Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility. — Agile Principle #9

A well-designed Agile process for development pulls technical excellence from teams wherever it is applied, by making the Agile process more effective in ways that visibly benefit the team and the organization.

The astounding growth of DevOps, with better architecture standards, more automated tools for regression testing and the movement towards test-first development in software shows how this has manifested in software development, even among people who are hacking out a Minimum Viable Product for a startup.

I’ve also seen the same effects among teams using Rapid Learning Cycles.

“Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.” – Agile Principle #8

Software teams that develop products in a waterfall style can turn into “death marches” at the end — and hardware teams that operate under the same flawed model end up in “production hell.”

This means that the accumulation of missed requirements and design flaws have turned into a cascade of late-found defects that have overwhelmed the team. They are behind schedule — often months or even years late. The pressure to deliver is overwhelming — and it breaks people, even if they don’t talk about it openly.

“Working software is the primary measure of progress.” – Agile Principle #7

This is the principle from the Agile Manifesto that trips up hardware developers the most. Of course, hardware developers are not delivering working software — so what is the closest equivalent? And why does it matter?

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation. – Agile Principle #6 If this maxim was not already almost dead, 2020 would have killed it anyway. If you’re like me, you’ve spent many an hour on Zoom or your company’s equivalent, and much time in […]