Purpose Behind the Practice – Why Are We Doing This Again?
As I come into new organizations to work with Scrum teams, I often find the team going through the motions of scrum or agile development without necessarily understanding why it is they are doing the things that they are doing. This is the first post in a series in which I will explore the reasons behind many of the processes we use in Agile development. I think it’s important in a methodology that focuses on allowing people to do what works best for them that those same people have an understanding of what the standard processes are all about. My hope is that this can help us to avoid throwing out good standard processes because they didn’t work for us; not because the practice doesn’t work for our team but because we failed to understand the practice well enough to implement it correctly.
All too often, the decision to pursue agile development in general falls victim to this lack of understanding and gets crushed in the process. I think it’s important for us to examine our process and make sure that we are adhering to the principles of Agile development before we decide whether or not Agile development works for us.