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The intersection of technology and leadership

Category: Agile (page 1 of 21)

The Technology Landscape in Singapore

June 29, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Earlier this year, I held my Tech Lead Skills for Developers workshop in Singapore and Thailand. It was a short and busy week including some customer visits and a talk on Building Evolutionary Architectures for the local community.

As a consultant, I’m lucky to travel to different parts of the world where I have been able to compare technology industries and cultures around the world. Please note that the following observations are simply my observations and not necessarily backed by research.

Extreme Shortage of Developers

Talking to a number of managers, it’s apparently very difficult to find experienced and very good developers. There seem to be a number of reasons for this including how Singapore Universities aren’t producing enough software developers, a country limit that ensures a consistent ratio of foreign and local talent and a culture that values higher status over getting things done.

Dense and active community

Singapore reminds me a lot like London. The financial sector has a big impact on the technology market. London is much more diverse from that perspective. Singapore, like London, is a small dense population with a very good public transportation network. The public infrastructure enables many community meetups as people don’t have to worry about driving, traffic or how long the commute might take and thus enables a lot of learning to be done.

One of people I met during my time at Singapore, Michael Cheng (or @coderkungfu), organises the Engineers.SG website, where they go around to meet ups, film the talks and put them online.

Above is a picture of Michael and I during the course I was running. What he organises is no small time-commitment, and is a huge service to the community and makes the content available to a much wider group.

High Power Distance Index (PDI) matters

Accroding to Hofsted, a researcher on the cultural dimensions of countries, Singapore has one of the highest PDI ratings. This means that ranking, titles and the relationship between titles matter more to people in Singapore than in countries with a lower PDI (such as the US or the UK).

Translated into the local market – almost everyone wants to be a manager.

One person was telling me about one team where they had two developers building software and eight managers managing! It wasn’t of any surprise to me that this team worked in a finance industry. It also didn’t surprise me that not a lot of work got done!

Singapore is following, not yet leading in technology

Singapore is known for its passion and drive to make a big difference for its size. I see many great things changing on the island state, however I see many other challenges in their market that simply investing in programmes as a nation won’t necessarily change.

If you want any other perspectives on this market, I’d recommend reading a couple of this articles:

Three ways to handle CFRs image

Three ways to handle CFRs

Three ways to handle CFRs

May 28, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Cross-Functional Requirements (CFRs) are some of the key system characteristics that are important to design and account for. Internally we refer to these as CFRs, although classically they might be called Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) or System Quality Attributes, however their cross-cutting nature means you always need to consider the impact of CFRs on new or existing functionality.

In the Tech Lead courses that I run, we discuss how it’s important that the Tech Lead ensures that the relevant CFRs are identified and accounted for either in design or development. Here are three ways I have seen some CFRs accounted handled.

1. CFRs satisfied via user stories and acceptance criteria

Security, authentication and authorisation stories are CFRs that naturally lend themselves to actually building out testable functionality. It’s important to consider the effort the risk and, in my experience, is important to start implementing these early to make sure they meet the needs and can evolve.

For these sorts of CFRs, it’s useful to identify these as natural user stories, and once implemented become acceptance criteria on future user stories that touch that area of the system.

As as example, authorisation can be dealt with by introducing a new persona role and what they might do (or not do) that others can have:

As an administrator, I would like to change the email server settings via a user interface, so that I do not need to raise an IT change request for it.

If this is the first time that this user story is implemented, then some acceptance criteria might look like:

  • Only a user with an administrator role can access this page
  • Only a user with an administrator role can successfully update the email setting (check the API)
  • Users with no administrator access receive a 403 or equivalent

This new role addition often means considering new acceptance criteria for every story going forward (if it should be accessible only by administrators or by all.

2. CFRs satisfied through architectural design

Scalability and durability are often CFRs that require upfront thinking about the architectural design, and perhaps planning for redundancy in the form of additional hardware, network, or bandwidth capacity. A web-based solution that needs to be scalable might draw upon the 12-factor application principles, as well as considering the underlying hardware. Failing to think about the architectural patterns that enable scalability and start coding will lead to additional rework later, or make it even impossible to scale.

3. CFRs satisfied via the development process

User experience is a CFR which often requires people, making automated testing much more difficult. An application where a high level of user experience is best dealt with by ensuring that a person with a background in UX is involved and that certain activities and feedback cycles are planned into the software development process to continually fine-tune the user experience as an application evolves.

