Agile Values

Responding to Change: If You See An Iceberg, Change Course! Agile Manifesto Value #4

Zan The Basics , ,

Welcome back to my continuing Back to Basics series. This time I’ll be covering Responding to Change: Agile Manifesto Value #4. If this is your first look at the Back to Basics posts, or want a general overview of the Agile Manifesto and its principles, please check this post.

Harnessing the Power of Change

In the last post, I talked about the need for collaboration with customers, and how original, fixed contacts stifled flexibility. This is the flexibility I was talking about. As you collaborate with your customers and get their feedback, you will learn things. Sometimes you’ll make small adjustments, but sometimes you’ll find things that require a major change of course. It seems silly, but often people can see danger coming, yet refuse to change course.  Not in Agile. When we see an iceberg, we alter course, and we check course often enough, that even if we do crash, hopefully we can correct instead of sinking.

Everybody’s Got a Plan Until They Get Punched In The Mouth

Like Iron Mike said, everybody makes a plan. However, most plans fall apart as soon as they hit adversity. Even if you try to plan for adversity, you’re going to get hit with something you didn’t expect. So why do we even value planning at all? Well as Dwight D. Eisenhower put it “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”  We plan so we know what parts of the plan can change, and what this will effect. If we don’t plan, we don’t know what’s coming. We have to make a plan, knowing it will change.

Not Just For The Software

More than any of the other values, this one applies more than just the software being created. Being Agile means we need to identify not only changes in plans for software, but for plans in how we work as well.  Setting up a team is an act of planning. We plan for these people to work together on projects. Are we just going to stop if one team member gets a new job and moves on?  As we identify things need to change in the business, we respond by working to ensure these roadblocks are removed.  If we stick to the plan, indulging in the “that’s the way we always do it” mentality, we do ourselves a disservice continuing to do things we know are wrong.  Again, it seems like common sense when we say it out loud, but its surprising just how willing we all are to stick to the plan even when we know its wrong. I could continue to write about that, but there’s no way I could do it better than the book “Who Moved My Cheese” by Dr. Spencer Johnson.  I won’t tell you that you have to read it, but I highly recommend it.

Summing It Up

In Agile, we value responding to change when we find we need it.  We value plans, but more for the act of planning then the actual plan that was produced.  We must always be vigilant that we do not stick to plans just for the sake of the plan.

Did you plan to leave a comment? Respond to more than just change below! Thanks for reading!

Advertisement

Customer Collaboration: No Magic 8 Balls Here? Agile Manifesto Value #3

Zan The Basics , ,

Welcome back to my continuing Back to Basics series. This time I’ll be covering Customer Collaboration: Agile Manifesto Value #3. If this is your first look at the Back to Basics posts, or want a general overview of the Agile Manifesto and its principles, please check this post.

Nostradamus Doesn’t Work Here

There is a shortage of functioning crystal balls in the world, and most fortune tellers are more concerned with your love line and your lucky numbers, not telling you what software will work for you once it’s built.  When we talk about customer collaboration, we have to look once again at how projects are traditionally made. With traditional software projects, it turns out you needed all of that comprehensive documentation from value number 2, because how else could you make a proposal to earn the contract for the project?  Contracts needed to spell out exactly what you wanted, because you were going to give it to a company and they would take it, go away for a while, make some magic and poof, its software!  I hope you and Doc Brown came back from the future knowing exactly what you need, otherwise chances are what you’ve asked for isn’t going to end up being what you need, and that’s assuming the magic men making your software are able to return exactly what you asked for with no issues.

With Agile, we value not only our own interactions like back in value 1, but interaction with the people who will be using what is being produced.  We not only want to know what they think they want in the beginning, but we want to work hand in hand with users as often as possible.  As we create, we constantly want customers to work with us, refining their vision of what will be useful based on what’s been created. It may so happen that with a few small changes, the customer may determine they may only need a portion of what they originally thought to meet their goals. Seems wasteful on both parties to continue at that point, doesn’t it? It may also happen that the customers are completely wrong about what they thought they wanted, or a major change in their industry completely invalidates their plans.  Once again, without collaboration, they would receive (and pay for!) something completely worthless.

New Types of Contracts

We obviously still value contracts. After all, from the developer point of view, we want to know we’ll get paid, and how much.  However, we now value new types of contracts, which allow flexibility and collaboration to ensure useful software is created and time is used efficiently. Contracts based on time and materials, flexible contracts with out clauses, and contacts based on incremental delivery are just some of the new forms of contracts that have come out of the Agile movement.

Summing It Up

Working software is only half the battle. Working software that doesn’t do what’s needed is less than useless, it is costly and wasteful. Comprehensive contacts are far more likely to produce software that doesn’t do what’s needed.

Working Software: Much Better Than Software In Paperwork. Agile Manifesto Value #2

Zan The Basics , ,

Welcome back to my continuing Back to Basics series. This time I’ll be covering Working Software: Agile Manifesto Value #2. If this is your first look at the Back to Basics posts, or want a general overview of the Agile Manifesto and its principles, please check this post.

