The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Into the Future

Agile teams never stop learning, experimenting, and improving. The practices in this book are only the starting point. Once you understand a practice, make it yours! Experiment with alternatives and seek out new ideas. As you become more fluent, deliberately break the rules and see what happens. You’ll learn why the rules exist…and what their limits are.

What comes after that? That’s for you to decide. Agile is always customized to the needs of the team.

In the Agile Fluency Model, Diana Larsen and I identified a possible fourth zone: Strengthening. If you look carefully, each zone represents a different expansion of the team’s circle of control: Focusing gives the team ownership of its tasks; Delivering gives it ownership of its releases; Optimizing gives it ownership of its product.

Strengthening continues this trend by expanding teams’ ownership over organizational strategy. People don’t just make decisions focused on their teams; they come together to make decisions affecting many teams. One example that’s starting to enter the mainstream is team self-selection. In team self-selection, team members decide for themselves which team they’ll be part of, rather than being assigned by management.

Sound crazy? It’s not. It’s carefully structured, not a free-for-all. (See [Mamoli2015] for details.) I’ve used team self-selection myself and it’s surprisingly effective. The results are better than I’ve seen from traditional manager-driven selection. It ...