Changes to the development process might include explicit user research activities, continuous user testing activities, the addition of an A/B capability and some training for product people and the development team to ensure that the developed software meets the desired level of user experience.

Conclusion

Every system has their own set of Cross-Functional Requirements (CFRs) and it is essential that teams focus on identifying the relevant and important CFRs and find ways to ensure they are met. In this article, I shared three typical ways that CFRs might be met.

How else have you seen these handled?

Feedback Booklet

The Gift of Feedback (in a Booklet)

March 19, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Receiving timely relevant feedback is an important element of how people grow. Sports coaches do not wait until the new year starts to start giving feedback to sportspeople, so why should people working in organisations wait until their annual review to receive feedback? Leaders are responsible for creating the right atmosphere for feedback, and to ensure that individuals receive useful feedback that helps them amplify their effectiveness.

I have given many talks on the topic and written a number of articles on this topic to help you.

However today, I want to share some brilliant work from some colleagues of mine, Karen Willis and Sara Michelazzo (@saramichelazzo) who have put together a printable guide to help people collect feedback and to help structure witting effective feedback for others.

Feedback Booklet

The booklet is intended to be printed in an A4 format, and I personally love the hand-drawn style. You can download the current version of the booklet here. Use this booklet to collect effective feedback more often, and share this booklet to help others benefit too.

Reviewing the week’s blinks

August 16, 2016 / / 1 Comment

I’ve signed up for a new service, called Blinkist, a service that provides summaries of books in 15 minutes both in text and audio format. I was looking for a way to review a number of books that I’ve both read and not yet read, to either determine whether or not I should read them, or just something new to learn.

Here’s a review of some of the book summaries that I’ve been listening/reading to:

  • Games People Play by Eric Berne – Humans play games all the time, acting in the role of Parent, Adult or Child depending on the “game” being played. We play games with different goals (safety, interaction, ) in mind although we cannot articulate them. Understanding the different roles people have when in a game gives insight into patterns of behaviour and this insight is useful in all relationships. We need to be particularly careful playing too many games in a personal relationship, as it is only when we stop playing games do you get to truly create deeper relationships.
  • Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet – A leadership tale that describes a leadership style that made one of the worst performing naval ships into one of the best. A good summary of turning a command-and-control leadership style, into a leaders building leaders style as well as other tricks to create quality control and feedback without using punishment. I’ll add this to my list of books to read further.
  • The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier – A nice summary that distinguishes between the difference of mentoring (where you are providing more advice/answers) to coaching (where you lead through asking questions). A good summary of the benefits to this leadership skill, and some good examples of open questions to stimulate good conversations.
  • Getting There: A Book of Mentors by Gillian Zoe Segal – With a subtitle about mentors, I thought this book would focus more on how mentors helped people succeed and instead you end up hearing the stories of some successful people. Although still inspirational, I found the summaries didn’t focus very much on the role the mentor played.

Book Review: The John Carlos Story

July 2, 2016 / / 0 Comments

At our internal away day in Brighton, ThoughtWorks EU had a Pillar 3 Bookstore, a book store selling books that encouraged people to learn more about Social and Economic Justice Issues. I ended up picking up The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World, a bibliography of one of the two famous runners in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics Games who raised their black-gloved fists on the winning podium.

John Carlos Story

As an Australian I remember reading last year a couple of articles of Peter Norman, a person who joined their protest by wearing a symbol but also lived with the same consequences. He died of a heart attack in 2006.

Despite being icons for protesting the movement, what struck me is the courage and the passion that John Carlos had at the time, fighting for equal rights and representation despite the environment in which he found himself. I can only imagine what it was like, having used the opportunity of a world-wide stage, to live with the aggressive response from both the Olympic committees and the sporting community back in the day.

I really enjoyed reading the book to better understand the story you never hear about, and the struggles and bravery people have to fight for the causes they believe in. Do yourself a favour and get a copy of the book here.

How Architects nurture Technical Excellence

Workshop outputs from “How Architects nurture Technical Excellence”

June 2, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Workshop background

Earlier this week, I ran a workshop at the first ever Agile Europe conference organised by the Agile Alliance in Gdansk, Poland. As described in the abstract:

Architects and architecture are often considered dirty words in the agile world, yet the Architect role and architectural thinking are essential amplifiers for technical excellence, which enable software agility.

