Agile Pitfalls

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• pgbossi@gmail.com

• @thinkingbox

A bit of history• Started programming for fun in ’82, professionally

in ‘87

• Very dissatisfied dev/tech lead doing waterfall / hacking in the 90s

• Discovered XP in ’99

• Did my first XP project in 2001 and never looked back

Agile today

Cargo Cult

Feynman

“In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he's the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land.”

XP

Forces

Agile Homeopathy

Symptoms

• Velocity used as a performance metric

• Scrum masters as project managers

• Estimates used as commitments

• Code freeze & lengthy manual QA activities

Made for each other?• Change the organization.

Or change organization.

• Are you ready to let go?

The essence

• Self- & continuously-improving feedback loop

• Open & honest communication at all levels

• Engineering practices to support all this

Experiment & adapt!

Question

“I've been reading a lot about Agile and I'm convinced my team could benefit from it. What is the best way to introduce it to my team? Is it best to hire a consultant? Do I need training?”

Simplicio

Question“We've been using Agile at my company for a while. At first everyone on my team was excited and it felt like we were getting things done more quickly. But now we seem to have lost our initial momentum and it just feels like a bunch of process and meeting that's not always useful and takes a lot of time. Does this happen often? How can we get back to getting shit done quickly?”

Pindarico

Question

“It is very important for my company to meet some deadlines, is it possible to combine some of the Agile techniques with a more waterfall approach so that we can get the benefit of both worlds: flexibility and predictability?”

Delirante

Question

“In your experience, is it ok to have the manager being part of the SCRUM team? Or is it best to have no hierarchy within the team?”

Scontato

Let’s talk