Today I answered three questions on Agile from a Swedish magazine. I was asked to give brief answers. Here are the questions and my elaborated answers in English.
- What is the hot topic in Agile today?
To me it is the Cynefin framework developed by Dave Snowden. It teaches me how to deal with different types of realities, Simple, complicated, complex and chaotic.
Another hot topic is the question about Scrum or Kanban, or both together.
- What Agile ideas or opinions are getting outdated?
My opinion is that surprisingly many are still doing waterfall development. Even if the Agile Manifesto celebrated 10 years in February this year many companies have yet to discover the opportunities and overcome the challenges of Agile.
By reflecting upon and understanding the reality we are facing when developing a specific product I strongly believe we will be better at choosing the way we should best develop that product. In software product development it is a good idea to at least consider empirical process control.
- If you could put the customers, orderers, sponsors and stakeholders of the software industry in a class room, what would you teach them?
For starters I would teach collaboration, communication, visualization, feedback, teamwork ( the concepts of self-organization and cross functionality), iterative development, incremental delivery, empirical process control, PDCA and Inspect and Adapt.
What would be your answer to these questions? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
I don’t think about a “hot topic” in Agile today. I go back to the fundamental topics, since we still need a lot of practice with them. I focus these days on “eliminate, then automate” and other kinds of Lean thinking, as well as personal habits to work more effectively.
Of all the Agile ideas becoming outdated, I think the first might be iterations. I still think many organisations need to practise in iterations, but only as a way to become comfortable with much smaller batches of work. I teach people to become more comfortable with smaller batches of work in their personal work, and I hope they will apply that thinking more generally.
If I got to speak to the wider software industry, I’d focus on throughput accounting to replace cost accounting, options, bottleneck theory, and The Three Signs of a Miserable Job.
Hi J.B.
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. What you write about iterations I agree with. Especially in a product development perspective. I see far too many long “iterations” out there. Usually they are called projects.