Up to now, I have figured out that teams trying to behave agile sometimes fall into the cave of pretending to be agile (e.g. stand up meetings and less than just enough planning and short iterations so on!). Often, when this pretending takes places for days, it creates a illusion on the minds of the people that they might be doing the "right thing". And all on a sudden, someone discovers things are breaking and there is no way out of this disaster!
So, I suggest for teams who are trying to get agile to meet the following prerequisites first-
1. Team members must have a certain level of all-round skills.
So, when we do not preserve seats for requirements gathering, planning and designing and still want a good architected software, we need to make sure we are not asking beyond the capacity of one team member. From my experiences I have found that, even a very good communicating team with enough of discussions and reviews cannot control the quality and integrity of the product when some of the fellows don't meet the all-round skill requirements.
So, an agile team is expected to meet all-round individual skills like
a. Database design concept.
b. Object Oriented design concept (must know about design patterns (e.g. from GoF) and design principles)
c. Standard Coding expertise.
d. Testing sense and writing effective test codes.
e. Understanding the business domain clearly and concisely.
f. Quickly respond to change requests and define effective way to meet system owner's demands.
2. An "agile" skilled team must practice the following
a. Effective Design and design reviews.
b. Good coding at the very first time (if possible).
c. Must write test/guard codes for automated testing.
d. Continuous and periodically re-factorization of the code base and architecture.
d. Some sort of mentoring to make sure things are in rhythm.
3. An "agile" skilled team must use appropriate tools for the "best practices"
a. Use smart collaboration tool to make sure all the stakeholders are on the same ground.
b. Use effective test suits.
c. Version management system.
d. Automated build system and continuous integrations.
e. Project management and time tracking software.
I will try to get more subjective on each of the items mentioned above in my upcoming posts.
