In Agile, People Come First!

There are two primary reasons I’ve seen software development teams fail even when they adopt Agile development methods and associated best practices process:

• Lack of clarity or business case on the product being built, that is, what to build?
• Lack of attention to having the right people with the right level of experience and skill level playing the right roles on the team.

Regarding the second point, I’ve blogged before on finding the right people for the job. But it’s beyond that. It’s also making sure you provide the right level of training and coaching to the people you already have, and making sure they’re following the basic practices of good software development — something that has nothing to do with Agile practices.

For some reason, some senior management teams think that once they’ve “adopted Agile” — because people self-organize — they don’t need to worry about anything anymore.

And yet, the first value of the Agile Manifesto is: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

Adopting Agile won’t make inexperienced or unskilled developers build good software.

Gojko Adzic summed it up, although a bit harshly, in his blog recently, titled, “How to do agile when you have 50 crap developers?”.

He rightly poses the question: Why do people, complaining that they can’t do agile development with 50 crap developers, not see that the problem is in the second part of that statement, not the first?

I recommend that you check it out.

Before you worry about getting Scrum practices exactly right, be sure you have the right people on your team!