In this workshop, we will explore different ways that teams achieve Technical Excellence and explore different tools and approaches that Architects use to successfully influence Technical Excellence.

During the workshop, the participants explored:

  • What are some examples of Technical Excellence?
  • How does one define Technical Excellence?
  • Explored the role of the Architect in agile environments
  • Understood the broader responsibilities of an Architect working in agile environments
  • Focused on specific behaviours and responsibilities of an Architect that help/hinder Technical Excellence

What follows are the results of the collective experiences of the workshop participants during Agile Europe 2016.

Examples of Technical Excellence

  • A set of coding conventions & standards that are shared, discussed, abided by by the team
  • Introducing more formal code reviews worked wonders, code quality enabled by code reviews, user testing and coding standards, Peer code review process
  • Software modeling with UML
  • First time we’ve used in memory search index to solve severe performance RDBMS problems
  • If scrum is used, a good technical Definition of Done (DoD) is visible and applied
  • Shared APIs for internal and external consumers
  • Introducing ‘no estimates’ approach and delivering software/features well enough to be allowed to continue with it
  • Microservice architecture with docker
  • Team spirit
  • Listening to others (not! my idea is the best)
  • Keeping a project/software alive and used in prod through excellence customer support (most exclusively)
  • “The art must not suffer” as attitude in the team
  • Thinking wide!
  • Dev engineering into requirements
  • Problems clearly and explicitly reported (e.g. Toyota)
  • Using most recent libraries and ability to upgrade
  • Right tools for the job
  • Frequent availability of “something” working (like a daily build that may be incomplete functionality, but in principle works)
  • Specification by example
  • Setting up technical environment for new software, new team members quickly introduced to the project (clean, straightforward set up)
  • Conscious pursuit of Technical Excellence by the team through this being discussed in retros and elsewhere
  • Driver for a device executed on the device
  • Continuous learning (discover new tech), methodologies
  • Automatic deployment, DevOps tools use CI, CD, UT with TDD methodology, First implementation of CD in 2011 in the project I worked on, Multi-layered CI grid, CI env for all services, Continuous Integration and Delivery (daily use tools to support them), Continuous Integration, great CI
  • Measure quality (static analysis, test coverage), static code analysis integrated into IDE
  • Fail fast approach, feedback loop
  • Shader stats (statistical approach to compiler efficiency)
  • Lock less multithreaded scheduling algorithm
  • Heuristic algorithm for multi threaded attributes deduction
  • It is easy to extend the product without modifying everything, modularity of codebase
  • Learn how to use something complex (in depth)
  • Reuse over reinvention/reengineering
  • Ability to predict how a given solution will work/consequences
  • Good work with small effort (efficiency)
  • Simple design over all in one, it’s simple to understand what that technology really does, architecture of the product fits on whiteboard 🙂
  • Systems’ architecture matches team/org structure
  • Self organisation
  • Ideally separated tests, Automated performance testing, automatic front end functional testing with selenium, unit testing done for the first time 10 years ago, constructing new performance testing cases takes minutes, after refactoring unit tests are passing (majority of them – hopefully all!)
  • Constant curiosity for new technologies/approaches
  • Good knowledge of software patterns (when to use and when not)
  • Learn from mistakes

Examples of Technical Excellence

Definition of Technical Excellence

  • (Technical) Excellence is an attitude to be better than yesterday
  • Technical Excellence is the holy grail that inspires teams to stay on the path of continued improvement
  • Technical Excellence is a process that continuously improves product design and the development team. Examples: Automation, knowledge sharing, culture. Synonyms: Dream
  • Technical Excellence is an ability to consciously apply tools and practices to solve and continuously improve over complex problems in a sustainable way and within constraints (e.g. time and money). Examples: Continuous Delivery

