Improving Agility when You’re Anything but Agile

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by — argh!

Agile, hey? It all seems so simple. Read the Agile Manifesto, check out the Agile Principles and start building. There are so many thought pieces out there extolling the virtues of continuous delivery, breaking stuff down small, getting constant feedback from customers, changing based on that feedback, collaboration, communication, the whole nine yards.

And, you know what? I’m 100% behind all of that. I genuinely believe that getting as close as possible to these principles helps deliver valuable products with minimal risk, and maximum flexibility. It can give companies a competitive advantage and ultimately delight customers. And you’d like to think that developers would love this stuff too.

So why do we hear so many stories about product development teams slaving away, unable to get features out and ultimately getting caught up in knots? You might hear stuff like:

• “We can’t release this feature because it has to go with X other changes”
• “We need to bundle this into release Y and that needs a month of testing”.
• “This has a hard dependency on product Z and that team doesn’t have any capacity”