Detecting Agile Bullshit

The Defense Innovation Board DIB advises the secretary of defense of the United States of America.

Members of the board are recognizable names like Eric Schmidt of Alphabet, or Instagram COO Marne Levine.

So I was quite surprised that a government committee was so straightforward to publish a document called Detecting Agile Bullshit.

Simple questions are used as a bullshit detector to identify organizations faking agile. Worth your time, if the government has this problem, you probably will also encounter it in the private sector.

How Healthy is Your Product? - Product Strategy Check

You are developing your product using agile and lean approaches. 

How can you check your approach and distill improvements? A health check of your product and your development approach is certainly a good solution.

This post is the third of a set of articles identifying health checks with different focus. We will identify strengths, potential weaknesses and hopefully find room for improvement.

What is your product strategy and how do you involve your customers and stakeholders.

How Healthy is Your Product? - Delivery Pipeline Check

You are developing your product using agile and lean approaches. 

How can you check your approach and distill improvements? A health check of your product and your development approach is certainly a good solution.

This post is the second of a set of articles identifying health checks with different focus. We will identify strengths, potential weaknesses and hopefully find room for improvement.

How you build and deliver your software product has direct implication on your liquidity and cashflow. Improvements in your delivery pipeline have direct impact on your finances.

SAFE 4.6: Improvements Direly Needed

It is official. The power engine of SAFe 4.6 vehicle is Team and Technical Agility. View the official presentation and more important download the slides.  It is one of their five Lean Enterprise competencies and one of their four core values. SAFe finally recognizes the tremendous importance of technical proficiency and craftsmanship.

They advocate two findings. First you need team agility, how you apply Scrum or Kanban. In other words being agile instead of doing agile. Second you need technical agility, how you develop a quality product.

I challenge you. If you are following SAFe, talk with your teams and checks how many of their official good practices are you using on a daily basis.

How Healthy is Your Product? - Source Code Check

You are developing your product using agile and lean approaches. 

How can you check your approach and distill improvements? A health check of your product and your development approach is certainly a good solution.

This post is the first of a set of articles identifying health checks with different focus. We will identify strengths, potential weaknesses and hopefully find room for improvement.

The initial examination shall always be the source code. Your code base is a key asset of your company.

How Should You handle Definition of Done?

An agile team is sole responsible for the internal quality of the product they build and maintain.

And the developers shall be accountable to produce the expected quality and optimize long terms goals of the organization.

They provide the answer to the seminal question

Did we build it right?

Definition of Done DoD is a major building block to answer this question with a sounding yes.

Shu Ha Ri for Enterprise Agile

First teams have successfully used Scrum to develop applications. The news spread out and everybody wants to apply Scrum. It is time to introduce Enterprise wide Agile with Scrum or Kanban or XP.

Your Company wants to introduce Enterprise Agility in their product development, quality assurance and sales departments. The company as a whole shall transition to an agile organization and all teams shall adopt Scrum.

Try the "Shu Ha Ri" approach for such a change process.