Know agile. Not habit. (जानामि Agile न च मे प्रवृत्तिः)

There are many projects which follow few of SCRUM framework like continuous integration, daily stand up meetings, short iterations, customer demonstration etc. They do not follow the agile manifesto or not even aware of it. They follow these as best practice or learnings from a successful project. Most of these do help the project to deliver a better product. Then why am I cribbing here? It is the same issue of SCRUMButt. Even if these are followed as best practice or SCRUM it results in local optima.  I will bet many managers and customers are pretty happy with these. But they are missing one important point here. Local optima causes disillusionment, frustration and fatigue which is bad for any project. It demoralizes the team. After all the hard work and beautifully done application customer coming back and telling, see here I cannot use this without these changes. Now the manager comes and tells the team, guys you have  done a great job ti...

Many projects do not become completely agile. They start by telling we will use SCRUM for this project. A small training is provided and team goes agile. There will be some benefits in the beginning and some short comings. But definitely project is not a huge success? What is going wrong? Trigger happy top management will pull the plug telling we tried agile and it is not working for us. When following SCRUM for the first time it is better to check whether SCRUM is followed to the full extent. As the old say it is the traditions which allowed humans to survive and evolve. It requires wise and old to tell what the tradition is. You can decide how to follow agile once you become expert on agile. How do you decide whether you are following agile to the full extent? Jeff Sutherland has developed a scoring system. This is called Nokia Test (or SRUMButt test). You can read more about this in Jeff Sutherland’s blog http://jeffsutherland.com/scrum/nokiatest.pdf . Most of the teams claiming to ...