Life cycle is a journey potent with highs and lows which everyone must go through with no exception. Successes and failures are the inseparable segments of this mandatory grind.
It is rightly said — nothing gets you sans effort and price. Having said this, one cannot afford to leave the things as-it-is fearing them as tough to be achieved in as much as, as we try to dwell in, gradually things become easy to conquer.
Supposedly it might be our common experience in our scholastic days, when, after completing 12th standard, we joined in Graduation or Engineering especially at a distant place, we all had to face and witness a totally new environment — both at college and hostel besides choosing new friends of same wavelength of ours. It’s all a challenging experience to be away from parents, staying lonely in hostel, to get acclimatized to changed place, doing all the things ourselves etc. besides getting introduced to an entirely new and unknown curriculum and syllabi of Engineering. In sum, we truly felt that to sustain and survive in such an adverse scenario was totally a different ball game.
However, as the time passed by, we had to settle down and to start thinking positively, considering that there is no other way but to face the challenges resolutely as we already took a plunge with an aim to achieve the goal ie., to complete our Engineering Degree. Then, the things steadily became normal and enjoyed our tenure in college in terms of — our stay, studies, friends etc and finally emerged as victorious with flying colours by withering all the Anti-patterns and adverse situations that have encountered our way.
If we apply our above common experience to Agile platform, as an Agile practitioner, to deliver value to the customer, it is more essential for us to identify the Anti Patterns (few bad practices) that we follow in the hope of making improvements and to overcome those negative aspects so that we can attain the goal with ease and comfort. But contrast to this popular belief, we fail to identify the Anti- patterns itself on a timely manner and resultantly, we become instrumental for hampering our own efforts and slowing down the progress of achieving Agile goals.
As a team, it is true that we consciously do everything to deliver value and delight to the end customer. But forget not, we also need to identify the potential Anti Patterns and remedy them with timeliness to ensure that such Anti-Patterns should not turn out to be the roadblocks for future value delivery.
As we experience in our daily work processes, Anti Patterns do happen unwittingly which are difficult to identify. It is not uncommon to observe or notice Anti Pattern in any agile Ceremonies, team member or in the process of work being done.
Few Common Anti-Patterns:
- Flow disruption: Do not allow stakeholders to disrupt the flow of the current Sprint goal. This will impact the team’s productivity. Instead, keep them in backlog and can be picked up in the refinement to prioritize.
- NoRetro: There is no Retrospective as the team believes there is nothing to improve. (There is no such thing as an agile where everything is just perfect.
- Board Out-of-Date: The team does not update tickets on the Sprint board in time to reflect the current statuses. This will impact the trust stakeholders has in the team.
- Side-gigs: The Development Team is working on issues that are not visible on the board.
- No analysis happens in the Sprint: The goal of the Sprint is the delivery of a valuable potentially shippable Product Increment instead of analysing the prioritized story.
- Big tasks will not allow to accomplish the work: Not breaking the tasks into smaller chunks.
- Do not ignore DOR: Any story is not clearing the DOR, then please park it.
- Ignoring technical Debt: The Development Team is not demanding adequate capacity to tackle technical debt and bugs during the Sprint. (The rule of thumb is that about 20 % of resources are well-spent every sprint to fix bugs and refactor the codebase.
- Capacity: The development team overestimates its capacity and takes on too many tasks.
- Collaboration: The whole team approach needed to have collective ownership. Collaborate as a team to understand if there can be any work form Backend, Front end etc. If we forget to identify, then it will delay the story to spill over.
But, by doing the Value Stream Mapping (elimination of waste), 5 Why’s Technique & adopting a Systems thinking approach, the above-mentioned Anti-Patterns can be easily identified. Should there be any laxity in identifying the Anti-Patterns timely, we may land in a situation where the Sprint Goal will be missed thereby the outcome would be incomplete. Consequently, in the next sprint, we need to rework the entire process for attaining the same goal. Gently steer the conversations and bring them up so that the team can contribute to evolve as a self-organising and high-performing teams as they learn to identify and eradicate the Anti-Patterns all together.
The above are a few to name as illustrations, but there may be many more such Anti-Patterns that may upsurge on daily basis which ought to be identified and remedy them for better results. If we succeed in overcoming the Anti Patterns in the work with timeliness, it frees up the precious time to focus on the most productive work, in futuristic context. This win-win situation will turn out to be a most encouraging eye-opener for teams.
To conclude, teams should always remember to rise amid Anti patterns by jotting down and allocate sufficient time to reflect, resurrect and reinvent for better value-driven delivery to customers at large.
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This is the continuation of sharing our Agile Stories/Thoughts Series. I strongly recommend referring to the links below for previous insightful blogs from our #teamagile in IBM.
Content of Agile Stories/Blogs
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Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article are my own and don’t reflect company’s opinion. They should not be considered as an advice or suggestion in any way.
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