The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER TEN

Accountability

If Agile teams own their work and their plans, how do their organizations know they’re doing the right thing? How do they know that the team is doing its best possible work, given the resources, information, and people it has?

Organizations may be willing, even eager, for teams to follow an Agile approach, but this doesn’t mean Agile teams have carte blanche authority to do whatever they want. They’re still accountable to the organization. They need to demonstrate that they’re spending the organization’s time and money appropriately.

This chapter has the practices you need to be accountable:

• “Stakeholder Trust” allows your team to work effectively with stakeholders.

• “Stakeholder Demos” provides feedback about your team’s progress.

• “Forecasting” predicts when software will be released.

• “Roadmaps” shares your team’s progress and plans.

• “Management” helps teams excel.

ACCOUNTABILITY SOURCES

Accountability is more implicit than explicit in Agile literature. In the days of Extreme Programming, the community talked about a “customer bill of rights,” an early version of which could be found in the preface of the first XP book:

To customers and managers, XP promises that they will get the most possible value out of every programming week. Every few weeks they will be able to see concrete progress on goals they care about. They will be able to change the direction of the project in the middle of development without incurring exorbitant costs. [Beck2000a] ...