Past few years software industry has taken up the Agile buzzword in the same league as “2.0”,”social networking”,”cloud computing”.While some of this words are really taken up to attract investors or sound new-agey,Agile has not been abused as much due to it’s inherent back office use nature.However like all good things as the good word spreads it takes new meanings as well as a general incorrect use which has an opposite effect of what’s intended.
Some of the most common mistakes are made when an organization strives to move from the traditional waterfall to an Agile process.Here are some things to watch out for
- Daily scrums turn into status meeting or long technical design discussions.
- Daily scrums run longer than 15-20 minutes at the most.
- Requirements and scheduling still happens at management level and not through team participation
- The release cycles are not getting shorter.
- Communication still flows top to bottom instead through team members
- Teams are still seen in silos and boundaries are not disappearing.
- Not enough tests that run automatically with every build.
This are just some of the things that you should look for when you are trying to build a true Agile team or process in your organization.Otherwise it would just be another buzz word to make the management feel good about it
Agile Transformation is not an easy process to adopt as well transformation of a culture used to the waterfall methodology is even harder.However if done the right way it can bring wonders to your organization and it’s highly satisfactory and rewarding for team members.