Adopt Before You Adapt: Learning Principles through Practice

Although agile principles sound simple, adopting agile is often extremely difficult. Some teams adopting agile start by making changes and tweaks to prescribed processes—bad! Steve Berczuk explains how following the recommended practices of your chosen agile method for a time will help you internalize the process and leverage the experiences of those who developed the method. Through experience, Steve has discovered that premature customization can lead to more problems and eventually to failure. After discussing the common reasons teams customize methods and tools prematurely and the problems this can cause, he offers guidance about how and when to change an agile process and explains which practices are essential to retain the values and principles that make agile development what it is meant to be. Take back a new appreciation of how following proven agile practices before you adapt them leads to the profound understanding and internalization of the principles that agile requires.