Working Software: Just As Simple As It Sounds

In Agile, we value working software. That sounds like a no-brainer, right?  Who doesn’t value working software? Taken out of context, this doesn’t really tell us much. So lets contextualize it. If we value working software, then we infer that we do not value software that doesn’t work. Taken to its logical conclusion, software is only valuable once it works, or in other words, once it can be used.

Now to the layperson, you might be tempted to take that to mean that software is only valuable once every single feature is complete. After all, how can you use software that’s not complete?  Let’s examine that. Take your favorite piece of software. For our example, let take a word processor like Microsoft Word.  Microsoft Word has loads and loads of features, some you might not even know existed (for example, Word can convert a table to a graph without any external software. Who needs Excel?). How many of those features do you actually use when you’re writing a document? Could Word be valuable, even if all you could do is type words, or type words and print? Sure it could, that’s why Notepad exists.

So what is “Non-Working” Software? Well, that’s a little bit harder of a concept. After all, code will generally run when executed, and a database exists once you create it, right? Here’s the “Tree Falling in the Forest” question for that: If a database exists, but nothing is connected to it, is it really working? What is more valuable, one table connected to an input form, or 100 tables connected to each other and nothing else?  All this is not even getting into testing, ensuring that your “working software” actually works like you think it should.

Comprehensive Documentation

Beyond the context I talked about above, the Agile Manifesto contextualizes this value in contrast to “Comprehensive Documentation”.  Let’s examine why.

It’s important to remember that the Agile Manifesto was not created in a bubble. At first, software projects were treated like every other kind of project: write out all the requirements into “Comprehensive Documentation”, and then complete each stage of creation as a discreet step, for example design then develop then test. There was only one problem with this. It didn’t work. Development took so much time to match the features, and when it couldn’t the documentation needed to be updated. Testing got pushed so far out, there was no time to actually develop fixes for bugs. Even if you did complete all the features you documented, there’s no guarantee what you created is useful, since you took a year to finish everything. The world can change in a blink of an eye, and while you were away building all that comprehensive documentation, Google came by and already did it faster and better.

Projects do not need to be documented up front. Some projects don’t need more documentation then commented code and a list of user stories. Agile says its always better to create what you need now than what you think you need someday, and that includes documentation.

Summing It Up

With Agile, we value something tangible that works, as opposed to a theory that might work. Even if your “working software” doesn’t end up being the real solution, the sooner you find out, the better.  Anything that is not real is still imagination, and its really hard to use imaginary software.

Like what I’m saying? Don’t like it at all? Leave me a (working) comment below!

Indviduals And Interactions: You Mean I Have To Talk To People? Agile Manifesto Value #1

Zan The Basics , ,

Welcome everyone to the first in my Back to Basics series: Individuals and Interactions: Agile Manifesto Value #1. If this is your first look at the Back to Basics posts, or want a general overview of the Agile Manifesto and its principles, please check this post.

Individuals

It’s easy to look at a company/department/team as a box or machine. You input the instructions and materials(most often money) and out comes a product. Of course, this is not really the case.  What ever this group is, it is made up of individuals. With Agile, we value each individual for all of their real and potential contributions. Without the individuals, the group does not exist, and nothing can happen.  Humans are not resources, and shouldn’t be treated as such. However, individuals working alone can only get you so far, which leads to…

Interactions

Interactions are fun. Much like chemical reactions, we take individuals, and mix them together. The results can be mundane, or they can be amazing, or even explosive!  This stems from a single idea: communication is the key to success. The frequency and value of interactions and communication between individuals determines just how good any output from said individuals will be. If your people don’t interact, then no reactions can take place. If people do interact, then as with chemistry, the whole can become much more than only the sum of its parts.

Interaction Killers: Processes, Tools and the Oxymoron of “Agile Processes”

So if we value the interaction of individuals, what does that have to do with processes and tools, and why do we value them less? First off, let’s be clear: there is still value in processes, and there is still value in tools.  However, when processes and tools interfere with individuals interacting, the processes and tools lose their value.  Let’s take some concrete examples. Jira, RallyOn and the like are great tools. Many an Agile team have used them to great success. However, if a team were to allow these tools to interfere with interactions, say by using task tracking in place of speaking face to face, the tool looses its value. Strictly defined processes, the cornerstone of the Waterfall SDLC, can destroy interaction, as we continue to act on others instead of interacting together.

So what is an Agile Process? I’ve seen it stated that there are no “Agile Processes”, only Agile teams and the environment for the Agile team to be Agile. I believe that teams will come up with their own processes internally, and if done with an Agile mindset, these processes will define how that team is Agile. There is no one size fits all process that will make a team Agile. Even Scrum, the most popular incarnation of Agile in software, is just a framework. It’s a restrictive framework which enforces the values of Agile (including Individuals and Interactions), but the processes the team comes up with to be Agile are their own.

Summing it up

Agile values the interactions of individuals over anything that will cause interactions to be interfered with.  There are great tools and processes out there, but if they interfere with people working together as a team and interacting, they can be damaging.

Want to interact with me? I welcome your feedback. Leave me a comment!