A common pitfall of agile

One of the most common pitfalls of agile development is not conducting any planning. While there is certainly less planning in agile than other methodologies of development, planning is still essential to a successful agile team. Planning in agile is conducted in a different fashion than traditional project management strategies. When making the transition from more traditional management strategies, such as plan and document, to agile, it is easy to find yourself trying to plan everything or forgetting to plan all together. The planning rules and guidelines certainly exist in agile, they just tend to be much more lightweight. However, it should be noted that because there are much less rules in agile planning, the rules that are in place should be followed with great consideration.

When learning agile you might hear a lot of qualities that sound similar to the story of Goldilocks. For instance, in agile you don’t plan nearly as much as you did in prior strategies, but you also don’t omit planning all together. It is all about finding that middle ground of planning that is sufficient enough to serve its purpose while not taking away from productivity that could be spent delivering software. It’s quite difficult for anyone who is relatively new to agile to have an understanding of where that nice middle ground is. This dilemma is where a good scrum master can really benefit an agile project.

The loosely defined framework of agile allows for teams to elastically respond to change whenever needed, but it can also give the power to the agile team members to abuse this loosely defined nature. It holds true for almost all developers that they would rather develop code opposed to generating documentation, it’s just the nature of the job. A scrum master must make sure that team members are not abusing the agile process by making their own process changes. In the end, agile was created to help teams deliver software and not to allow team members to dictate how and what they complete.

In summary, agile provides a framework that is optimized for coping with the flexibility of a project. This is not the same statement as agile is a free ticket that lets deliver the product however the teams choose. It is imperative to not mix up the term agile with how a team conducts their events. If your agile team finds themselves constantly altering the agile framework itself, then chances are your Scrum Master is not doing their job correctly.

Work Cited:

"Agile at Work: Planning with Agile User Stories." www.lynda.com/Business-Skills-tutorials/Avoiding-We-dont-plan-were-agile/175074/387225-4.html. Accessed 13 Nov. 2017.

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