Title: Preventing Agile Perversion
Speaker: Lanette Creamer, Consulting Software Tester, Spark Quality, LLC
Date: Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Time: 12:25 PM - 1:25 PM PT
Since it was introduced in 2001, Agile has gone from a development approach used at smaller and newer web development companies to being adopted across many industries, even in the enterprise. One of the criticisms of Agile are the failures that occur when a transition to Agile is done partially, incorrectly, and/or inconsistently at an organization. If you've heard of "Scrummerfall" or "Scrumbut” and felt it described your project, you may be facing a problem of good intentions that went awry. I call these common issues “Agile Perversion” and consider them the biggest risk to software quality that many teams are facing this year. Agile perversion happens when the “Agile in practice” has strayed so far from the values stated in the Agile Manifesto that it no longer can be classified as an agile practice.
During this session Lanette will walk you through some of the most common reasons that a change to an incremental development cycle can become grossly distorted. If you are in a dysfunctional state of development, one that is neither agile, nor good for customers & employees, what can you do to help your team get past the pain?
As a member of a team struggling with an unnatural perversion of Agile, your team has the tools needed to expose the perversion and get your team moving and achieving incremental improvement. Agile problems are often not new problems. You may be seeing the problems for the first time. They are the very difficult people issues that often prompt a team to look for a better way to deliver software to start with. Just as they aren’t really caused by Agile itself, having a standup meeting also isn’t going to magically fix all longstanding cultural, team, technical, and individual problems.
Everywhere you look you can find ways to tell if you aren't really Agile, or if your agile adoption has gone wrong, but what can you DO about it if you already know that it has? Lanette will explain how you can use Agile Manifesto as a means to surviving a transition gone wrong, while making the very incremental improvement that is the driving reason many companies intended to adopt agile practices in the first place. If you recognize the issue, you may be the very person needed to turn the team around. There is no better motivator than success. Knowing what is blocking the first victory reveals what to do next. Incremental improvement is about triggering a big change by a series of small changes. All you need to know is what the next right thing to do is.
About Lanette Creamer
Lanette Creamer likes testing software even more than Diet Coke and cats. After working for a decade at Adobe, including leading coordinated testing across products on the Creative Suites, Lanette jumped into consulting, working independently as Spark Quality LLC. Throughout her career, Lanette has evangelized advancement of real-time human thought above process solutions in software quality. Deeply passionate about collaboration, she believes it is a powerful solution when facing complex technical challenges. Lanette is an active participant in the testing community, and a writer in her well known TestyRedhead blog, on Twitter, and occasionally in industry magazines and technical papers.