Problems with Agile?

If you have already adopted Agile, you may know that it is hard to just pick up a book and boost productivity overnight. Here are some problems we have seen and some common solutions.

Team priorities change rapidly and productivity is undermined

May happen when there is no single Product Owner or Customer that is responsible for driving business value.
The team is not protected in an iteration to accomplish a specific goal.
Addressed by working with management to declare a single person – the Product Owner – responsible for project priorities.

Team keeps on missing iteration deliverables

May happen when team is assigned work by management rather than selecting items from the product backlog to work on.
Addressed by having the team select work from the product backlog.

Bugs found by QA after the iteration completes interferes with the current iteration

One common problem is QA not being fully integrated with Development.
Addressed by having the whole team work together on an iteration. It’s more efficient but requires some changes to the way people traditionally work.

Not enough time to test at the end of each iteration

Coined as ScrummerFall – following the WaterFall process within an Sprint/Iteration.
Addressed by using Test Driven Development to write acceptance tests before design, coding and unit tests.
QA, dev, BA, and Customer may pair to write these.
Can also add slack time to either: complete current iteration work or get ahead on research and upcoming work.

Been doing Agile for a while but things aren’t improving

May happen when the team does not spend time discussing problems or there is no action taken.
Often there can be a strong focus on “getting the product out” so that there is no slack to fix problems.
Addressed by taking action every iteration to improve the work environment and productivity.

The design and architecture is a mess!

May happen when there is too much focus on completing features and not enough on quality.
Addressed by leaving time for refactroring and code cleaning.

Things were great at first, but now it is taking longer and longer to get work done

May happen when the team follows just the Scrum process. Also called Flaccid Scrum.
Addressed by training the team on XP Engineering practices such as Continuous Integration, Refactoring, Shared Code ownership, Automated testing and pairing.

We can help

If it sounds like any of these problems exist at your organzation and you want to get some help, then, please look at your options for getting started.