Beyond Legacy Code

Implementing Agile

Agile has been around since 2001, but it still isn’t well understood in the industry. Many organizations do one or a few of the easier Agile practices like stand-up meetings and two-week sprints, and claim they’re doing Agile. Most Scrum teams know there’s a Product Owner and work in fixed time horizons called time boxes. These are important practices, but are valuable only if adopted properly, fully, and in conjunction with other important practices.

It’s not about Waterfall versus Agile. It’s common for many of the Waterfall processes to seep into the Agile practices. For example, when requirements gathering becomes so complex that requirements have to be written down to later be read and interpreted, it can introduce major ...