Agile Is A Philosophy, Not A Process

Have you ever read the Agile Manifesto and the Twelve Principles of Agile Software? If you haven’t, you should. I would be very surprised if someone had a serious beef with any of the principles.

I can always identify the people who are “Survivors of Bad Process” because they will say things like “I hate Agile”. I’m in the same survivors club, but I don’t think you can seriously hate the Agile Principles. What they inevitably actually mean is that they hate how the place they worked implemented a process, and they have come to believe that this process is what “Agile” is.

Let’s look at what activities go on in my teams :

• Everyone (product/eng/design) comes to a common understanding of what needs to be built and what the priorities are, and why
• The eng team decides how they are going to build the top priority items
• The team rapidly surfaces what is stopping them getting that done
• The eng team shows what new bits of software are completed, as they are completed
• The team decides how to operate at their best and continuously addresses issues preventing it

Any of those activities look unreasonable? I wouldn’t think so. The sum total of the time, per week, spent on the meetings around those activities is somewhere around 2.5 hours per person.

This is an implementation of Scrum, and I really think it’d be hard to hate.

(If you are suffering with a painful Scrum environment, drop me a line — I’d be happy to share tips on how to streamline things while maintaining the value)