Definition

Activities of an architect

  • Explains decisions
  • Able to choose the right solution amongst many possibilities (awareness of consequences and limitations)
  • Being able to justify technical decisions made
  • Thinking (find time to think about the product, structure, technologies used, etc)
  • Helps resolve interdependencies, helps to identify/minimise external noise (i.e. technical dependency change with negative impact), co-ordination of integration with other teams working on the same project
  • Start and moderate discussions on design, longer term consequences of decisions, etc
  • Requirements definition, making sure ‘nothing’ is omitted during analysis/design
  • Questions decisions to encourage thinking about wider picture amongst developers, asks questions (non obvious especially), Asking difficult questions about work being done
  • Listens to others
  • Encourage people to bring ideas, encourage idea sharing
  • Setup backlog for achieving technical excellence
  • Challenge old decisions
  • Business decision support (IT, 3rd party)
  • Make sure we don’t bite more than we can chew – incrementally/iterative
  • Ensure architecture is visible, understood and accessible to the team, keep the technical cohesion, helps team consider the bigger picture and interdependencies, helps team define the system and diagram it
  • Detailed knowledge of technologies/protocols used
  • Forward thinking
  • Proposes solutions to complex problems
  • Diagrams/presentations
  • Wide view of situation/projects, look what other teams are building for things to reuse or interface to
  • “Main” test scenarios definition
  • Definition of components structure and interactions
  • Guard technical vision (dialogue with stakeholders)
  • Focus on project goal
  • API specification
  • Verification of current design vs planned use
  • Ad hoc just in time consulting to feature teams when things get complex
  • Teaching teams, sharing technical knowledge (and expertise) with the team
  • Coaches team. Gets buy-in from the team for change they are about to trigger, coaches dev team
  • Identifies technical skillset gaps in the team
  • Pro-active thinking
  • Gaps identification
  • Mitigates the risks
  • Out of box ideas
  • Research for solution, helps team identify areas for experimenting, exploring new territories
  • Creating proof of concept (POC)
  • Learns new things, research and try new tools, ideas, technologies, etc
  • Gains an in-depth understanding of a system before attempting to change it
  • Reviews teams’ system design, performs code reviews and coding standard support, reviews code

Architect Activities

Architect Activities

Behaviours that support Technical Excellence

Active

  • Gives team rapid and timely feedback
  • Patiently explaining all the tiny details responding to simple questions
  • Be there whenever needed
  • be the safety net whenever devs need you
  • Set communication for knowledge sharing
  • Explain the reasons behind the design
  • Raising the visibility of good developers
  • Do pair programming, works with the team
  • Explain technical excellence value for business
  • Encourage team to think and work towards Technical Excellence
  • Growing people, mentoring developers to improve tech skills, training the team, educate actively – organise coding dojos, etc
  • Set up backlog for achieving Technical Excellence
  • Raising the team spirit and motivation
  • Waking up with 3am to connect with a team on a daily basis (for a distributed team)
  • Discussing discovered problems with the team
  • Sat down with the team to teach and record architecture training for future use
  • Keeping an eye on new things on the market and bringing them to the team
  • Staying current in technologies, tools, concepts, etc.
  • Being a visible role model in terms of pursuing Technical Excellence
  • Encourages experimentation
  • Support team in collaboration with other teams
  • Helps team identify blindspots

    • Active Encouragement

    Passive

  • ability to change contexts between projects
  • Lets the team make decisions
  • Take a step back and make room for technical advancements of the whole team
  • Not doing stuff from actively discourage column
  • Team makes decisions

    • Passive Encouragement

    Behaviours that discourage Technical Excellence

    Active

  • Dictatorship, have to do it my way, will to control (every small detail)
  • Blaming and shaming
  • Making arbitrary decisions, especially without explaining the reasoning behind it
  • Rejecting too complex C++ code
  • Using ambiguous, complex, uncertain English vocabulary
  • Shutting down emergent ideas from the team
  • Discouraging ideas “I couldn’t care less about your sophisticated C++ SPT initialisation”
  • Created ugly prototype for a demo and forced team to clean up afterwards
  • Imposing BDUF (Big Design Up Front) over the development team
  • Created non-viable design (i.e. could not be implemented with current constraints)
  • Enforcing old known technologies, etc out of inertia/ignorance, sticking to the “old ways”

    • Active Discouragement

    Passive

  • Doing too many activities to follow through – not focused on any (and no time to encourage Technical Excellence)
  • Invited but never attended meetings
  • “I don’t meet with the Architect”
  • Software Architect with poor development skills
  • Not working with the team
  • Leaving obsolete information in documentation
  • Getting involved in design only if prompted
  • “I don’t know how, so I won’t define it”

    • Passive Discouragement

    Stories

  • Developers supporting software (getting email feedback)
  • Anti-Story: “Let’s *NOT* sit together” – Person leaving showed them how it was done
  • “Let’s sit down together” (solving a memory leak problem)
  • Group Problem (Security problem)

    • Stories

    If you liked this article, you will be interested in “Talking with Tech Leads,” a book that shares real life experiences from over 35 Tech Leads around the world. Now available on Leanpub.

    Book Review: The Phoenix Project

    April 3, 2016 / / 0 Comments

    It has been a while since I read The Phoenix Project and I am glad to have reviewed it again recently. Described as a business novel, or The Goal for the 21st century, the book focuses on a story that large organisations need to realise when they feel they need to transform IT.

    Title cover of the Phoenix Project book

    The book focuses on a company in crisis – a company that is trying to complete lots of software projects, has a terrible number in flight and grapples with the problems many companies have – lack of visibility of the work, dependency on key individuals, marketing lead promises and IT treated as a cost-centre attitude. Bill, an IT Manager is one day promoted into a higher role where he is responsible for turning around and dealing with all the critical issues. He is given access to a mentor who introduces him to the “mysterious Three Ways” that are slowly uncovered throughout the book.

    What I liked about the book

    Business novels are refreshing to read as they feel less like reading a business book and sometimes makes picking up the book less of a chore. The authors manage to talk about generating insights and explaining some of the tools from a number of angles (Bill’s thoughts as well as from other characters’ perspectives) as well as relating it to existing material such as Theory of Constraints.

    Like all good books, you follow the exciting story plot that descends into what seems like an insurmountable situation, only for the protagonist to find ways of overcoming it. For those who have never been exposed to visual ways of working (like Kanban), or understanding Work in Progress, Queueing theory and how IT capability matters to business, there are many useful lessons to learn.

    What would have made the book better

    Although the book has several characters who behave in a negative way, and pay for some of thoese consequences you don’t hear about the attempts by the protaganist which end up failing (with their consequences) unlike the real world. I also felt that the pace at which things changed seemed to occur at an unrealistic rate – but that’s proabably the downsides of a business novel versus what might actually happen in real life.

    Conclusion
    I would still highly recommend this reading if you’re interested in understanding about how modern IT, interested in how DevOps culture operates and some tools and techniques for moving IT management into a more responsive, flexible but still highly controlled manner.

    Photo from coltera's flickr stream under the Creative Commons licence

    Two topics best avoided in retrospectives

    March 27, 2016 / / 2 Comments

    When I introduce people to retrospectives I often am asked what topics should be covered and not covered as part of this. When I have asked this question of other people, I hear answers like “Everything should be open for discussion” or “No topic is ever taboo.”

    Although I agree with the sentiment, I strongly disagree with the statements.

    Photo from coltera's Flickr stream under the Creative Commons licence

    Photo from coltera’s flickr stream under the Creative Commons licence

    Yes, being able to discuss most topics openly as a team, particularly where there are different views is a sign of a healthy, collaborative team. Even then, I still believe there are two topics that teams should watch out for because I feel they do more harm than good.

    1. Interpersonal conflict

    Imagine yourself working with a team where two people suddenly start shouting at each other. You hear voices continue to escalate, maybe even watching someone storm off. An uncomfortable silence descends in the open team space as no one is quite sure how to react. Is this something you discuss as a team in the next retrospective?

    Perhaps if the issue involves the entire team. When it involves two people where tension escalated too quickly over a single topic, it is more likely you need mediation and a facilitated conversation. A person wearing a leadership role (e.g. Project Manager, Line Manager, or Tech Lead) may be an ideal person with context to do that, but it may also be better to find a mediator who can get to each person’s interests and to find a way to both move forward and to start healing the relationship.

    Although it will be impossible to ignore the topic in a retrospective, the focus should be on team expectations about behaviour, or identify ways the team can support each other better. It is unlikely you will solve, as a group, the conflict between the two people without making each of them very uncomfortable and unsafe.

    behavioural issues for a single person

    Just as you wouldn’t isolate two people and make the entire retrospective about them, teams must not “gang up” on a single person unless they feel safe to discuss the topic. If the entire team complains about what a single person is doing, the person is likely to feel targeted, isolated and potentially humiliated in front of their peers.

    It may still be important to highlight issues impacting the entire team, but be careful that a retrospective does not become a witchhunt.

    Where repeated, consistent behaviour needs to be addressed, a better solution is targeted one-to-one feedback.

