Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from “Waterfalling Backward”

Metrics

Metrics may be hard to apply to stop the line behavior because the goal of the behavior is to handle the problem when it occurs, not track it. But the following metric may help when a team discovers problems that are too large and/or too numerous to fix right now.

Before Scott and I start a formal coaching engagement with a team, we do short interviews with a broad cross-section of team members to discover how the team operates. In the course of these interviews, we usually discover barriers to successful agile adoption (or, as we call them, inhibitors). Many of the typical inhibitors should have been fixed when they first occurred, but the teams have left them festering. Inhibitors tend to be large problems that teams know they need ...