Agile change and transformation
The Agile Karlskrona test is a simple self-assesement test that tries to answer the “How agile are you?” question. With 11 questions, this test should help you find where “on the road” from waterfall to agile your software development team is at the moment.
Companies that transition to Agile often adopt the analogy that sprints are just mini waterfall. This article provides five reasons why Scrum sprints are not mini-Waterfall. Each argument is illustrated by a diagram that provides a clear visual evidence of the difference between the Agile approach and a traditional process.
Is the transition to Agile more difficult for late adopters? In this blog post that provides feedback about his attendance to the Conference on Lean Enterprise Software and Systems, Alan Shalloway explains that those taking on Agile are of a different mindset than those who made it initially successful. He also discusses Scrum-of-Scrums and preventing a “cargo cult” attitude towards agile practice.
How do you know if you are developing and maturing as a team? How do you know you are getting good at this agile stuff? Typically agile talks about the soft side of things with a focus on the less tangible aspects such as individuals and interactions. Are there things that teams can tangibly work towards and measure their progress against? This video presents metrics that will help you assess the agile maturity of your team.
This article presents the changes needed to create collaborative agile teams. It explains that you need to modify in your traditional project management team both the process, the way people get work done, and how people work together.
The five stories presented in this article, mostly based on real life, might help you see how Agile can become mechanical and what you should do about this. You will also learn some solutions that could help to solve all five symptoms. We need to allow people to act like people and not try to force them into a machine model that we have created for them.
Implementing Scrum on a custom (or bespoke) software development project can be difficult and many organizations new to the agile methodology struggle to adopt it. Typical issues/obstacles that arise include lack of business ownership and the inability to make decisions, limited business buy-in into the concept of Agile or team communication and individual skills. When introducing Agile, organizations often attempt to tackle all of these issues head on and get overwhelmed with the new methodology, then choosing to revert back to what they are familiar with. Why not moving gradually to Scrum, enabling an organization to deal with issues one at a time and gain the benefits associated with solving each issue gradually?
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