September 18, 2007

Agile Provides No Answers

by Brian Donahue

Scott BellwareBroken Link: http://codebetter.com/blogs/scott.bellware/default.aspx had a great post recently in which he explains very well that Agile methods are not solutionsBroken Link: http://codebetter.com/blogs/scott.bellware/archive/2007/09/09/167734.aspx to your organizations development problems.  Agile merely provides you a structure that allows you to expose problems early. 

It is really helpful to think of Agile's effects on your organization's processes and methods in the same way that you think about what it means to coding.  Iterations/sprints are there to give you short feedback cycles on your work, and allow you to make constant corrections so that you are much less likely to drift too far off course.  For developers, that means you are more likely to be working on quality, production code that is providing business value for your customer.  For the entire team, it means you are working on your process.  After each iteration, if your process is falling short somewhere, you can address it and try something different in the next iteration.

This is especially important in early agile adoption, as you will definitely face growing pains.  At my last company, I'd say we reviewed our processes almost as much, if not more, than we reviewed our application.  That may seem a bit ridiculous, but it is vitally important to have your team on the same page and feeling empowered to make suggestions about how things could run more smoothly.  Our inexperience definitely slowed us down some, and it would have been nice to spend more time focused on the application but the fact was, without tweaking our process, we wouldn't have had much to review anyway.