Agile Basics. How well do you know them?
After meeting with a handful of Agile Coaches this morning, a few of us hung around to talk about something interesting. There is an astounding number of people that claim to know agile that haven’t read the Agile Manifesto and the 12 Principles. There are also a large number of people apparently that are practicing Scrum that haven’t read the Scrum Guide. Is this possibly true?
I tend to repeat this frequently to people I encounter: it’s important to revisit the principles. The last team I worked with made stickers of the above design and stuck them on their laptops and around the team room. It doesn’t take much time, but I find just reading them or better yet, asking the team to read them at the start of their next retrospective can be very powerful. These principles are behind everything we do. And while your process may have become routine, when you read these principles I hope that it invigorates something inside you like it does for me. The reminder that we should crave knowing why we build things and that we commit to work together in a safe and sustainable way are really liberating. If you ever worked in the 90s or early 2000s under a waterfall regime death-march, you likely know what I mean. And we should embrace these things and remind our managers what we all signed up for, so we can keep building software this way.
The second point we discussed was the Scrum Guide. Scrum is deceptively simple. It’s a great place to start learning agile. Some people even refer to Scrum as the agile training wheels. I think because of this, many take it for granted and skip over some of the important subtleties. Just read the guide. Download the latest version from the URL because it does get updated ocasionally. It’s only about 16 pages long and you will learn something or remember something that you’ve forgotten. And, if I’m right, it will help you and your team be better at executing Scrum.
Now I know my blog is basically dedicated to Agile Transformation topics and things beyond the basics, but everyone once in a while should remind themselves and their teams that everything that exists in the universe of agile all started with that one pager of the manifesto and 12 principles. What you do with it and how you apply it is up to you.
About the Author: Brian Link is the author of AgileMisconceptions.com (also available on Amazon) and the owner of Practical Agilist, LLC. Brian provides leadership and coaching services as an Agile Coach at LeanDog. Follow Brian on Twitter @blinkdaddy or LinkedIn, and subscribe to his newsletter.
