There are two important things that I believe about Agile. First, while I do believe that being Agile is more than just a set of practices, I also believe that there are a set of practices which are so good that for me they define what I currently think of as Agile and believe everybody can do them and would benefit from them.
Here are the practices which currently define “being Agile” for me. These are roughly in order of benefit: short iterations (preferably 1-2 weeks), Kanban (as an alternative to short iterations), backlog, one piece flow, continuous integration, whole teams, collocated whole teams, test first/test early, use of a product owner, incremental design, refactoring, unit tests, multi-stage continuous integration, user stories, sustainable pace, task assignment and estimation by team members, stand-up meetings, burn-down and burn-up charts, iteration review, retrospective, and frequent releases. There are other good practices out there, but these are the ones that I believe will become mainstream.
Second, and most importantly:
I truly believe the benefits of Agile are significant enough to focus your resources to get to the point of saying this sentence.
This is based on the belief that the algorithm of Agile is just plain better than traditional development combined with direct observation of the significant benefits experienced by both external and internal teams.
To put it another way, if you are not yet investing in Agile, I believe it is the #1 investment you can make to increase your productivity, quality, revenues, customer satisfaction, profitability, and employee satisfaction. It is possible to invest in Agile but not get these benefits. If that is happening to you, I urge you to stick to your guns and look for help. Getting to Agile is worth the investment. It is worth redirecting resources, changing priorities, and doing what it takes to get there.
The web book “Zero to Hyper Agile in 90 Days or Less” is a good place to start.
You may also be interested in “The Top Ten Reasons I May be Wrong That Agile is Better” .
2 comments:
Very good post! Your list of Agile practices / behaviors / techniques seems more like the things that you might do, if you're Agile. What do you consider the essentials, without which, you can't claim that you're Agile.
Tom,
Order of adoption is important, and many of the practices are interlinked. However,a very stripped down Agile, which likely would quickly expand to include more would be:
Short iterations or Kanban
Backlog
One piece flow
Whole teams
... as described elsewhere on my blog. For instance, having iterations defined but not "shippable" at the end of the iteration is not actually short iterations :) .
And in fact, these are the key things I focus on initially when evaluating the state of an team.
Cheers,
Damon
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