Daily Common Sense

Complacency is the enemy of product development, but it's in our nature to seek it in our lives and our work. This is reflected in the processes we traditionally use to make things:

• Document everything out up front so we don't have to worry so much about it later.
• Schedule out all the work that needs to be done to insure that we know what the cost, schedule and scope is.
• Implement process rules. If the rules are followed, everything will work out.

Agile addresses the first two clearly, but it is a danger with many agile adoptions to get too complacent about the practices. It's a natural law that complex things decay. Processes, machines and organizations break down all on their own. If there isn't constant attention paid to this, then things can get real bad.

One of my favorite Ken Schwaber phrases is "Scrum is about making things visible so you can make common sense decisions". We often view processes as doing more for us, maybe solving our problems. This certainly isn't the case with agile.

Examples of the practices being 'practiced', but something is wrong:

• We might be meeting everyday, but if there are no impediments being reported and the build is broken.
• The builds are stable, the Sprints are all successful, but the game is not fun.
• We're pair programming and writing unit tests, but the continuous integration server is showing errors half the time.

The list can go on. The main question is how do we build a culture where improvement is the consequence of visible problems everywhere in the organization?