Agile methodologies and practices have revolutionized the way teams approach project management and software development. The principles of agility, such as iterative development, self-organization, and continuous improvement, enable teams to deliver high-quality products with increased efficiency and customer satisfaction. However, just like any process or methodology, Agile is not immune to pitfalls and bad practices.
In this blog, we will delve into the world of Agile and explore how to identify and fix bad Agile practices within your teams. Whether you're a project manager, Scrum Master, or team member, recognizing and addressing these issues is crucial for fostering a healthy and productive Agile environment.
A 2013 study by Alexander Budzier and Bent Flyvbjerg of Oxford University determined that agile techniques speed up IT projects.
However, the average schedule overrun was 37%, and the average cost overrun was 107% among more than 4,000 IT initiatives. Projects that incur significant delays or cost overruns can significantly impact a business.
The researchers found that 12.8% of projects were twice as costly as planned, and 12.6% were almost a decade behind schedule.
The study is about a decade old, and the numbers might not be the same in the current world. However, organizations still vouch for agile practices, and statistics are proof that it still works!
So, with that in hand, it's time to answer some of the questions:
By the end of this agile practice guide, we can have a clear understanding of common bad Agile practices and practical strategies to rectify them. Let's dive in!
The Agile model for software development was created in 2001 and outlined four critical principles to elevate the profession of software engineering and improve product management.
But over the years, adopting these principles has widely departed from the original sense.
In large tech companies, the product team focuses significantly on writing small requirements (aka, user stories). These requirements are put into a ticket queue for the next available engineer. With this, the bar for documentation to move the queue swiftly rises. And ultimately, this becomes one of many small “waterfalls,” where the work is funneled from the product owner to designers to development.
Companies practicing such models invest a large portion of overhead in forecasting tasks, recording work, developing burn-down charts and sprint reports, and communicating status in daily standups.
In such setups, the production line would be jeopardized if new things were tried, or the process was experimented with. Feature output is maximized, so there is little room to invest in automation, learning new technologies, upgrading documentation, or evolving the development process. If you recognize yourself with this and don't continuously improve, you're doing scrum all wrong.
The Solution
To attain real agility, a team should have a no-handoff process rather than one in which one person writes requirements (even the basic ones) while the other executes them. Instead, a team should have a collaborative approach to creating a feature. Every team member, including the product manager and the engineers (and other stakeholders), should be involved in developing a feature from the beginning to the end.
The first for the agile team is to define its strategic “challenges, aka team mission.” A team mission can be created in question-form to encourage open thinking and is generated and improved by the whole team, including the executive sponsors (and customers). Customers' results or effects should be enhanced by allowing every team member to offer ideas about any problem at any time.
The agile principle of “welcoming change over following a plan” often gets misinterpreted in agile practice guides as “don’t have a plan at all.”
Most agile teams don’t try to understand the product vision and strategy of the organization. This results in ineffective iterations based on strategically unimportant features and milestones.
Also, we’ve seen scrum teams considering the product owner as the customer. But, on the contrary, the product owner is an integral part of an agile team as they express the product vision, mission, and the customer's voice.
Without having a plan, the agile teams don’t understand the priorities and are unable to invest in the project responsibly. In fact, this false principle has come so far that many agile teams now believe that it’s inappropriate to have common milestones and timeboxes.
The Solution
It has been seen that every successful scrum team includes a product owner who sits with the team every day and works to provide the vision in high-quality detail so that the engineers can grasp the big picture and make smarter product choices.
On the other hand, the development team would explain the technical aspects of the product so that the product owner can clearly understand the technology's capabilities, limitations, and feasibility. However, by treating the product owner as a customer, a strong bond of trust cannot be formed, and there is a gap in knowledge and communication.
Many agile teams follow all the scrum and agile practice guides, except transparency. And there lies the problem of trust. When the development team hides issues from the product owner during stand-up calls, there is a high possibility that the team won’t be able to deliver the product on time.
Moreover, suppose this transparency remains an issue for a long time. In that case, product owners lose trust in development teams, which can be a big issue because trust is the foundation of human/business relationships. In such scenarios, the scrum team members start playing defense, and it will be nearly impossible to facilitate collaboration among them.
The Solution
The scrum master plays a crucial role in this scenario. He/she should manage the risks by conducting daily scrums to review the development team’s work and have an up-to-date plan to achieve the goals.
The scrum master should also encourage their team to share the roadblocks and challenges and then communicate the impediments, if there are any, to the product owners.
Moreover, it can be useful if the scrum master can remind the team that the agile methodology has room for failure and continuous improvement. Hence, there is no sense in fearing failure because we learn from our mistakes.
It's crucial for agile teams to be able to push to production at any moment. Many teams fail to do this by lumping multiple sprints into large releases rather than pushing to production at the end of every sprint.
Not being able to deploy continuously not only increases overhead as stacked deployment but also breaks the critical feedback loops, which are essential for agile. Also, the agile teams aren’t able to gather feedback and are prone to invest too much in unnecessary functionalities.
The Solution
Agile teams need to take several things into consideration to keep shipping.
Agile teams are often the victim of retrospective non-participation or treating it as just another chance to discuss product features.
With some clients simply whining about those that annoy them without committing to any solutions, we have seen that, for the most part, retrospectives are skipped or regarded as just another chance to criticize.
Retrospective is the most critical component of the development process. Suppose you don't perform a retrospective in earnest at the end of every sprint, where you identify issues in your process and brainstorm and commit to trying new things. In that case, you are disregarding the fundamental principles of agile software development.
The Solution
Stop, Start, continue is the standard model for driving the retrospective. This method breaks down and evaluates communication and deliverables throughout the pipeline. It's an opportunity to recognize problems in the process that caused inefficiency or waste and to devise a novel approach to address them.
In the retrospective model, Stop means identifying a process issue and seeking continuous improvement opportunities. Start signifies devising a test to address the issue. And continue signifies confirming that the test was successful and should be integrated into the process going forward. That is the fundamental principle of any agile practice guide and software development.
A bad agile team's biggest failure is that they turn sprints into marathons that never end, which is soul-crushing. To maximize productivity, sprint after sprint is an endless cycle, and there is no room to celebrate what’s been achieved so far.
This results in a less motivated and frustrated workforce, which ultimately leads to poor product delivery.
The Solution
Agile teams that are successful celebrate their achievements, endorse their clients' success, reward those who went above and beyond to achieve this and establish how much the group has progressed over time.
An elaborate celebration may be held on special occasions, or a team meal or happy hour might follow every sprint. It is critical not to miss this period of rest and appreciation, as it provides the energy, passion, and motivation required for the next sprints.
Knowing the 6 most common reasons why agile in the modern software development process is malfunctioning can help develop best agile practices for your business.
There are two ways to go about it:
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