Think Before You Leap - Life is Dangerous for Change Agents
- by technodrone
So you want to introduce agile methods to your team...
The following are some "lessons learned" when from someone who advocated agile/scrum to a group that was not ready for it.
"Change agents, in my experience, face negative consequences. Sometimes, most of the time at the beginning, it's painful.
This is the question you might have to ask yourself. Do you want to be a developer in scrum project or do you want be a scrum master managing the process?
I think with proper mentoring/training, you can become good scrum master. But is that what you want? if yes, you can go ahead, take the training.
if you want to be a developer, you may not need to be certified as scrum master. You can just pick up from a book such as Mike Cohn new book Succeeding with Agile, I am reading it now. It's good.
In my experience, I did waste my resources by trying to change the culture. It cost me lot. Instead, I should have focused on technical practices that are core to agile.
Then look for teams that are good at agile. I would have saved lot of energy, and time.
Try baby steps first yourself in the company, and next with the team, starting with technical practices like writing unit tests, SOLID principles, patterns, refactoring, continuous integration, pairing, and peer code reviews. These have inherent pull that can bring collaboration from a team. Once you see team adaption in core practices, then you can introduce scrum concepts like user stories/task board etc. This idea of Leading by example seems to be working for most of the agile folks. You can pitch core practices to the manager, and the team, and start showing them how you are doing. You can put a road map for agile adaption and you can pitch to your manager. I would include need for scrum master training as part of the road map. "
I thought about his advice for a couple of weeks and read about the pitfalls of technical debt and the team not having prior awareness of agile methods. The more I read and think about it the more I think he was right. What do you think?
