LeSS Agile, More Productive — Part 1: Pain

Our Agile disaster — How doing LeSS has saved our sanity.

At ResponseTap we have always thought of ourselves as using the Agile Scrum Methodology. But, increasingly we’d been evolving it into our own bewildering flavour of Agile — and it was getting really painful.

This is the first of three posts telling our story, the story of how ResponseTap Engineering adopted the “LeSS” framework, and brought order to our chaos.

Our trilogy of sad face:

• Years of evolving software development process
• Many raised voices
• JFDIs

We were SO agile!

I have lost count of the number of conversations when someone said something like this..

This new feature is urgent, can’t we just skip testing to get it out faster?

…or…

We can’t let the process get in the way, “Customer A” will cancel if we don’t fix this bug!

Or, a thousand other ways of saying: The thing I want you to do is too important for it to be slowed down by “the process”. These conversations would often end up with somebody uttering the immortal words: