How Agile is Your Agile Framework
Every agile framework claims to have the agile secret sauce. With so many choices, why are so many teams and organizations struggling to become agile? The agile manifesto was intentional not to prescribe the HOW of agility. Given that there are many frameworks, how do they compare and stand the test of agile?
Let's take a look at how 5 of the frameworks compare.
SCRUM
Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber developed SCRUM – the most popular agile framework on the market today. It comes with a predefined list of ceremonies, role definitions and principles. Despite its popularity it comes with weaknesses. SCRUM out of the box is unable to manage changes in team size – an unavoidable predicament in any IT organization. It claims team churn is a sign of immature agile practices. However, team churn is a reality, framework can not ignore.
Here are some key SCRUM strengths/weaknesses
History/Founders 1995/Jeff Sutherland/Ken Schwaber
Strengths
- Set of predefined roles & meetings
- Daily meetings help to keep everyone informed
- Shippable code every sprint
- Accountability – daily 3 magic questions
Weaknesses
- Cross functional team relies on highly skilled team members
- Changes to team has impact to team estimation/velocity
- Too many meetings can frustrate people
- Designed for face to face
Key Metric: Velocity
Change Philosophy: Teams should strive not to make changes to sprint.
Recent changes to SCRUM guide has modified change philosophy to include some level of change within a sprint. Sprint "commitment" has been modified to sprint "forecast" and root of some debate within agile community.
Kanban
The Kanban method was invented in Toyota in 1940. Like SCRUM, Kanban framework was in existence before the agile manifesto was created.
It’s a system that focuses on flow of work and reducing waste. There are no roles/responsibilities or ceremonies prescribed. The Kanban system helps teams identify bottlenecks and dependencies so that teams can build in improvements. There are no roles/responsibilities, ceremonies or processes defined around how to best organize and communicate leaving teams to decide how to best organize and communicate.
History/Founders: 1940/Taiichi Ohno/[Toyota]
Strengths
- Work transparency
- Limit WIP – eliminate bottlenecks/context switching
- Flexible planning
- No need for iterations – Continuous delivery instead
- Focus on eliminating waste – cycle time
Weaknesses
- No formal meetings/structure
- Team need to be mature enough to develop own processes and team rhythms
Key Metric: Cycle Time
Change Philosophy: Changes welcome at any time
Scrumban
Scrumban came into existence the best way possible, through an experiment – something the founders of the manifesto had intended to happen when they wrote the manifesto in 2001. The path to discover better ways to deliver software comes from experimentation. A team shifting to Kanban from Scrum decided to slowly progress to Kanban by keeping SCRUM practices they felt were useful. What we got was a framework that is a hybrid of SCRUM and Kanban.
History/Founders 2009/Corey Ladas
Strengths
- Best of both scrum & Kanban
- Focus on cycle time
- Team is focused on improving how quickly they deliver
- Ceremonies are as required
Weaknesses
? No solution for scaling scrum
Key Metric: Velocity
Change Philosophy: Change welcome any time
SAFe
Dean Leffingwell introduced the world to SAFe in 2011. To Leffingwell’s dismay, SAFe did not receive a warm embrace from agile community. Quite the contrary, criticism was loud and harsh, creating an uproar among purist whom claimed SAFe was not agile at all. However, SAFe aimed to solve problems Scrum/Kanban do not attempt to address, scrum applied to many teams, enterprise wide agility and leadership transformation.
Despite this early rocky start, SAFe has remained strong as an agile framework contender among very large corporate companies looking to transform. It’s biggest criticism included it was plug and play, one size fits all franchise gimmicky agile frameworks of the industry. I agree it is a one size fits all approach but for large corporations looking to jump start their transformation this might be what they need. The biggest strength of SAFe is its high focus on how leaders are to lead and the role they play in making agile successful for an organization.
Founders/History 2011/Dean Leffingwell
Strengths
? Takes agile up to portfolio level
? Lean/systems thinking
? Holistic view of entire value stream
? Set of predefined roles & meetings
? Defines mgmt. role
? Leverages investment in scrum
Weaknesses
? Discourages modifications to SAFe process
? One size fits all approach
? Organizations can plateau
? SAFe can be dogmatic
Key Metric: Velocity/Weighted shortest job first
Change Philosophy: Stretch objectives try to account for variability within a sprint.
LesS
Like SAFe, LeSS is also a framework intended to be scrum applied to many teams. However, what SAFe does to hard code practices, LeSS advocates against best practices. Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, the LeSS founders were careful not to prescribe how to operate however describe a lightweight approach to how to best operate in a scaled agile environment. This leaves organizations the responsibility to experiment, learn and create their own style of working based on trying and adopting to new styles of working. SAFe proposed an innovation sprint every 5 sprints, however LeSS argues innovation can happen any time learning takes place and can not wait during a specific period of time. LesS advocates for drastic organization change putting development team in front lines to customers, something many organizations are not ready to embrace .
History/Founders 2005/Craig Larman/Bas Vodde
Strengths
? Scrum applied to many teams
? Discourages “best practices”
? Careful not to exclude innovation
? Dev team interacts with customer directly
? Highly flexible
Weaknesses
? Drastic org change
? Large organizations shy away from it – find it too risky
Key Metric: Velocity/Capacity
Change Philosophy: Built in buffer for uncertainty