Agile or Ad hoc?
Simon Brown, author of the Pebble weblog application, books and other things, has an interesting post on agile.
Are you really agile or just ad hoc?
I suspect that this is quite applicable to many people “doing Scrum”. For a while now I’ve been collecting job ads from Seek that mention Scrum. All of them are looking for people with experience using agile, but they tend to ask for it in a general sense. e.g. “Experience with agile methods like Scrum, XP, etc.”
Of course, mentioning agile processes and methodologies in a job ad may be a ploy to interest high quality candidates.
If you were to apply for one of these positions then asking Simon’s questions while in the interview might be revealing.
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« Agile Quality: A Canary in a Coal Mine : Differences between software development and traditional engineering »
27 November 2006, 21:35
The self-organised team would be the best test for an agile enviornment. Check how the company manages the work plan, how iterations are planned and work “allocated”. How much trust is there between the development team and the management? Is the development team cross-functional? Is project management about control?
For Nokia “agile” projects must have: – short iterations – retrospectives
Or in Scrum newspeak “timebox” and “sprint review”.
These 2 elements lay a foundation for many other agile tools/techniques, but I would have thought the self-organisation was the key.