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Core Agile Practices

There are certain core Agile practices that, when you do them with your team, they increase your team’s engagement and results. You also don’t need to call yourself “Agile” – if you are doing some or all of these Agile core practices then you could class yourself as an Agile team, and you will no doubt already know the benefits they bring.

This particular core practice is “Early and Frequent Feedback”.

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Early and Frequent Feedback

When you’re working on an Agile project or delivering in an Agile way, your projects will usually have short iterations.  These short iterations are usually time-boxed pieces of work from two to four weeks, where you deliver something or showcase something for feedback. By releasing something in short cycles what we’re actually doing is enabling a project team to receive early and continuous feedback on the product’s quality throughout the development life cycle.

If we were developing something, and we had our scope figured out all the way up the front and maybe there were a thousand pieces of scope for this thing. We developed it over a year and just sat in solitary confinement, developing over a year and at the end of it we gave it to our customer and the customer said “Oh that’s not actually what I wanted.” This has happened so much which is why the opposite method, Agile, has grown in popularity.

If that does happen then we have to go back to the drawing board, and maybe maybe redo this part here and redo this part there, and the cost starts to go up. So by getting that frequent customer feedback using iterations and delivering increments of work as the project progresses, Agile teams can incorporate most of those new changes into the product and also into their development process.

At the end of these iterations we will usually have something called a Retrospective. Now we’ll go into this in more detail and it is exactly what it sounds like – we’re retrospectively looking at what we did.

• What went well
• What didn’t go well
• What we learned and;
• What still puzzles us

And by asking those questions of the process and of the way that we’re working we actually improve our way of working continuously at the end of each iteration as well, not just the product.

There are many benefits of getting early and frequent feedback, not just in an Agile way or an Agile delivery method, but actually throughout our lives as well. First of all we’re avoiding requirements misunderstandings in the product. This is simply because sometimes the customer may not actually understand or realize what they’ve asked for until they get their hands on it, and once they get their hands on it they say “Oh yeah this was actually good,” or maybe “I needed something else,” or you know maybe it actually wasn’t exactly what they wanted at all now that they’re seeing it. So by getting this frequent feedback early we’re actually able to define these problems and fix them early in the development cycle instead of later when it’s much more expensive to fix.

By getting early and frequent feedback were also clarifying our customer feature requests. We’re making them available for the customer to use early, little increments that they can see, feel, touch and use, and by doing that the product better reflects what the customer wants over time. When you’ve just written something down it can be very different to holding it in your hands or physically using it.

Continuous integration in Agile, discovering via continuous integration, we’re isolating and resolving quality problems early. What this means is we’re performing continuous integration often on a daily basis – we’re taking the branches of code, integrating them into the one environment, and then often regression testing (automatically, too).  In other words it’s tested as a whole just to see if it has broken or not. Everyone can be can be creating things in isolation, but once they once they put things together, is it still working? We want to know from a quality point of view.

And this doesn’t have to be for a coding product or a project, it could be for anything where you’ve got teams developing something. This means that an agile team can improve its productivity and its ability to learn to deliver but because we’re always knowing whether it’s actually working or not, often on a daily basis and as we saw with the retrospective we’re promoting feedback into our process – so we’re also promoting consistent project momentum because we’re wanting to improve our process, we’re wanting to improve the product in the customer’s eyes, and all of those things just increase the momentum as we go along. They make sure that we’re not having to go back or we’re not getting bogged down and we’re always making things better.

And that is early and frequent feedback!

– David McLachlan

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