Does the Agile Manifesto need refactoring? Should it be extended?
At the previous
Agile Practitioners Forum, Colin MacAndrew asked the group "Does the
Agile Manifesto need refactoring?" and it was encouraging to see quite a few people leap to its defence. Now, Colin simply asked a question about whether it could be improved, he didn't state that it needed to be re-written. And yet the defence of the Manifesto was so vehement it took me a little by surprise. There's a spark for an interesting debate here. I think it's one worth pursuing in a future meeting.
I hope that everyone agrees that the
Agile Manifesto is an important guiding text. However, it should not be sacrosanct. Some months ago I bought a new mountain bike. Before I left the shop the assistant reminded me to bring the bike back in 6 weeks for a free service - to "tighten some of the nuts and bolts that may have worked loose during its initial use and to check everything remains in working order", he said. Now, maybe the Manifesto is still right on the mark, but unless we take the time to review its statements and principles (through debate) given what we've learned about agility in the 6 years since its inception, we won't know if there are a few "nuts and bolts that need tightening".
Brian Marick recently
posted:
Six Years Later: What the Agile Manifesto Left Out.
The Agile Manifesto has worked rather well at changing the way software is built, but the Agile movement is now suffering from some backsliding and some backlash. I believe that's partly because the Manifesto is almost entirely focused outward: it talks, to the business, about how the development team will interact with it. What it does not talk about is how the team must interact with itself and with the code. In the early days, that didn't matter so much; the right interactions tended to happen anyway. But now it matters.
I look forward to reading what's produced. Certainly many teams struggle with agility because of difficulties within the team. But I'm still wondering how much of the backsliding has been due to the
Agile Manifesto not being understood at all levels of an organisation. Some of the qualities it alludes to may not be immediately obvious to senior management. I bet in many cases senior managers don't even know about the Manifesto but that's a failure in the adoption strategy. In my experience, it is this lack of understanding coupled with an incompatible corporate culture engrained with superstition and habit that is, more often than not, ultimately responsible for the breakdown in agility. Often, what is happening or not happening with teams is symptomatic of more deeply rooted problems.
The
Agile Manifesto is a very useful tool and I use it all the time when I'm coaching. However, I do think it can be improved. In particular, to help senior management understand agility so that they can provide top-down support for it and take action to create and maintain a corporate culture in which agility can become sustainable. Based on experience, I've had better results engaging senior management when I use concepts that are more familiar to Lean practitioners (e.g. pursuing excellence, understanding waste and eliminating it, optimising the whole, queuing theory, etc) as they seem to provide a common understanding. The essences of these Lean concepts could be incorporated into the Manifesto and its principles.
I also think that some of the current wording undersells what have become cornerstone techniques. It's not possible to appreciate the full capability of self-organisation from the principle, "The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organising teams". And what about collaboration? This is limited to "Customer collaboration over contract negotiation". Both these statements are true and powerful but nothing is said about the richness of interaction and the commitment-based working that results from self-organising teams of people who collaborate intensely. Another principle starts, "Build projects around motivated individuals". Again there's no doubting that this is good advice but it doesn't communicate the greater ability of empowered teams (another Lean concept) where decision-making is pushed to the people doing the work. And what of the role of facilitation and leadership in empowering teams?
All this falls under "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools", which is testament to the foresight of the founders of the Manifesto. But maybe some of the current principles can be re-worked and some new principles added to communicate a more coherent and holistic alternative to hierarchical structure with role-based departments, command-and-control management, and waterfall development.
For me the
Agile Manifesto needs to evolve over time.
Tags:
agile manifesto
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Self-management and self-leadership
Via
Skip Angel.
A successful
agile team is
empowered and
self-organising. To manage themselves effectively you need each person in the team to be self-managed. And because leadership is a portable attribute within the team, you need each person to be able to demonstrate self-leadership.
Rosa Say has devised 12 rules for
self-management and 12 rules for
self-leadership.
12 rules for
self-management (my emphasis):
- Live by your values, whatever they are. You confuse people when you don't, because they can't predict how you'll behave.
- Speak up! No one can "hear" what you're thinking without you be willing to stand up for it. Mind-reading is something most people can't do.
- Honor your own good word, and keep the promises you make. If not, people eventually stop believing most of what you say, and your words will no longer work for you.
- When you ask for more responsibility, expect to be held fully accountable. This is what seizing ownership of something is all about; it's usually an all or nothing kind of thing, and so you've got to treat it that way.
- Don't expect people to trust you if you aren't willing to be trustworthy for them first and foremost. Trust is an outcome of fulfilled expectations.
