What mistakes can you avoid to make your agile process successful?
It’s not an unknown fact that numerous software projects end up as failures because of a lack of planning and communication. To cater to this problem, agile methodology is one of the preferred approaches opted by software companies.
However, many times the essence of agile is lost due to some minor mistakes that have a high impact. This article discusses some of those mistakes and the potential solutions to them.
What is Agile Methodology?
Before looking into mistakes, let’s see what agile methodology actually is. It is the process of dividing the whole software development cycle into smaller parts to have inclusion of feedback and incrementation of collaboration. The focus is to continuously improve the processes by having a collaborative approach and feedback from customers along the way.
5 Common Mistakes to Avoid in Agile Methodology
This section discusses the five common mistakes made by organizations that fail agile methodology. These include:
Considering Agile means no documentation at all!
Although Agile focuses more on the processes instead of comprehensive documentation, it doesn’t take documentation completely out of the equation. Having no documentation makes tracking of work and onboarding of new employees very difficult. It also increases your dependency on specific individuals by a great deal.
Therefore, it’s important to maintain considerable documentation of your product or features to make your agile process successful.
Considering Agile doesn’t require a scrum master.
Many times, organizations make the mistake of considering project managers equivalent to the scrum master. It’s not the right approach. Having a dedicated scrum master will help ensure that all the processes are done in the right and timely manner.
Considering Agile means catering to all the feature requests!
Without a doubt, agile focuses on catering to customer feedback along the process to help make the right changes for improvement. However, taking up too much will never allow you to effectively cater to customer feedback. With every release, define a moderate number of new features you will pick and ensure to prioritize among them as well.
Considering Agile doesn’t make retrospective a priority.
Before the planning of the next sprint, it’s important to reflect on what went right and wrong during the previous one. Organizations may skip the retrospective considering it a waste of time, but it kills the essence of the agile approach. Comprehensive retrospective sessions can help have a clear understanding of the action items to improve the upcoming sprints.
Considering Agile means micromanaging the resources!
It is essentially important to keep track of work progress and deadlines, but it does not equate to micromanagement. The agile approach is successful when all the teams are equipped with the right resources and skills to complete their tasks.
All in all, the agile process can highly contribute to the success of projects, but only if done correctly. Therefore, aim to avoid the above-mentioned mistakes to make your agile process a successful one.
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