3 signs of non-Agile companies

Have you been to companies with Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and Agile Coaches but they still don’t have results promised by Agile?

How do you know whether your ideas about improving Agility will be welcome or not?

What early signs may tell you that if you get a job in such a company, you’ll face a lot of legacy Waterfall behavior and resistance to innovation?

There are 3 obvious signs.

1: Infrequent Releases

A long release cycle is the most significant sign of the Waterfall process. It creates several problems. But the biggest of all is that the product innovation is practically blocked.

When customers don’t have a chance to use a product and provide feedback for months, the innovative ideas about the product don’t get a real test. There’s no feedback loop.

An evolved Agile practice allows releasing on-demand, any day, and any time. In some advanced cases – automatically and many times a second. High performing companies release frequently and get a lot of feedback from the users and therefore innovate rapidly.

2: “This is how we work here”

When managers and executives say, “It won’t work here this way” or “This is how we work here,” it’s a red flag. How can we interpret these words? It means company culture protects its rigid hierarchy and habits of top-down decisions.

Agile is an approach of rapid adaptation to solving business problems. When you see multiple approval layers, you know that the pace of decisions is slow, and the delays are frequent and long.

Companies that split business problems into dozen pieces and give them to dozen teams always have bottleneck teams and teams that crave work. Breaking business problems into pieces is costly. And managing dependencies between teams is expensive as well.

3: A Long Testing Cycle

A long testing cycle is another red flag. Quality suffers when people don’t have feedback on each of their changes.

If the full regression cycle is longer than a couple of hours, it means it is manual. Therefore, it’s costly, infrequent, and based on the release schedule.

Running regression once or twice per release causes a higher rate of defects, a higher change failure rate, and a long backlog of technical debt.

Conclusion

These 3 factors reflect the state of innovation, organizational structure, and quality engineering. They are 3 pillars of high performance. Even if people assure you that they have embraced Agile, always look for these 3 signs to understand the mindset and the culture.

And if you like challenges, you can set yourself a goal to help your organization improve and become another “Elite performer” as defined in the “State of DevOps report.”

If you would like to learn more about options to speed up teams in your company, schedule a call with me: https://calendly.com/vladimir-bushin

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