- Be more productive by creating good habits and rejecting bad ones. Good habits corral your energies into a momentum-building rhythm for you; bad habits sap your energies and drain you.
- Have a good work ethic, for it seems to be getting rare today. Curious, for those "old-fashioned" values like dependability, timeliness, professionalism and diligence are prized more than ever before. Be action-oriented. Seek to make things work. Be willing to do what it takes.
- Be interesting. Read voraciously, and listen to learn, then teach and share everything you know. No one owes you their attention; you have to earn it and keep attracting it.
- Be nice. Be courteous, polite and respectful. Be considerate. Manners still count for an awful lot in life, and thank goodness they do.
- Be self-disciplined. That's what adults are supposed to "grow up" to be.
- Don't be a victim or a martyr. You always have a choice, so don't shy from it: Choose and choose without regret. Look forward and be enthusiastic.
- Keep healthy and take care of yourself. Exercise your mind, body and spirit so you can be someone people count on, and so you can live expansively and with abundance.
12 rules for
self-leadership (my emphasis):
- Set goals for your life; not just for your job. What we think of as "meaning of life" goals affect your lifestyle outside of work too, and you get whole-life context, not just work-life, each feeding off the other.
- Practice discretion constantly, and lead with the example of how your own good behavior does get great results. Otherwise, why should anyone follow you when you lead?
- Take initiative. Volunteer to be first. Be daring, bold, brave and fearless, willing to fall down, fail, and get up again for another round. Starting with vulnerability has this amazing way of making us stronger when all is done.
- Be humble and give away the credit. Going before others is only part of leading; you have to go with them too. Therefore, they've got to want you around!
- Learn to love ideas and experiments. Turn them into pilot programs that preface impulsive decisions. Everything was impossible until the first person did it.
- Live in wonder. Wonder why, and prize "Why not?" as your favorite question. Be insatiably curious, and question everything.
- There are some things you don't take liberty with no matter how innovative you are when you lead. For instance, to have integrity means to tell the truth. To be ethical is to do the right thing. These are not fuzzy concepts.
- Believe that beauty exists in everything and in everyone, and then go about finding it. You'll be amazed how little you have to invent and much is waiting to be displayed.
- Actively reject pessimism and be an optimist. Say you have zero tolerance for negativity and self-fulfilling prophecies of doubt, and mean it.
- Champion change. As the saying goes, those who do what they've always done, will get what they've always gotten. The only things they do get more of are apathy, complacency, and boredom.
- Be a lifelong learner, and be a fanatic about it. Surround yourself with mentors and people smarter than you. Seek to be continually inspired by something, learning what your triggers are.
- Care for and about people. Compassion and empathy become you, and keep you ever-connected to your humanity. People will choose you to lead them.
Tags:
self-management,
leadership
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Improve quality to increase productivity
Sadly, these days most managers are more interested in the cost of quality than in quality itself. Essentially, they're wondering 'how low can we take our quality before we start losing customers?' They might permit us to improve quality up to a point, beyond which they see further improvements in quality as a poor investment. When a manager warns us that we're in danger of putting too much time and effort into quality, he's wrong!
We can't take quality too far.And when scope, time and cost are fixed, as is so often the case these days, we've all been guilty of habitually cutting quality to meet the deadline. It's madness! This is one of the major contributing factors to project failure.
Seeking excellence through
continuous improvements in quality initiates a chain reaction of positive and beneficial results.
Improve quality to increase productivity
Originally uploaded by sjb140470.When you continuously improve quality the defect count is significantly reduced and there are fewer delays. You find yourself with more time to spend on adding new features that are valuable to your customers. Productivity is increased and costs are reduced. People are happy in their jobs. Existing customers see more of the features they've requested materialise in the product with fewer defects, which secures their continuing loyalty. And new customers are attracted to your product because it's feature-rich, has a higher quality and is more reliable than competitor products and comes at a lower price. All this is very good for business.
Tags:
lean,
quality,
productivity
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Self-organisation again
Read
Jeremy Miller's post:
Self Organizing Teams are Superior to Command n' Control Teams. One of the things he says is:
People in a self-organized team are able to make decisions themselves and accordingly adapt to changing situations. Command and control grunts have to wait for the boss to tell them what to do. That introduces latency in the development process as the team waits for the leader to shake free to deal with a decision.
He's right. The latency is proportional to the distance the decision maker is away from the point where the decision is needed. This is often far away from the coal face (hierarchically, geographically, or both). And it gets worse. Small decisions aren't possible because the latency is too great - you'll spend all your time waiting around - and because decisions are bigger than they need to be, they aren't easily reversible. (If you try to reverse them you have to traverse the hierarchy again adding more latency). This means it's more difficult to fail fast, learn, and try something else.
