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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5 comments:
Interesting post...
I currently work at Wipro, where our marketing/sales message is that we can deliver using an agile model. However, when I ask how we do that, the iterations start only after the analysis and design have already been done! Prior to Wipro I worked at TCS and they used a similar approach and called it "agile". I'd be interested in other comments on this.
Very well written. Having start and end dates set, determines the target. Thereafter, agile methodology can bring the magic.
Very true with the current trend of saying we are going agile ...... something on similar lines http://littlestraythoughts.blogspot.com/2011/06/ateam-not-necessarily-agile-team.html
Agile is not an end state, it's an ongoing journey. If it takes a larger organization longer to turn their boat and they are only making incremental changes, they are still changing. The Agile community continues to shot itself in the foot by presenting Agile as an all or nothing proposition. If we want larger organizations to adopt Agile we need to be more tolerant of the pace at which they adopt it.
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