AGILE IN ACTION

At the previous Agile Practitioners Forum , Colin MacAndrew asked the group "Does the Agile Manifesto need refactoring?" and it was encouraging to see quite a few people leap to its defence. Now, Colin simply asked a question about whether it could be improved, he didn't state that it needed to be re-written. And yet the defence of the Manifesto was so vehement it took me a little by surprise. There's a spark for an interesting debate here. I think it's one worth pursuing in a future meeting. I hope that everyone agrees that the Agile Manifesto is an important guiding text. However, it should not be sacrosanct. Some months ago I bought a new mountain bike. Before I left the shop the assistant reminded me to bring the bike back in 6 weeks for a free service - to "tighten some of the nuts and bolts that may have worked loose during its initial use and to check everything remains in working order", he said. Now, maybe the Manifesto is still right on the mark, but unless we take the time to review its statements and principles (through debate) given what we've learned about agility in the 6 years since its inception, we won't know if there are a few "nuts and bolts that need tightening". Brian Marick recently posted :

Via Skip Angel . A successful agile team is empowered and self-organising . To manage themselves effectively you need each person in the team to be self-managed. And because leadership is a portable attribute within the team, you need each person to be able to demonstrate self-leadership. Rosa Say has devised 12 rules for self-management and 12 rules for self-leadership . 12 rules for self-management (my emphasis): Live by your values , whatever they are. You confuse people when you don't, because they can't predict how you'll behave. Speak up! No one can "hear" what you're thinking without you be willing to stand up for it. Mind-reading is something most people can't do. Honor your own good word, and keep the promises you make . If not, people eventually stop believing most of what you say, and your words will no longer work for you. When you ask for more responsibility, expect to be held fully accountable. This is what seizing ownership of something is all about; it's usually an all or nothing kind of thing, and so you've got to treat it that way. Don't expect people to trust you if you aren't willing to be trustworthy for them first and foremost. Trust is an outcome of fulfilled expectations. Be more productive by creating good habits and rejecting bad ones. Good habits corral your energies into a momentum-building rhythm for you; bad habits sap your energies and drain you. Have a good work ethic , for it seems to be getting rare today. Curious, for those "old-fashioned" values like dependability, timeliness, professionalism and diligence are prized more than ever before. Be action-oriented. Seek to make things work. Be willing to do what it takes. Be interesting. Read voraciously, and listen to learn , then teach and share everything you know . No one owes you their attention; you have to earn it and keep attracting it. Be nice. Be courteous, polite and respectful. Be considerate. Manners still count for an awful lot in life, and thank goodness they do. Be self-disciplined. That's what adults are supposed to "grow up" to be. Don't be a victim or a martyr. You always have a choice, so don't shy from it: Choose and choose without regret. Look forward and be enthusiastic. Keep healthy and take care of yourself. Exercise your mind, body and spirit so you can be someone people count on, and so you can live expansively and with abundance. 12 rules for self-leadership (my emphasis): Set goals for your life; not just for your job. What we think of as "meaning of life" goals affect your lifestyle outside of work too, and you get whole-life context, not just work-life, each feeding off the other. Practice discretion constantly, and lead with the example of how your own good behavior does get great results. Otherwise, why should anyone follow you when you lead? Take initiative. Volunteer to be first. Be daring, bold, brave and fearless, willing to fall down, fail, and get up again for another round. Starting with vulnerability has this amazing way of making us stronger when all is done. Be humble and give away the credit. Going before others is only part of leading; you have to go with them too. Therefore, they've got to want you around! Learn to love ideas and experiments. Turn them into pilot programs that preface impulsive decisions. Everything was impossible until the first person did it. Live in wonder. Wonder why, and prize "Why not?" as your favorite question. Be insatiably curious, and question everything. There are some things you don't take liberty with no matter how innovative you are when you lead. For instance, to have integrity means to tell the truth . To be ethical is to do the right thing . These are not fuzzy concepts. Believe that beauty exists in everything and in everyone, and then go about finding it. You'll be amazed how little you have to invent and much is waiting to be displayed. Actively reject pessimism and be an optimist . Say you have zero tolerance for negativity and self-fulfilling prophecies of doubt, and mean it. Champion change. As the saying goes, those who do what they've always done, will get what they've always gotten. The only things they do get more of are apathy, complacency, and boredom. Be a lifelong learner , and be a fanatic about it. Surround yourself with mentors and people smarter than you. Seek to be continually inspired by something , learning what your triggers are. Care for and about people. Compassion and empathy become you, and keep you ever-connected to your humanity. People will choose you to lead them.

Sadly, these days most managers are more interested in the cost of quality than in quality itself. Essentially, they're wondering 'how low can we take our quality before we start losing customers?' They might permit us to improve quality up to a point, beyond which they see further improvements in quality as a poor investment. When a manager warns us that we're in danger of putting too much time and effort into quality, he's wrong! We can't take quality too far. And when scope, time and cost are fixed, as is so often the case these days, we've all been guilty of habitually cutting quality to meet the deadline. It's madness! This is one of the major contributing factors to project failure. Seeking excellence through continuous improvements in quality initiates a chain reaction of positive and beneficial results. Improve quality to increase productivity Originally uploaded by sjb140470 . When you continuously improve quality the defect count is significantly reduced and there are fewer delays. You find yourself with more time to spend on adding new features that are valuable to your customers. Productivity is increased and costs are reduced. People are happy in their jobs. Existing customers see more of the features they've requested materialise in the product with fewer defects, which secures their continuing loyalty. And new customers are attracted to your product because it's feature-rich, has a higher quality and is more reliable than competitor products and comes at a lower price. All this is very good for business.

Read Jeremy Miller 's post: Self Organizing Teams are Superior to Command n' Control Teams . One of the things he says is:

Organisations need to break habits that prevent them from seizing opportunities to achieve agility.

If an army marching in lockstep to tightly arranged military music is a metaphor for yesterday's workplace, the workplace of the future will be more like a jazz ensemble where musicians improvise creatively around an agreed key, melody, and tempo.

W Edwards Deming said something like:

A market-by-market approach to organising production no longer makes sense in a global age. National silos gave rise to bloated and expensive bureaucracies that deployed inefficient, incompatible, and often redundant processes for making and marketing products locally. Insufficient knowledge transfer across organisational boundaries and departmental silos meant that most multinationals failed to seize opportunities for innovation and cost reduction.

Defects are waste. User stories with known defects aren't done and can't be released, they're partially complete work or inventory, and they are waste too. If you're using a defect tracking tool you're queuing up waste and you're inspecting for quality after the code's been written. Eliminate waste . Avoid queues because they prevent throughput of released software and block the flow of value to the customer. Build quality into the code from the start by fixing defects as you go. To help improve the quality of code, developers should use test-driven development and testers should perform exploratory testing as developers complete vertical slices of user stories . If a defect is found, stop the line and fix it immediately. Don't queue it up.

Part of the Agile Manifesto says: