Look out for Agility!

I don't know where to begin, so I'll start to tell you that it is for a fact that Scrum Masters often are pulling their hair out. Why is my team slowing down? Why is there a decrease in velocity? What happened? Is scrum failing? Is Agility failing? Am I failing?

We have been told that agility is about making a move and then look back if this move was a correct one. If not, take another step and try again. Everybody knows that this move is not just a random move, because we think things through. What if I told you that's not enough? You might end up in some situation you don't want to be in...

So, how come that I tell you that agility is not the way to work?

It's pretty obvious. If you don't take the long term into account, you can easily walk into a trap. Let me explain with a common scenario. A team is working on a software product. They are delivering feature by feature. But what they don't think of is creating automated tests. Also they don't think of architecture. Did you heard about the S.O.L.I.D. principles? The Scrum Master is not familiar with that and he thinks that testing and clean code is overrated. And in the beginning it's going nice and steady, nothing to worry about! But after a few months some bugs appear and functionality comes with different business rules. It's not a rare scenario that your product is going to fail because of changes made in future sprints. Expanding features is harder than everyone thought it would be. So, there you go! Velocity is going down.

What I want to explain is that Agility is about short term decisions and learning from them. But what you really need is a long term vision next to Agility and use them side by side. Be sure that you deliver with such quality that you are absolutely sure that your architecture is ready for extension. Only then you succeed in Agility and Scrum!