

    So actually Darth Vader was the first Scrum Master?
    It suddenly all makes sense to me now … what about the scrum alliance?

  • Parrotlover77 said

    And we come full circle: the fact that the weapon was completed before the defense systems were completed. Prioritizing the Emperor's desire to blow up planets before properly protecting the weapon by delaying the project for a little while longer. What the client wanted to see was completed before what should have been done to protect the product was completed.

  • adimauro said

    But it didn't NEED to be completed. That's what the SHIELDS were for! They just weren't agile enough to account for Ewoks.

  • adimauro said

    Actually, what I think you have really uncovered is the classic corporate struggle of trying to adopt agile practices.

    And, as I said in another post, no, they really didn't leave the reactor core accessible. That's what the shields were for. They just didn't have a back-up plan to account for losing the shields. And that's because they became agile only when Vader showed up, not before.

    So, it's a lesson for us all. When writing code, don't forget to account for Ewoks!

  • Dr Appocolypse said

    “So, it's a lesson for us all. When writing code, don't forget to account for Ewoks!”

    Greatest. Quote. Ever.

  • Aristides Castillo said

    As a matter of fact, even top agilists recognize Waterfall definitely works in some scenarios. Of course, they're talking about life-critical systems, which definitely have to be closed to changes in requirements. Not that it's the best for creating a web app.

    But bottom-line, yes, any tool can be useful if you apply it the right way.

  • Dklotzbach said

    It worked out much better for Tyler Vernen and Troy in “Live free or Die” by John Ringo.

  • Reket said

    If you ask me, they weren't Agile enough. After the destruction of the first Death Star, they should have focused on preventing another.. disintegration. If they would just block the path to the core (by making it really narrow or/and twisted – with very sharp turns?) they would have succeeded.

  • Dre G said

    I guess this goes to show you that Agile processes don't mix well with Application Security.

    The priorities were completely out of whack — the customer would have attained the most benefit from a non-thrown-into-reactor, non-blown-up-Death-Star scenario. If only a hardening sprint or two were spent on verification of coding and architecture standards using Hibernate or iBATIS ORM with named parameters and proper variable binding (with additional caution to avoid string manipulation and concatenation operations)! If only they had hired an application penetration-tester before the rebels had arrived!

    Back to the OWASP drawing board. I suggest the Evil Empire purchase a copy of Burp Suite Professional and implement an embedded ModSecurity and AppSensor for their Apache Tomcat with a monitored, whitelist approach to encoding and data validation issues next time. It takes about one day to implement AppSensor (i.e. part of a hardening sprint), a few weeks to implement ModSecurity (a longer, dedicated hardening sprint), and about a month to understand Burp Suite Professional (in order to perform a thorough pen-test). If faster times are needed, I suggest a copy of “The ModSecurity Handbook” or perhaps PortSwigger Ltd's official “Web Application Hacker's Handbook: Live Edition” training class.

    Yes, it should be the application developers doing this work — not the IT/Ops team. Perhaps DevOps would be best suited to the AppSensor and ModSecurity implementation, if such a team exists. App developers cannot and should not assume that an MCSE or CCIE knows anything about data encoding or validation issues — they probably don't even know what a parameter or Views folder is (let alone what a controller does).

  • Timrfrench61 said

    So what your saying effective Agile is a manifestation of the Dark Side of The Force?

  • Ian Nicholson said

    That's right, don't you remember? When Han Solo and friends plant the charges in shield generator and are ambushed by the Empire, you can clearly hear the Empire forces leader say: “You Rebel Scrum!”

  • Matty said

    although, this does fly in the face of the dark side's methods… as Obi Wan says, 'only the Sith deal in absolutes'… maybe they were trying to change.

  • Software maestro said

    Make sure you check out
    http://softwaremaestro.wordpress.com/2007/06/30/scrum-master-jar-jar/

  • James Dunmore said

    After reading all the comments….

    The fact that the weapon was built before the rest is not a failing of agile…. what agile allowed it to do was having *something* working. The client needed something, the rebels were turning up – it could sit there as an empty shell and be attacked, or sit there was some shields in place and a big gun. As it turned out, the gun helped and did it's job really effectively. The client asked for something, understood the risks – those risks failed, but for a while, the product was doing it's job – rather than nothing at all and the client would have been in a worse situation sooner.

    p.s. it was waterfall planning, agile implementation.

  • Shoobe01 said

    Perfect. As are all the comments this spurred.

    What it reminds me of is how little most coaches and instructors think about their analogies. This would get a lot of people to think about it.

    My least favorite has been the house. You want the 2nd floor bathroom first. But can't do it because of dependencies of course. Says who? Old waterfall guys. Ever heard of modular construction? Ships are in fact built with whatever they want first. You can make the radio shack (among the top most things on the ship) first, and even power it up and sit in it. Just can't install it till you assemble a lot more modules. This is an analogy to me.

    And: the Death Star suffered from a bad product owner. I suspect the guy with the Admiral Choking Power doesn't respond well to “you can have that feature, but will have to give up another one or two of the same difficulty.”

  • Mclausd73 said

    I totally see where they went wrong here. They weren't using their SIS or JPAC reports correctly. If Mr. Vader would've called Dr. Perry and Heather he would have saved the death star from destruction.

  • celerno said

    Agile went perfect for death star project, the error was fully on client side…

    They trust too much on their security so they didn't ask for a indestructible death star, just for a mortal deadly, evil, enormous, piece of ultramassive destruction weapon.Remember Jedi's (or siths) sense things before they happened.Also, as justification for awesomness of Emperor and Darth Vader powers, They couldn't sense the danger coming because, it was an “In progress Jedi”; that kind of things lessons you don't learn until they explode in your face.procrastination is never good when is about your children.

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