Use [domain] principles, not practices
“Use agile principles, not practices”
Quote taken from Author Q&A: from Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams and applies to any domain, not just Agile.
One of the biggest challenges occur when experienced agilists try to apply the same practices to distributed teams as they do for collocated teams. A typical practice like the retrospective can become complicated and painful depending on the distribution of your team members and their hours of overlap. Instead, we recommend going back to principles and looking at how the practices you want to use were trying to apply those principles. How might the principles suggest different practices for your context to achieve the same goal?
In my experience, people that get too much stuck on “practices” (=ceremonies), in any domain, don’t have a deep understanding of the “principles”.
Example: When I was a Java developer I was stuck on the Sun Microsystems “best practices” about what Enterprise development was (“J2EE orthodoxy”), and after coming across the book “Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development” by Rod Johnson, creator of Spring, realized that what I considered as the right way to do things was actually the opinionated approach of a handful of people at Sun.
In the original quote, try swapping “agile” with your domain and see where that takes you:
- Use Sales principles, not practices.
- Use Marketing principles, not practices.
- Use Online publishing principles, not practices.
- etc, etc.
What fundamental assumptions would you challenge?
