Agile Overview

Quality is key to an Agile development team. Time, Cost and Quality are fixed, whereas features are variable.

What happens if quality is applied at the expense of features? This is a very common anti-pattern when implementing Agile, a company will go from developing a number of features a week, to one every 2 months. Quality must be understood, if time is fixed (1 month), cost is fixed (£10,000), quality is fixed (???) and features (1-10 features) are flexible, we need to know what quality means.

Working software is the primary metric of success in Agile. With very few, or no features being developed, even with uber high quality... you can't sell anything.

If you've recently applied an Agile methodology, but not seen results for weeks or months as the developers are setting up the environments?

This is not Agile, you should see results quickly. Every sprint if using Scrum, or at least within 2-3 weeks.

One common problem is the development team are self-imposing a fixed scope mindset when initially creating environments and architectures. When using Agile, you should see results almost immediately. There are some exceptions (in DSDM, or some of the scaled frameworks) but this is a good anti-pattern to look out for in general.

The internet is packed with information on Agile frameworks, Scrum, XP, Lean Software Development, Automated Testing, the Agile Manifesto, KanBan, the 12 principles of Agile. But what does it mean? What does Agile actually do? How can it help you? And what the bloody hell is everyone talking about?

This is high level, describing what an Agile mindset can help you achieve and what it was designed for.

Agile has a number of different terms and understanding these is really important. They may seem self-explanatory but it's worth spending the time absolutely understnading what they mean Value, Incremental Delivery, Customer, Validated Learning, Vanity Metrics, etc...

I've put together a guide on what these mean to me and hopefully tis will give a bit of clarity.