12 Agile Principles in 12 Sprints — Deep dive into Agile Manifesto
In my experience, most of the teams and organisations adopt agile without a deep understanding of the agile principles. Teams and organisations start by putting in place an agile framework such as Scrum. By following the framework artifacts, they believe that they are ‘agile’. I have seen teams with team members that are not even aware of agile principles yet they are using Scrum for quite some time. We not only have to do agile but also ‘think’ agile.
Frameworks such as Scrum do promote agile principles and provide a disciplined approach to delivery. Product backlogs, stand-up’s, iterative development, Retros promote agile principles such as
- Early and continuous delivery of valuable software
- Welcome changing requirements, even late in development
- Deliver working software frequently
- Face to Face meetings
- Team reflection for improvement and continuous improvement
If the team does not have a profound understanding of agile principles, the benefits of implementing an agile framework can be quite limited.
To develop this understanding, I am planning to run 12 agile principles in the 12 sprints program.
Each sprint, the team will agree to pick up an agile principle. We will focus on the selected principle, discuss and practice it throughout the sprint. We hope that this targeted focus and practice will teach us to act on these principles as a natural way of doing things. It will change our mindset.
For the first sprint, we have decided to start with the 10th principle first: Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential. Our team at times struggles to balance maximizing the value for our customers vs developing the perfect application. We tend to complicate things that could be simplified because we are excited about implementing ‘cool’ features using the latest technology that might not be important for the end-user. Developers tend to do that — Microsoft word and excel are full of features that we never use. In fact, most of MS office users only use 20–30% of the available features. So our aim is to think about everything we have to develop using this principle.
I will be writing a blog on our journey to understand these 12 principles every two weeks. I invite you to follow us on this journey and provide your input and feedback.
As part of the journey, I have written two blogs related to principle 7 and principle 10 and principle 8. Links below. I will add more reflections in the near future. Comments are welcome.
