Natalie Hanson Recognizing Agile
This Part 1 of a 4-Part series on Agile.
Here is my list of the Top ways to know you’re working in an Agile environment:
- You hear people talking about Sprints, but no-one appears to be running around the office.
- You hear references to scrum, but people seem more interested in American football than rugby.
- You hear people talking about a Backlog, but the bathrooms seem to be in working order. The only other references about plumbing or water are in reference to Waterfall, and in this case most references are critical.
- Teammates are talking about User Stories or Epics but they are pointing to index cards. You’re not at all clear how an entire story could fit on such a small piece of paper.
- You’re asked to participate in a Release Planning meeting but the team is not talking about lanterns or balloons (or birds for that matter).
- You’re being asked to attend daily Stand-up meetings, and you’re concerned that your new company cannot afford chairs.
- You signed up to do research but all of the sudden you’re being called “that User Experience person”. You have no idea what they are talking about, or why they think the UX Designer should share an office with you.
This is a teaser for a series of posts I wrote about Agile and User Experience, so I hope you’ll come back and check them out!
Natalie Hanson 
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Those are almost all ways of recognizing a Scrum environment. It’s clever, but I want to add this comment because I think the association between agile and Scrum is damaging to the software community. Not all agile teams use Scrum, and not all Scrum teams are agile. The non-agile Scrum teams give Scrum a bad name, and the non-Scrum agile teams often go unnoticed. If management implements Scrum to get agile, they’re in for a nasty surprise. Agility in software development is a set of principles and values, without which no set of rules, roles, or jargon will make a team agile.