Agile Development Blog

Last week I attended the Agile Success Tour in Santa Clara, CA. I noticed 5 themes to the discussions and breakout sessions with the nearly 200 software and IT leaders in attendance.

Catch the next event in Atlanta on June 25. The event is free, but registration is required.

1. Product Owners are very important

Waterfall product marketing will find it difficult to adapt to the new responsibilities of Agile teams, unless they learn what is expected of the Product Owner. An absent or uneducated Product Owner can handicap a project before it even gets started.

2. For Agile to be successful, you must gain consensus and commitment

When rolling out new Agile teams, you must get consensus both from the team members converting to Agile and your management. Everyone involved needs to understand that growing pains will occur, but ultimately lead to higher performance. In addition, you must dive in and get started with a “burn the boats” mentality that prevents anyone from considering turning back. See Jean’s post on 12 Agile Failure Modes for more on behaviors that can inhibit your success.

3. Distributed teams, though popular, are hard to make successful

With obstacles like quality of life, cultural and time zone differences, and the drag from waiting for decisions, distributed teams pose special challenges that require Agile teams to inspect and adapt with respect to all. Team building at each location, enhancing communication, mentors, travel, group pictures, and sharing the load all help break down barriers that can prevent distributed Agile teams from reaching their potential.

4. Successful Agile adoption can help companies realize quantifiable benefits

Jean Tabaka shared how companies who are adopting Agile development are seeing significant cost savings in their development organizations with faster ROI, improved time-to-market, and increased productivity. In tough economic times, speeding up Agile adoption to help companies realize cost-savings quickly is more critical than ever before.

5. An Agile community is a valuable tool

Agile development may have simple values, but it is not always easy to implement. Capitalizing on the “wisdom of crowds” and learning from each other’s experience are key to avoiding common pitfalls.