What are the biggest struggles organizations face to adopt Agile? What are benefits of Disciplined Agile Delivery framework? What issues creates IT governance and what to do about it? During short interview at Agilia Conference in Olomouc Scott W. Ambler, author of Disciplined Agile Delivery framework (DAD), shares his view and opinions on agile software development while questioned by Jaroslav Procházka.
Which are biggest pitfall for Agile Adoption?
Scott argues, based on his experience, that too many organizations underestimates the effort needed for successful agile adoption, or they simply want to progress faster than it is healthy for them. Agile transitions focus these days a lot on people and culture, but it is forgotten to address also process and tools at the same time.
It is also seen that many organizations want a simple answer, something like best practices to proceed through change. Change is approached the way of some checklist to check we completed the activity, and this always leads to fail. As software development is complex, each company is different, each team is different, and receipt that works for e.g. large team will not work in a small one. Successful transformation therefore needs skills, experience and knowledge that help us understand a greater picture.
What is Disciplined Agile Delivery framework about?
Disciplined Agile Framework is a process decision framework. It does not prescribe, but provides a choice. It consists of 22 capabilities, and provides options or choices to choose from, depending on context and situation at decision point. It does not matter how the team works, but at some point it will reach a decision point, e.g. how modelling or architecture will be done, and framework provides possibilities to choose from there.
IT governance and how does it help teams?
Scott opinions, that good IT governance motivates teams to do right things and spend money wisely. It involves many activities that help teams to deliver quality solution to stakeholders. However, today we see often governance as a form of bureaucracy that mostly funds place for bureaucrats. It can easily be observed that teams are faking activities, all knows it and pretend it is not happening, which results in colossal waste of resources, both time and money.
More ideas and opinion of Scott Ambler you can find in a short video. We kindly invite you to Agilia Conference and Agile Management Congress, where similar discussions and many more you can obtain first hand.
Michal Vallo
Conference Chair
About author: Michal Vallo helps managers to understand agile techniques, benefit from its adoption to their organizations and consequently radically improve overall organizational performance. He is principal, agile trainer, coach and manager at Aguarra, founding member of Agilia agile community and organizer of Agilia Conference / Agile Management Congress in Olomouc, Agilia Budapest Conference and Agilia Prague conference.
About author: Jaroslav Procházka is coach of Agile and Lean techniques, mentor and trainer of soft skills.