Agile Is Not The Goal
Agile has become the new fashion in the Software Development World. Organizations ranging from startups to large scale development, varying across technologies and domains, from Product Companies to Service Organizations have either started, or planning to start or already have years of experience invested in the Agile Software Development.
The challenge starts when the teams or organizations just want to do Agile, without understanding the need for it. They just want to brand themselves as Agile, as this is the new thing and everyone is doing it. They don’t want to be left behind in this race.
They just focus too much on the practices, and forget to think about why they are doing those practices. They blindly follow the popular Agile methodologies or frameworks without understanding the context of their problems, environment, real need of the hour, believing Agile is the ultimate solution to any problem.
Agile Politics – The Games People Play
‘Office politics’ – a fact of ‘working life’ we all have to deal with at some point or other.
Plato once said “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”
Assuming there’s some truth in this statement, then regardless of whether you practice, hate, avoid, or love it, it’s important to understand and know how to safely navigate the political minefield – especially if you want to advance in your career.
In this short video, Professor of Software Engineering at University of British Columbia,Vancouver and Director of Process Development (RUP) at Rational Software, Philippe Kruchten shares some useful information including:
Why Stretched Teams do “Scrumban”
A few years ago Corey Ladas wrote an article about an Agile approach he called “Scrumban”. As the name suggests, this is a variant of Scrum with certain Lean-Kanban characteristics. What he proposed was a graduation of Scrum teams to leaner and more pull-based ways of working than Scrum itself allows.
Whereas Scrum will “batch” work up into Sprint Backlogs and potentially releasable increments, a leaner Scrumban approach will seek to minimize the batching of work as far as possible. Each work item will be processed in response to a clear signal for demand, and not because it has been planned into a Sprint backlog. In strictly Lean terms, holding on to such inventory is a form of waste.
What Corey proposed was the gradual facilitation of leaner practices in Scrum. He sought “…to incrementally enhance Scrum with more and more pull-like features until all that remains of the original process is vestigial scaffolding”. For example, he argued that “if your iteration backlog contains 20 work items, then that’s still about 19 more than it needs to be in a pull system”.
The result was an agile approach which makes a Leaner way of working an end in itself. Since then though, Scrum-Kanban hybrids have taken off in ways that were perhaps not entirely foreseeable at the time when Scrumban was floated.
An Introduction to Continuous Integration
One of the great Agile ‘promises’ is the ability to “satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”
But what does it really take to achieve this end goal?
In this video, ‘The Continuous Deliverist’ and AtTask Inc Director of Development Jesse Dowdle shares some continuous integration insights, including…
From Chaos to Order with Agile
When scaling agile across large organisations it’s not unusual for different teams to tailor Agile practices to meet their unique project needs and constraints. And in an attempt to manage these variations, some companies try to enforce a prescriptive, one-size-fits-all approach to Agile.
But is this the best way to achieve enterprise agility?
In this video, international Agile consultant, author and speaker Scott Ambler shares some key insights for scaling Agile across organisations, including:
- Which factors to consider when scaling Agile at the organisational level
- What to consider when outsourcing agile projects or working with distributed teams
- Which agile methodology is best suited to your project objectives
- The key ‘Agile’ trends to look out for over the next few years
Check it out and leave your thoughts, insights, comments and/or questions below
