Monday 20 January 2014

Biggest hindrances to being agile

I often wonder how projects fail to be agile enough even though the team consists of talented team members.  So today I am planning to summarize few points that are the biggest hindrances to being agile in a team based environment.


1.  Laziness / Procrastination

I think this is by far the number one hindrance to being agile.  This habit by individuals will result in a gap that widens with each work that is being delayed.  Let me explain this a bit better.  If you are part of a QA team, your responsibilities will primarily include testing of your module perfectly.  Obviously everyone will do that.  But automating the current testing will act as a regression suite for your future needs.  How many of you would do that if automation is not mandated in your process?  The answer is not all.  

So the laziness / Procrastination sets in and the gap widens with each delayed item.  So unless automation is mandated, it will not be implemented by everyone.  So the Agile Definition of Done should include all these nitty and gritty details that makes the entire process more agile.


2.  Lack of understanding

Not everyone is comfortable with Agile concepts and the lack of understanding of Agile has a direct impact on the team performance.  No Agile is almost always better than bad Agile.  For example, trying to be Agile without giving importance