I had a talk in monthly meetup of hocvienagile.com, July. Here is the slide. In fact, some few words in the slide cannot express my idea clearly while our discussion was very interesting. It’s not easy to write these ideas in a short article but it’s nice for some notes:
- Agile is for speed, budget…? No. In business perspective, Agile is for value; in development’s view, Agile is for quality. Agile is a method to adjust / negotiate between the constrains of scope, time and budget to get the highest value / quality in the current situation.
- Agile team is happier than non-Agile team. Not sure. If we don’t use the negotiation to adjust these constrains in the right way, Agile team never has chance to be happier.
- Agile is built for fast success. No. There are many tricks to get an Agile team successful in the early stage but it’s normally a trap.
- Scrum is the best Agile framework. Not sure. About 50% of Agile-share doesn’t show that Scrum is the best Agile framework. Every Agile team should start with Scrum because it’s easier and has clear guideline with specific roles, events…etc. But when the world is changing fast from development-in-black-box to operation stage, Scrum is going down due to limitation of Sprint goal.
- Always say no to ScrumBUT. Not sure. If we are aware that ScrumBUT is being used in reasonable way, it’s fine. Read more here.
- Scrum needs 5 core values to success. No. If a team has 5 core values (as Scrum mentions), they would be successful no matter Scrum or another framework is being used. It’s not a required values to start a Scrum team, it’s a target for having high performance team. If a Scrum team doesn’t have, find the right ways from 3 Scrum pillars to get them up.
- Agile works without XP practices. No. Never. I have never seen any Agile team (in software development) be successful without XP. XP is the most important thing in Agile umbrella.
- Retrospective never talks about people. We should talk about processes, tools and also people. But please do it in constructive way, for both people who give and receive feedbacks. Please not that “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” is mentioned in Agile Manifesto.
- Agile team needs stability, so small turnover-rate is good. Not sure. We also need the new knowledge and change by getting Agile team in a downer stage with new guys.
