According to the thesaurus, agile or agility, is a term to describe ease of movement. It can consist out of speed, flexibility or quick thinking.
When we use the term Agile in software development, we think of all the buzzwords surrounding it: Scrum, closure, startup, iteration, standup, retrospective …
But is it truly enough to know all those technical terms and iterate the same process over and over again?
- Every x week(s) (iteration), closure and startup
- Every day a standup
- Once in a month a retrospective
Does your daily standup sounds like this: “Yesterday, i did task x, today I’ll continue on this…”
Is your closure/startup taking up hours or even days and exhausting you?
Does your retrospective reminds you of laying on a sofa while your shrink asks you how you feel?
All of these techniques are profound and can help your team to become agile, but why is it not working or just not feeling right?
Because somewhere along the way, Agile lost his agility. It became a mantra we do without even thinking about the really important concepts underneath.
The basic concepts are communication, collaboration, growth/evolution and the ability to adapt quickly to a situation!
If Agile does not seem to fit your team, allow it to grow, evolve. So it may gain back its agility and maybe then, your team can reach his full potential.
What you describe are the ceremonies in scrum. Scrum is agile but agile doesn’t have to be scrum.
The basic concepts of agile is the manifesto:
-Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
-Working software over comprehensive documentation
-Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
-Responding to change over following a plan
Agile is not a process but It is a mindset. A different way of thinking.
I totally agree with you Wesley, have taken scrum as an example of agile, which was maybe the wrong way. But in the end do you agree with the fact that both scrum/kanban are processes to do agile. It’s how management see this. I as a developer think of it as a mindset. But in too many cases it is used to change a company, which it cannot do.
Tom, i agree with your blogpost. When we practice our daily standup meeting its more of a proof to tell what we have done, instead of telling the essential things (communication, collaboration, …). I mostly find myself telling the essential things to other teammembers after the standup (not right after, even a few hours after). And this information i should have told during the standup. But some even lack to tell this information, which can lead to problems in the long run.
I remember that I read an approach of Uservoice (where they use trello.com as a tool). http://www.uservoice.com/blog/founders/trello-google-docs-product-management/
They stated: “We try to drive standups to be discussion of what people need to accomplish their task rather than a boring “I did this; I’m doing this”.
When reading that, it made sense…