Believe it or not, I ask this question all the time.

I come from the belief that if you’re in a team, and you’re getting products out the door, and your product owners/managers are happy, and your developers are happy, and (most importantly) your customers are happy, then why adopt Agile?

As I am an Agile enthusiast, you’re probably shocked to read the above paragraph.  But, why?  See – I like asking this question because it lets me really understand why a team wants Agile coaching.  Sometimes I get a team that wants to  implement Agile, but not because they want to improve themselves but rather because their manager told them to do it.  I’ve learned through the years that those teams who are forced to do Agile without having internal reasons for doing so, tend to fail at implementing Agile.  Or they end up worse off than they were before.

In order to implement Agile the team has to commit to some minimum disciplines in order to be successful.  Scrum is a great overall process but for software engineering jobs it must also be supplemented with development practices (unit testing, automated acceptance testing, modular codebase, etc).  The testing team also has to be on board with a dramatic change.  These things cannot just be “adopted” willy-nilly – it takes commitment.  And teams without that level of commitment – to themselves, to quality, to their customers – should just not bother.

Of course, these practices don’t have to be adopted all at once – it is expected to happen piece-by-piece as well.  But the commitment must be there to eventually get to that point.

No related posts.