“Show what you’ve done to someone who cares frequently”
Are you working in the way you are because it’s a good idea, or just because someone told you to do it? I increasingly hear experienced professionals at Agile conference bemoan the blind adherence to the techniques of Scrum without understanding the principles and values that make it work. I also encounter many software professionals who are overwhelmed by the amount of things that they are asked to do. The result is the questions “are we ‘Agile’?” and “should we be doing ‘Agile’ or not?”
I die a little bit inside when people say “should we do Agile or not”. The assumptions behind this question are all wrong: That there is one way to “be Agile”, that learning from Agile methods like Scrum requires that you use everything in those methods, and that there are good reasons to be “not Agile”. All of this is wrong.
To me, the most essential lesson that the Agile manifesto tries to communicate is that of Feedback. And frankly, if you’re ignoring feedback on your project, you’re stupid. There are different constraints around the feedback on different project, but essentially, delaying feedback is delaying critical learning.
The most essential manifestation of feedback in Scrum is the Sprint review, or demo. No matter if you’re calling what you do “Scrum”, “Kanban”, “Cowboy coding”, “Waterfall” (which is more like Cowboy coding than a real process) or just “the way we do stuff here”, you will get benefit from showing what you’ve done to someone who cares frequently. For some projects, “someone who cares” may be an end user, while for other projects it’s not feasible to involve end-users frequently. On some projects, “frequently” may mean every day, other projects may not be able to do more than once every month. You may even find that nobody cares about what you do. If that’s the case, surely you can find more relaxing ways of doing it.
When you are showing what you’ve done to someone who cares frequently, you can improve. You can think about how to show it better, how to have the show more accurately reflect what you’ve done, how to involve more people or people how care more and how you can do it even more frequently. Some of the techniques of Scrum may help you do that, but use whatever source of inspiration you like.
No matter if you’re excited about the word “Agile” or not, if you’re not getting feedback, you’re not only non-Agile, you’re non-smart.
