Last week while attending Scott Ambler’s talk on Agile in Practice at SDBP I tried and failed to share his Agile Criteria slide in real time. Apparently there’s a limit to what iPhone, Twitter and sloth can accomplish in a dark lecture hall. So here, only one week and one day later are Scott’s criteria, the things he looks for when evaluating a team that claims to be agile:
- Developer regression testing, better yet TDD.
- Active stakeholder participation.
- Regular delivery of working software.
- Self-organization.
I had special interest Scott’s criteria because I’d just posted my own attempt to the CITCON mailing list the week before. I wasn’t trying to put together a magic recipe but rather to come up with a list of practices without which — or their equivalents — you will fail. My list was:
- Iterations
- Planning game
- TDD
- Automated acceptance tests
- Continuous integration
- Retrospectives
I think these two lists are pretty compatible, but there are two outliers: self-organization and retrospectives. I was surprised that Scott didn’t have retrospectives on his list. I’m naturally a lumper not a splitter, so I’m tempted to say that retrospectives are a vehicle for self-organization and call it a day. But I don’t think that’s honoring what Scott had in mind. By self-organization Scott meant the team should be organizing the work, deciding who does what. But is that really needed to be Agile? I can imagine using all the practices listed but having a manager assign the work for each story. I can imagine it… but it isn’t something I’ve ever done. I don’t remember having the need, though this may be selective memory on my part. Certainly the majority of the time who should do what is obvious to everyone, and when there are multiple people who could do the work then it is divided easily enough. So I’m not sure that self-organization is a requirement but I clearly believe it is better. Better to have people sign-up themselves and have feel a greater ownership in the project.
So is this it, do we have our list? If you’re not doing these you’re in trouble?
3 Comments
I think the main point is that Ambler is listing higher level criteria. Yours work too, but are rather more specific.
Ambler is actually only a step away from simply mentioning the 4 core Agile values. So he is probably more true to the original spirit. But are his criteria more useful in practice? It is difficult to say (for example, he does not mention continuous improvement -not in the 4 original values either-, which is clearly the aim of Retrospectives).
I notice that on his blog (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/ambler?entry=agile_criteria) that Scott has added a 5th factor which is regular reflection and states that retrospectives are formal form of this. Perhaps you have influenced him!
Effective self-organization requires the team to continuously reflect on what is being done, and not done, thus retrospectives should be an integral part of it. I think that your criteria in general is closer to the ground than Scott’s and that is why it tends to be longer.
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