    Conclusion

    Retrospectives are important practices for agile teams, but it is not a tool that will solve all problems. Retrospectives work well with other tools that offer better, more focused conversations for smaller groups such as mediation and one-to-one feedback.

    What topics do you think should be avoided in retrospectives? Please leave a comment with your thoughts.

    The practice of reflection in action

    The practice of reflection in action

    February 8, 2016 / / 2 Comments

    In a previous article, I explained how the most essential agile practice is reflection. In this article, I outline examples how organisations, teams and people use reflection in action.

    Reflection through retrospectives

    Retrospectives are powerful tools that whole teams use to reflect on their current working practices to understand what they might do to continuously improve. As an author of a “The Retrospective Handbook“, I am clearly passionate about the practice because they explictly give teams permission to seek ways to improve and when executed well, create a safe space to talk about issues.

    Reflection through coaching

    Effective leaders draw upon coaching as a powerful skill that helps individuals reflect on their goals and actions to help them grow. Reflective questions asked by a coach to a coachee uncover barriers or new opportunities for a coachee to reach their own goals.

    Coaching is a skill in itself and requires time for both the person doing the coaching, and for the people being coached. When done well, coaching can massively improve the performance and satisfication of team members by helping coachees reach their own goals or find ways to further develop themselves.

    Reflection through daily/weekly prioritisation

    I have run a course for Tech Leads for the past several years and in this course, I teach future Tech Leads to make time during their week to reflect and prioritise. I see many people in leadership positions fall into a reactive trap, where they are too busy “doing” without considering if it is the most important task they should be doing.

    Effective leaders build time into their schedules to regularly review all their activities and to prioritise them. In this process, leaders also determine what is the best way of accomplishing these activities which is often involving and enabling others rather than doing it themselves.

    Reflection through 1 to 1 feedback

    When I work with teams, I teach team members the principles of giving and receiving effective feedback. I truly believe in the Prime Directive – that everyone is trying to do the best that they can, given their current skills and the situation at hand. A lot of conflict in working enviornments is often due to different goals, or different perspectives and it is easy for people to be frustrated with each other.

    When team members do not know how to give an receive feedback, being on either side can be a really scary prospect. 1 to 1 feedback gives people opportunites to reflect on themselves and make space for personally being more effective and for strengthening the trust and relationships of the people involved.

    Reflection through refactoring

    Refactoring is an essential skill for the agile software developer and a non-negotiable part of development.

    Three strikes and you refactor – Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (Martin Fowler)

    Developers should be making tiny refactorings as they write and modify software as it forces developer to reflect on their code and think explicitly about better designs or ways of solving problems, one bit at a time.

    Reflection through user feedback

    In more recent years I have seen the User Experience field better integrated with agile delivery teams through practices such as user research, user testing, monitoring actual usage and collecting user feedback to constantly improve the product.

    While good engineering practices help teams build systems right, only through user feedback can teams reflect on if they are building the right system.

    Conclusion

    Reflection is the most powerful way that teams can become agile. Through reflection, teams can better choose the practices they want and gain value immediately because they understand why they are adopting different ways of working.

    What is the most essential agile practice?

    The most essential agile practice

    January 22, 2016 / / 3 Comments

    Since the declaration of the Agile Manifesto our industry has seen and continues to see many agile methodologies, some better than others. The large number of methods and practices can be confusing and overwhelming for newcomers although each offer their own advantages in different circumstances.

    Methdology is made up of many practices

    Methodologies offer a starting point for a set of practices, not an end point like many people think. I draw upon practices from a variety of methodologies almost all the time because I find value using them. Some examples include: Continuous Integration, Co-Located and Cross-Functional Teams, Test Driven Development, Refactoring, Daily Stand-Ups, Small Iterations and Retrospectives. Although I feel agile values and principles are important, I also believe that practices are just as important. Practices offer people something concrete to start with and a way to breath life into a principle or value.

    After working for more than a decade in agile teams and enviornments, I truly believe there is one key agile practice that has the biggest impact. Organisations, teams and people who fail to use the most essential agile practice end up cargo-culting, or using a practice because others are using it and are unlikely to gain real value from the practice. Organisations, teams and people who use the most essential agile practice become the best at what they do because they understand why they are doing what they do.

    Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results – Albert Einstein

    The most essential agile practice is Reflection. In the upcoming follow on article, I will explain how I have seen organisations, teams and people use the practice of reflection.

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