Back to Basics; it's good to be reminded every now and then...

I've been developing some online versions of agile games and activities at https://agilesimulations.co.uk/, got a bit waylaid, and ended up building a version of the classic 70s Mastermind* game. This is where the game sets up a challenge of 4 random colours, and you have 10 attempts to work out what those colours are. I was quite chuffed with it, and circulated it amongst a few friends. They all replied with the same comment - "it doesn't work". Wierd; it worked for me, so I started investigating...

I soon realised that you could play a game without setting up a challenge. There is a "New Game" button to create the challenge and start a game, but every single person who tried it didn't do this and assumed you could just start playing a game when you landed on the app.

I had made a very common, and very dangerous assumption; I thought I knew how my customers would use my app. By building the entire thing, then giving it to them, I had given myself quite a bit of re-writing to make it work in the way the users expected it to. I had forgotten the absolute basics of agile; frequent customer collaboration, deliver early and get feedback. I'd forgotten all about experimentation and MVPs - in one small side project, I had not practised what I preach. I'd forgotten - or just disregarded - the basics of agile.

In this case, of course, the damage wasn't too bad (the game only took a couple of days to build in Vue.js), but making an assumption like this in a large corporate app could be devastating; particularly with a large user base who aren't all going to tell you if it works or not; they'll just silently go to your competitors.

Now, I hear the phrase "we need to get back to basics" over and over again in organisations, in blog posts, at meetups, and it usually refers to the basics of Scrum, or some other framework/process - are all teams having retros? Are they all doing standups? Are they delivering every sprint? Is their Jira board up to date? (don't get me started...). Are they on track to hit their deadlines? (Not 100% sure that last one is Scrum, but I hear it a lot...).

Would doing all of this have solved my issue? No, clearly not (as I didn't do any of it). If we are going to "get back to basics", surely we need to take a step back and get back to the real basics - the Agile Manifesto, the principles, the experimental method. Full on, regular customer collaboration and feedback gathering. Re-planning our next set of work based on what we learned from our last (very small) delivery.

Put whatever framework on top of this you like, but don't expect success unless you start with the actual basics, and stop concentrating on the basics of the process. The customer really doesn't care about most of those "basics", and remember the first agile principle:

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

It's our highest priority to satisfy the customer, not the process...

* Actually the game still has a bug; it doesn't calculate the result properly if there are repated colours. Hopefully that'll be fixed by the time you read this. Feel free to have a play, tho' at https://agilesimulations.co.uk/mastermind/ - this time, I'm welcoming early feedback :-)