Agile — I want my cake

Agile_Ed
Agile_Ed
Sep 3, 2018 · 2 min read

There is a lot of good conversation happening around the idea of aiming for agility rather than implementing “Agile” (and whatever that might mean to any one person), since the focus seems to have swung far too much towards focusing on the “how” rather than the “why”, or what it is you’re trying to actually achieve from the process.

I was talking to someone recently about this and the described it like this:

I want my cake

It feels like a nice (albeit simplistic) analogy to me, plus I get to say the word cake a lot.

My requirements are “I want a Victoria sponge cake for 8 people and it must be gluten free”, and I should be able to let the team get on with baking me my cake. The more I have to get involved in that process highlights an increasing number of problems. If I have to tell them how much flour, sugar, eggs to use, and what temperature and time to bake for then clearly my team of bakers has some significant problems.

If a software team is tasked with creating me a new iteration of software within a defined time period (that could be a Scrum sprint, or a number of days in Kanban, whatever) then all I’m really worried about as a customer of the team (e.g. Product Owner, the business, and to a certain extent Scrum Master) is that I get my software — aka my cake. I care much less about how they do it, they are supposed to be a capable team of professionals, I just care that they get it “done”. The Scrum Master is of course involved in the “how”, but, if they are having to get deeply involved with a team of professional software developers (which includes automation testers) on how to do things then clearly there are some significant problems with that team. Tackling those issues is a whole other topic.

It doesn’t change the fact that as someone who wants something from the team my primary focus is, and should be, that I want my cake.