7 minute read
Are you just 'Doing Agile' or '‘Being Agile’?
by Techfastly
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The amalgamation of the latest technological innovations, live-in-the-moment end-users, and an ever-changing business environment requires organizations to continuously evolve and adapt to new strategies to meet the business/customer requirements.
Necessity is the mother of invention. With a need to have a greater business impact, innovate faster, and outmaneuver competitors, organizations are transforming and going the Agile way. Customers demand what they need, and businesses are expected to deliver. Organizations have realized the need to move at break-neck speed and embrace themselves to transform ways of working, enabling faster delivery and speed-to-market continuously. Where traditional models of working fail, agile is the way to go!
But how and why did we get here?
Shortfalls Before Agile:
Gone are the days where a product was built using traditional models like Waterfall, and when a customer just saw the end product or a working software after everything had been designed and developed. Imagine waiting for a year or so to solve your business need!
The big bang integration done at the very last stage could not account for any undocumented business or technological bottlenecks and risks. Additionally, the longer duration of projects amounted to high risk and uncertainty as the project could go out of scope, beyond budget, or take more time to be built. The development model was rigid with no scope of change or improvements. There was a need to solve issues in real-time.
However, in today’s VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world, change is the only constant. And organizations are going Agile to maximize the business impact and achieve continuous delivery and minimize the feedback loop between the developers and users.
The Birth of Agile
In February 2001, seventeen independent-minded software practitioners got together and the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, also known as the Agile Manifesto, came into existence to speed up the software development lifecycle. They created four values.
The manifesto saw value in the items on the right, but it valued the items on the left more.
Agile is all about developing quality product iterations in short-sprinted releases. Teams started implementing Agile practices like stand-up meetings, user stories, iterations, etc. Although this is what it means to be agile, the real question that came up is - Are you just “Adopting Agile” or “Transforming to become Agile”? In other words, are you “Doing Agile” or “Being Agile”?
Traditional development teams worked in silos. Agile called for smashing down the barriers and bringing a collaborative and cross-functional team to the forefront.
Adapting to this radical shift – a world where acceptance to change is hard – needed a culture and mindset change. Agile is not just about practicing Scrum or Kanban. Agile is more of a culture and mindset shift both organizational and individual level.
According to the State of Agile report, only 16% of respondents reached the satisfactory level of Agile maturity, while the whopping 54% of enterprises are still perfecting their practices, despite following Agile from one to five or more years.
Are you just “Doing Agile”?
If you start and adopt the Agile practices like Scrum just because everyone is doing it, then it’s absolutely just a knee jerk reaction. It’s like a journey without a destination. The only change that will be bought by Agile Adoption is in the way the team works by implementing Agile practices, processes, values, and principles.
Or are you “Being Agile”?
Agile Transformation may be defined as a fundamental change in the process of an organization’s culture and mindset. It’s not just the development teams that need a change in mindset. A real transformation can only occur when you not only implement it across one team, but across all teams and levels in the organization.
Employees at all levels in the organization must embrace the change to achieve a real agile transformation. The C-suite should be in the driver’s seat and lay a clear foundation for the organization-wide agile transformation by embracing the change and setting a clear vision. The middle layer should put on their innovation caps and lead the cross-functional teams from the front.
Agile adoption can be pretty fast as only one team can adopt Agile. One team may follow Agile, whereas another team may follow the Waterfall model. If implemented incorrectly, this can undermine the very essence of Agile. However, Agile transformation would take time and a number of years to transform all teams and align themselves to the common objective where business value delivered and user satisfaction are the top two measures of success.
The majority of the teams fail to move from “doing agile” to “being agile”. Thus, the success of Agile Transformation is dependent on how the management or leadership team perceives it.
Reinvigorating the Software Development Lifecycle
Adopting Agile is not a luxury but a necessary guide that empowers you to navigate through any market turbulences and steer ahead with full power throttle. Let us look at some of the benefits of going Agile:
1. Business value is given top priority : Agile enables the client to determine the priority features. This enables a better understanding of the business goals and objectives and helps the team prioritize and deliver features that provide the most business value.
2. Highly collaborative environment : As a first step, Agile shatters the traditional development, testing, and operations silos increasing team collaboration and instilling accountability across employees to drive towards a common goal. Creating cross-functional teams enables effective communication and empowers them to make on-the-go decisions. With such flexibility and responsiveness, agile organizations can meet their customer demands.
3. Improves overall product quality : Agile breaks down the work into manageable units. Instead of a big bang integration at the end, every build is tested right from the development phase enabling early defect identification in requirements, architecture, and design, thus giving a chance to change/improve the feature.
4. Reduces cost : The cost of fixing a defect rises exponentially as you move closer to production. According to an IBM survey, research from the National Institute of Standards and Technology & the Ponemon Institutefound that if vulnerabilities get detected in the early development process, they may cost around $80 on average. But the same vulnerabilities may cost around $7600 to fix if detected during the production phase.Early defect identification helps in fixing defects at the development stage itself. Prevention (of defects escaping production) is better than a cure (defect fixes), especially when the cure is costly.
5. Prevent any “bow wave” effect : With traditional ways of identifying defects at the last stages, there is less time to fix defects, thereby increasing the likelihood that they will be postponed until later increments or versions of the system. Fixing defects early avoids creating a “bow wave” of technical debt.
Handling Chaos with Agility
Agile is a powerful framework for software development that benefits all stakeholders involved in the product lifecycle – starting from the development team, operations team, and even client and end-users. It helps teams avoid the most common bottlenecks such as cost, timelines, and scope creep in a more controlled manner.
Amid the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, every organization’s think-tank had to reshape the working model with agility by quickly adapting to work remotely and still be operate-ready. Larger organizations that were already Agile-ready could quickly position themselves and deal with the crisis. The smaller and not-so-agile companies had to adapt, adopt, and transform to the agile ways of working to stay afloat and ensure business continuity. And now that they have gained traction, they wouldn’t want to lose the continuity.
