Funnier ways of implementing Agile projects

Have you observed that every company wants to be known as an Agile company(company implementing Agile methods), but no one wants to really follow Agile by the book ?.

Software Project teams do a lot of Agile tweaking during the journey of implementing Agile to fit the company’s culture. Since, company’s culture cannot be changed so easily, they tend to modify Agile practices to fit the companies needs.  Here are few and funnier ways of tweaking that I have observed :

1. Have start and end dates of project carved on stone, and all the requirements are then tried to fit in between the dates.  But, the coding, design and Test are done in 2 or 3 weeks cycle. All the new requirements that emerge during iteration has to be implemented no matter what within the duration

2. Measure Velocity week after week and set a goal for the team to achieve the velocity

3. Measure velocity of all the Agile teams and standardize the Velocity number (like number of story points to be delivered in an iteration) across organization

4. Project Manager would be renamed as Scrum  Master after the CSM training and he/she would continue doing what they were doing earlier

5. Testers are separated from the main team

6. Testing is done at the end of all iterations with a dedicated testing iteration

7. While signing the contract with the customer, sign the fixed bid contract based on the number of stories

8. Having an iteration duration of > 6 weeks

9. Staffing the project with all senior people with the assumption that Agile projects need only “matured” people. See more myths here

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PMI is offering Agile Certification

Finally the PMI, big dinosaur as per agilists,  is offering the Agile certification.  Even though PMI is famous for its waterfallish process support, but its team looks like finally has woken up by the noise Agile methods like Scrum, XP is creating in the universe.

Take a look at PMI’s  Agile website for more details.
On and off, we keep hearing about  Agile certifications being offered by Scrum Alliance and other well known organizations. However, so far many of them have either not taken off successfully or have died down after a brief hype.    Now PMI, too seems to be planning to offer  Agile Certification, need to wait and see if it gains popularity.  check out the  PMI’s Agile Certification FAQ from here.

PMI seems to have taken help from Agile thought leaders like Alistair Cockburn, Mike Griffiths, Michele Sliger, etc  in making the Agile certification happen. These people carry a lot of credibility in the Agile world, and so, we could definitely expect a quality Agile certification from PMI in the end.

 

I still believe that these certifications will improve the knowledge but can’t change a man(or a woman)