The 7 deadly sins of Agile

 

When conduction Agile, here's a list of 7 deadly sins to avoid:

1.    Forget to get early feedback – It’s important to get feedback early on for items such as user stories, product requirements, Agile charter, etc. to your reviewers as early as you can.  This will save having to do multiple rewrites.

2.    Avoid rather than embrace change – Despite being a practice and method developed to accommodate change the most, you may still find resistance to change especially if your team and customer are accommodated to having requirements upfront.  You have to foster an environment where embracing change is viewed as an opportunity to provide value to your customers rather than something to be avoided.

3.    Order and prioritize intermittently – You have to pursue ordering and prioritizing your product requirements, backlog tasks and daily activities relentlessly.  This will allow you to distinguish the must-haves from the should-haves and won’t haves.

4.    Favor remote over direct interactions – With the plethora of electronic mediums to communicate (mobile, IM, social networking, etc.) and an increasingly globalized workforce, it becomes easy to favor remote over direct interactions.  Don’t get lazy and get your teams to actually stand-up and talk during stand-up meeting as much as you can!

5.    Put off total transparency – Agile is great at revealing and making any problems and issues you have in your projects visible.  It is up to you and your team to proactively manage and act on them.  To be Agile is to embrace total transparency.

6.    Forget to experiment and learn – We can get so focused on delivering the project that we forget to experiment and learn to continually improve.  Use retrospectives to collaborate and document lessons learned and allow teams to not be afraid to experiment, test and learn as many novel solutions to pressing project problems get solved during these brainstorms.

7.    Deliver work that does not provide true customer value – Though it’s both a very explicit and implicit goal of Agile to deliver customer value, you and your team can get easily side tracked into tasks that won’t contribute to customer value and take up a lot of valuable time and effort.  Your team can get too involved with optimizing or tweaking a software feature that’s technical interesting, but will be of little value to your customer.  Don’t get too involved with fancy burn down charts or progress reports, but spend just enough time to clearly and concisely articulate the status of your project to keep you stakeholders in the loop.