Agile Snafus: When Good Teams Go Bad
Agile done well can lead to great successes—rapid delivery of business and user value, high product quality, fast time to market, and engineering productivity. Agile done poorly leads to skepticism of the methodologies, distrust of the principles, and failure to deliver—in essence, a snafu [sna-foo]: a badly confused or ridiculous muddled situation. James Waletzky has gathered a set of snafus (anti-patterns) that pose challenges for organizations adopting agile. Set yourself up for success by understanding where teams go wrong with agile, complete with tips on how to avoid or fix the issues. James starts with a backlog of agile anti-patterns. Like any backlog, external inputs factor into the ranking of the items within it. We first vote on which topics are most interesting. James then proceeds through each topic in the backlog—until we run out of time. Some examples of items in the backlog may include lack of management commitment, no “done” definitions, and poor development practices to support agile. Discover how to deal with these problems so they don’t “snafu” you.
James Waletzky is a partner at Crosslake Technologies, where he performs technical due diligence on software companies, optimizes software engineering systems, and enables development team improvements in time-to-market, productivity, and overall quality. He has more than twenty years of experience in the software industry, including eleven years working on or with agile teams. Previously, James held development leadership roles at Microsoft, including Xbox where he helped ship Kinect, Windows Phone, Content Management Server, and Engineering Excellence. In his spare time, James hikes with his family, writes, develops games, and plays a multitude of sports. He recently contributed to the book Agile Project Management with Kanban.