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Agile for teams that hate Agile (a preview)

Agile for teams who hate Agile

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Page 1: Agile for teams who hate Agile

Agile for teams that hate Agile

(a preview)

Page 2: Agile for teams who hate Agile

by Eric GelinasFlickr / Yahoo!

Page 3: Agile for teams who hate Agile

First off... what is Agile?

Agile is a toolset of software development methods. At it’s core it is about time-boxing the work of a team so that launches can happen more frequently with a prioritized set of features instead of launching larger sets of features less often. It promotes self-organizing of creative teams as well as measuring progress against goals.

Companies from large ones to start-up have adopted agile methodologies because Agile teams are more productive and predictable.

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What’s to hate?

I have been working with one agile process or an other for over seven years. I have tried more than a few flavors of agile and more than a few tools meant to make the whole process easier to adopt. Funny thing is that there were only two times in the last seven years where agile has actually done what it set out to do; make my life easier. Both of these times I was on a team who was learning agile from scratch and was light on tools and process. Where it has not worked is where it had become something which tries to solve so many problems that the process became unapproachable for the people who use it every day. The process did not stay out of the way and make things organized, it became a big giant burden.

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Agile at human scale

One of my favorite books in the past few years is "Bicycle Diaries" by David Byrne of the Talking Heads. He shares stories of his experiences exploring cities around the world by bike. Obviously his music career brought him to cities large and small all over the world. Some of his favorite cities were ones he described as “human scale", a term used by architect Jan Gehl in his book "Cities for People ". Parts of San Francisco fall into this category. Byrne mentions cities like Valencia, California (a Los Angeles suburb) which he did not like because the town was too spread out with very few things close enough to be walkable. We like to live in places that are approachable. We like to live in places which give us space to interact and play, as well as do the practical things we need to do. Our work is no different.

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What else?Start with simple goals

In this talk I will go through some real world examples of Agile implemented in good and bad ways. Setting a simple set of goals is the first step in building a process. Goals give your team a measurable way to track the success of a process to make sure it does what it is supposed to do. Being able to measure success and failure, along with a willingness to adapt, will help grow a process which people believe is valuable.

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Real worldy stuff

Agile was core to how our team at Flickr reached our goal of re-launching in March of 2013. I will talk about some of the things we learned in that process. I will also discuss the goals we chose to help guide the development of our Agile process