Agile REALLY Is All About Building Trust!

First, you may need to build trust to move to Agile

Agile as a virtuous cycle for trust

Once you get past those first hurdles, then Agile (if done well) makes its magic and helps build trust between the Team and users and other stakeholders.

Many times, I have seen business people, that were previously puzzled by our persistence not to commit on any hard deadline before we even get started, now amazed to see actual, usable (yet, functionally limited) software at the end of Sprint 1, and then marveled at how software could be improved without regressions even with a large codebase, and how keeping a high standard on quality made it possible to achieve velocity.

What is it in Agile that builds trust?

I have already mentioned transparency as an intimacy inducer. But that’s only part of the recipe. Here are a few items I feel are of utmost importance.

(a.) The principle of self-organizing dev teams leads to better allocation of the decision power. By better, I mean that decisions are made by the right people, i.e. those who have the context and skills to make them. Business people drive the features roadmap and tech people make technical decisions.

Self-organized teams leads to highly-motivated people who show much better ownership of their product.

(b.) Quality. Focusing on *working* software and indefinitely sustainable pace means agile teams have high quality expectations. They tend to shift error left in the development workflow. A developer won’t see a story that doesn’t verify the definition of ready, a reviewer won’t review code that has failing tests, a tester won’t test unreviewed code, etc.

Velocity, again, is a by-product of quality. Not something that you try to compromise against quality. I knew our business people had reached a threshold in understanding Agile when, during a review, they mentioned that they didn’t want to team to overdeliver if it were at the expense of quality.

(c.) Risk mitigation. Agile teams focus on delivering working software. That means they’d rather deliver a walking skeleton (a fully integrated software that doesn’t do much) than a fully-developed front-end with no back-end.

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