Break the Old, Waterfall Habits that Hinder
Agile Success:
Drive Rapid Value and Continuous
Improvement
When agile teams don’t get
immediate results, it’s tempting for them to fall back
into old habits that make success even less likely. In
Being Agile, Leslie Ekas and Scott Will present
eleven powerful techniques for rapidly gaining
substantial value from agile, making agile methods
stick, and launching a “virtuous circle” of continuous
improvement.
Drawing on their experience
helping more than 100 teams transition to agile, the
authors review its key principles, identify
corresponding practices, and offer breakthrough
approaches for implementing them. Using their
techniques, you can break typical waterfall patterns and
go beyond merely “doing agile” to actually thinking and
being agile.
Ekas and Will help you clear
away silos, improve stakeholder interaction, eliminate
waste and waterfall-style inefficiencies, and lead the
agile transition far more successfully. Each of their
eleven principles can stand on its own: when you combine
them, they become even more
valuable.
Coverage includes
-
Building “whole teams” that cut across silos and
work together throughout a product’s lifecycle
-
Engaging product stakeholders earlier and far
more effectively
-
Overcoming inefficient “waterations” and “big
batch” waterfall thinking
-
Getting past the curse of multi-tasking
-
Eliminating dangerous technical and project
debt
-
Repeatedly deploying “release-ready” software in
real user environments
- Delivering what customers really need, not what
you think they needn Fixing the root causes of
problems so they don’t recur
-
Learning from experience: mastering continuous
improvement
-
Assessing whether you’re just “doing agile” or
actually “being agile”
Being Agile
will be indispensable for all software professionals
now adopting agile; for coaches, managers, engineers,
and team members who want to get more value from it and
for students discovering it for the first
time.
