Agile Transitions - BANG!

A while back, I posted a blog summary of David Anderson’s thoughts on enterprise Agile transition initiatives. In general, big process improvement efforts really don’t work all that well. I’ve experienced this in many cases, as well. I touched on it briefly in a blog post where I stated that

Large process improvement efforts typically fail, often resulting in methodology wars that place process improvement efforts above software delivery.

If you’ve ever been part of a large process improvement effort, you’ve probably felt the pain. In Grass Roots Agile, I take a rather developer-centric view in exploring ways to increase agility by injecting agile practices into the development effort.

In lieu of adopting in complete form an Agile software development process, such as Scrum, XP, or Crystal, injecting practices can help ease the pain. Such an approach makes an agile transition easier, less risky, and ultimately more beneficial.

I also posted a follow-up explaining how these practices help agile scale to larger teams. The concept of injecting agile practices to help ease the pain is supported by Big Blue’s agile transition, where Sue McKinney says:

We pushed tackling low-hanging fruit to get the benefit and to attack the major pain points.

I’ve found it tends to work better to incrementally improve how software is delivered by relieving the most significant pain points one practice at a time. But I think Esther Derby sums it up very succintly in saying:

I’m a bit puzzled by big bang transitions to agile methods.  Since you can’t know how everything will play out, it only makes sense to make incremental change and inspect and adapt as you go.

Gosh! That makes a lot of sense, heh?

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