Working with a great Agile team feels magical but do you know from where to start?
We all have our own favorite game that we like to watch live in a stadium or on television. Now imagine a game with no rules and no scoreboard. Aha ! are you lost ?
What would happen if there is no set rules to the game. Lets sit back and think of all the mess that can happen during the play without a set guideline. The important question to ask here is – Does this game holds any value now? Simply NO !
In 1986, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka published a path-breaking paper –
The New New Product development Game.
This paper compared to a scrummage (scrum), a method of restarting play in Rugby football that involves players packing closely together with their head down and attempting to gain possession of the ball. Rather than a relay-race where one person passing the baton to the next, in Rugby, the ball gets passed within the team as it moves as a unit up in the field. Scrum was inspired by this paper.
In 2001, seventeen open-minded software developers (that included creators of Scrum and XP) met at Snowbird ski resort outside of Salt lake city, Utah to discuss lightweight development methods i.e. iterative and incremental approach to product development.
Agile Manifesto thus was born based on 12 Agile principles.
Agile Manifesto –
1) Individual and Interactions over process and tools
2) Working Software over comprehensive documentation
3) Customer Collaboration over contract negotiation
4) Responding to Change over following a plan
The principles that led to Agile Manifesto –
- Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
- Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
- Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
- Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
- Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
- The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
- Working software is the primary measure of progress.
- Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
- Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
- Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
- The best architectures, requirements, and design emerge from self-organizing teams.
- At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
Well, there goes the answer for Why? We need Agile !
Next time when you watch a game, remember on what guidelines is the game played and why it makes the watching so enjoyable.