Self-organisation only works if people are (and importantly feel that they are) empowered to make decisions, own the necessary authority, are prepared to be responsible and hold one another accountable to their commitments.
Tags:
self-organisation,
collaboration
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Breaking habits
Organisations need to break habits that prevent them from seizing opportunities to achieve agility.
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Self-organisation
If an army marching in lockstep to tightly arranged military music is a metaphor for yesterday's workplace, the workplace of the future will be more like a jazz ensemble where musicians improvise creatively around an agreed key, melody, and tempo.
Self-organisation helps create an energetic community with intelligence distributed throughout rather than controlled from the middle where people share knowledge, collaborate spontaneously and innovate together. But without a command centre telling you what to do and how to do it common goals, discipline and leadership are more important.
Tags:
self-organisation,
collaboration
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Put customers first and everything else follows
W Edwards Deming said something like:
The real purpose of a company is not to make money, but to create customers who are so pleased that they will continue to buy products.
Don't fixate on sales figures and profits. Get your relationship right with your customers and end-users and everything will follow.
Work from the outside, in. Continuously collaborate with your customers and end-users. See everything from their point of view first. Understand value from their perspective. Have your efforts be driven by your customers and end-users. Ask them what they want next and let their requests pull you ahead of the competition.
Tags:
lean,
value
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I just came from there ...
A market-by-market approach to organising production no longer makes sense in a global age. National silos gave rise to bloated and expensive bureaucracies that deployed inefficient, incompatible, and often redundant processes for making and marketing products locally. Insufficient knowledge transfer across organisational boundaries and departmental silos meant that most multinationals failed to seize opportunities for innovation and cost reduction.
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Defect tracking tools and waste
Defects are waste.
User stories with known defects aren't
done and can't be released, they're partially complete work or inventory, and they are waste too. If you're using a defect tracking tool you're queuing up waste and you're inspecting for quality after the code's been written.
Eliminate waste. Avoid queues because they prevent throughput of released software and block the flow of value to the customer.
Build quality into the code from the start by fixing defects as you go. To help improve the quality of code, developers should use
test-driven development and testers should perform exploratory testing as developers complete
vertical slices of
user stories. If a defect is found,
stop the line and fix it immediately. Don't queue it up.
Tags:
lean,
waste,
muda,
flow,
throughput,
quality
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Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Part of the
Agile Manifesto says:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
But what does it mean by 'individuals and interactions'? It's about people. And this means culture, organisation, working environment, personalities, chemistry, and friendship. More specifically:
- Community of people united around a shared vision and charter, who collaborate, share knowledge and achieve ba. A social network, if you like. Not deep hierarchy with strict lines of authority.
- Self-organisation, not a rigid team structure with fixed roles.
- Leadership, not management.
- Empowerment, not control.
- Cross-functional teams, not groups of people separated by role.
- Open, trusting environment without politics and blame where people have freedom; where people are honest, not disingenuous; where people are aware, not ignorant; where people show courage, not fear; where people take responsibility and are held accountable; where people allowed to ply their craft, make mistakes and learn.
Put the
right people in the right environment and trust them to get things done.
Tags:
agile manifesto
Are you missing the point?
I value:
Values and principles over practices
While there's value in the practices I value the values and principles more.
Reference:
Agile ManifestoTags:
agile values,
agile principles,
agile practices
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Scrum Master, Master of Ceremonies and Quartermaster
Esther Derby's friend, Bryan Stallings,
describes a Scrum Master as a combination of a Master-of-Ceremonies and a Quartermaster.
A Master-of-Ceremonies is responsible for procedure at an event and ensures that things progress as planned, facilitating the transition from one phase to another, and intervening should anything unexpected occur. A Scrum Master is responsible for the Scrum process, ensuring that it progresses effectively from event to event, and intervenes should an obstacle to success be encountered.
A Quartermaster provides the soldiers with everything they require to achieve their mission. A Scrum Master provides the team with everything they require to ensure their success.
Tags:
scrum
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When you put it like that ...
It's got to be more effective to deliver each
minimal marketable feature to production, without delays, where it can earn value for the business than to
batch and queue unvalidated decisions.
Hasn't it?
Tags:
agile,
waterfall,
lean
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Via
Scrum Development GroupAgile certification now available.
There are no tests, classes, books or interviews! Get a certificate of expertise in Agile Software Development! Receive the benefits and admiration that comes with certification! No one is turned down!Not so fast. Happy April's Fool!
Tags:
agile certification
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