3 Signs You're Doing Agile Development Wrong
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Are you ready to make your work agile? Today we’ll have a look at few characteristics that can make your Agile projects perfect. And Bart will help us with this issue.
To begin with, we’ll explain what Agile is. Agile (or Agile software development) is a different way of managing IT development teams and projects. Most agile development methods break the tasks into small parts with minimal planning and do not directly involve long-term planning. These are usually short time frames that typically last from one to four weeks. If you want to make the most of working with Agile, you should follow these principles:
- Follow all the instructions and handle Agile correctly
- Use it as intended and where it is needed
- Use the correct dosage — the techniques that will be useful for your project, but at the same time don’t forget the basic principles and the aims of Agile.
The Ways to Fail with Agile
So, let’s look through approaches that don’t make for good Agile project:
1. Initiating Agile with Pauses.
Under normal circumstances you work with your developers in sprints, assess tasks, take testing into consideration, create a backlog, plan acceptable assignments for every developer and take into account bug fixing, etc. This way you use the best Agile practices. Then, one day you may have to say something like: “Guys, let’s work this week without scrum, 10 hours per day and without weekends… Our customer urgently needs this release, and deadline is coming soon. When we finish all this stuff, we’ll move to Agile again.”
In such cases, developers are buckling down. They have to fix everything they have done for this urgent release, and then fix everything that has beеn broken by the urgent fix after the urgent release…
The main goal is to make development effective, especially in tough-times and when you don’t follow Agile principles in the most difficult times, you can hardly forsee a result.
Here is some of Bart’s wisdom: "If the difficult situation requires complicated decisions, then the methodology shouldn’t be stopped or rejected. Rather, it should be reviewed and improved. There is no ready-made solutions and no ideal recipe, you are the one to create it…”
2. Total Control
Rejecting the key Agile principle brings no joy to the working process, which is a huge mistake. The purpose of Agile is to give developers freedom, without any pressure. Of course this approach works when there are responsible and disciplined programmers in a team. Those, who remembers about daily, intermediate, estimates, finals, retrospective, testing and other obligatory stand-ups/meetings only for reporting, and can tighten the screws on everybody. Communication is the main scrum’s subject, but its goal is cooperation.
Developers are creative people. Don’t create feeling of tension. If you do, they will be worried about any time spent not coding, and being caught by reading a book or simply thinking, because later they will have to make a report. Working under such conditions creates a negative atmosphere for the developers and is counterproductive for your project.
Bart says: "Don’t turn stand-ups into reports, because they should synchronize your work.”
3. Poor Teamwork
There is no cooperation and teamwork. Here’s an example: an advanced and experienced developer works only on his own. He has no time for frivolous development methods. He hardcodes, and doesn’t like communicating with colleagues. After all, they’ll never understand his genius hardcoding anyway. This person comes to his workplace when he wants, as he doesn’t want to meet anybody. He knows how to do everything right.
On the other hand, according to Bart: “An Agile development team works as a whole to achieve a common goal. Successful product development requires close cooperation!”
Wrap-up
Agile methodologies were created to make your working process flexible, not vice versa. So, think about good teamwork, give developers more freedom and don’t stop using Agile. Remember these tips: Bart says the truth!
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