Three important principles of agile development are:
- End to end development of small batches of work
- Make problems visible
- Limit work to capacity
Unfortunately it is not uncommon for teams, adopting agile methods like e.g. Scrum to somehow miss these principles.
I have a number of times watched teams plan and estimate work, they believe they can do in one sprint. After a few days, it is clear that the team lag behind. The immediate reaction is then to start to try to work faster, either by putting in longer hours or by sacrificing quality. In that way a Scrum sprints really live up it's name – a headless rush towards the goal. The result of having sacrificed all three principles mentioned above is a demotivated team and a growing pile of technical debt.
It is important to realize that the great benefits of agile development, will take some time to manifest themselves, and the best way to make them manifest themselves, is to avoid focusing too much on getting a lot dot done when starting to do agile development. Instead you should look carefully on how things are done.
For instance it is a common problem that developers lack information about features they need to work on, which will either slow them down or in order to not be slowed down, make them start guessing what it is they are supposed to do. This is a problem that should be made visible and dealt with at its root cause.
Another common problem is that features are not completely done when the iteration ends. Either they are not doing what they should, or is has not been verified that they actually work.
These two problems are just examples of problems a team starting to do agile development can and will encounter. It is important to embrace problems as opportunities for improving processes in a way that will create a more lean and flexible development environment.
So in your agile adoption:
admit we are all tortoises and we will not become hares just because we do agile development!
By Bent Jensen