Navigating Agile Pitfalls: How to Avoid the Roller Coaster Ride and Build Outcome-Driven Productive Agile Teams

In today's fast-paced business landscape, agile methodologies, particularly SAFe Agile and Scrum, are celebrated for their potential to boost productivity and enable incremental releases that swiftly add value to the business. However, the benefits of Scrum can only be fully realized when its principles are diligently adhered to. Neglecting core development principles while focusing only on Agile rituals can lead to a cascade of issues: unnecessary effort, compromised product quality, increased costs, eroded customer trust, missed opportunities and delayed return on investment. In this blog, I will delve into the critical importance of meticulously following Agile's best core dev non-negotiable practices and highlight the potential pitfalls of deviating from them, drawing from my deep expertise and years of practical experience.

Value Over Outputs: Agile is about delivering high value, not just going through the motions. Effective teams focus on outcomes, not just activities and outputs.

?? The Sinking Ship Team: These teams are like specialists on a sinking ship, with each member believing they are the key to the team's success. This "Me" vs. "Us" mentality fosters silos, unhealthy competition, delays, quality issues, and stress. Often driven by prevalent culture and management attitudes, these teams need strong servant leadership and coaching to turn things around.

?? The Merry-Go-Round Team: Everything appears great on the surface, but while Agile celebrates people, it’s ultimately about delivering high value. These teams may follow Agile practices superficially but lack effectiveness. They need to remember that Agile is about value delivery and team effectiveness, not just fun.

?? The Well-Oiled Machine Team: These process-focused teams become too routine and mechanical, sidelining creativity, inspect-and-adapt, and happiness. They need to experiment, converse, and challenge the status quo to stay productive. A flowing river generates power—stale routines do not.

?? The Roller Coaster Team: Always busy, these teams equate busyness in terms of redesign, rework, and code-refactor with effectiveness, focusing on outputs rather than outcomes. Stable velocity and predictability don’t always translate to quality and value delivery. Tech Leads and POs should implement the dev-focused best practices, focusing on stabilizing with these teams to ensure quality work and outcomes, watching the baton, not just the runners.        

Consider a Scrum product team named "Dev Dynamo," following the ‘Roller Coaster’ team style. This team comprises 8 dedicated members: 4 developers, 2 quality assurance (QA) specialists, 1 product owner (PO), and 1 Scrum master. Dev Dynamo is committed to releasing new features to production every two weeks, completing each sprint with a few features. For practical purposes, let's assume a blended hourly rate of $60 for each team member.

In this scenario, we will examine the development of three features and analyze the associated cost, lead time, and efforts compared to the optimal value.

Below is the feature development effort worksheet for our scenario and best practices review.

After post-production, let's assume Feature #3 introduced a bug that caused rework and disrupted the existing sprint and schedule. Below, you can see how the efforts are distributed, leading to additional lead time, increased efforts, and higher costs.

If the exemplary practices had been followed, the optimal cost, effort, and lead time would have been achieved for these three features, even with one of them having a production bug. Imagine extrapolating this scenario to a larger scale to see the broader impact. Unfortunately, these features were not developed with the proper quality and process adherence, leading to inefficiencies, avoidable costs, and missed opportunities.

Despite the plethora of best practices in agile methodologies, there are still key areas where agile teams often falter, overlooking opportunities for improvement. This blog will spotlight five critical areas where Dev Dynamo and similar agile teams can enhance their processes to boost productivity, reduce costs, and deliver high-quality products. By focusing on these areas, teams can fully leverage agile Dev best practices, achieving tremendous success and realizing the true potential of their projects.

1. Be a Capability/Feature Developer

In agile development, a "Capability/Feature Developer" thoroughly understands the entire functionality of the capability they are working on. They develop and follow the technical design, ensuring they grasp all nuances before starting development. Unlike screen developers or button builders who focus on individual components in a cowboy development style, Capability/Feature Developers learn the complete capability, its features, and cross-functional aspects. This comprehensive understanding allows them to write more effective and maintainable code.

Importance:

• Bug-Free Code & Efficient Maintenance: By understanding the full capability and following the technical design, developers can anticipate potential issues and write code that is less prone to bugs. This also makes the code easier to maintain and expand, leading to more efficient and sustainable development practices.
• Enhanced Quality: Developers who know the end-to-end functionality can ensure that their code aligns perfectly with the overall system, resulting in higher quality and better-integrated features. Following the technical design further enhances the consistency and reliability of the code.
• Improved Collaboration: When developers understand the full scope of capabilities and the technical design, they can collaborate more effectively with other team members, including testers, product owners, and developers. This shared understanding facilitates smoother communication and teamwork.
• Future Expandability & Reduced Rework: Code written with a holistic view of the capability and adherence to the technical design is often more modular and adaptable, making expanding with new features or functionalities easier. A thorough understanding reduces the need for rework, as developers are less likely to miss critical functionality or create code that doesn't fit well with the rest of the system.

In summary, having developers act as Capability/Feature Developers ensures that they produce higher quality, bug-free, and maintainable code. This approach enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of agile teams, leading to better product outcomes.

Capability Developers: The Foundation of Bug-Free, High-Quality Code!

2. Become an Effective Unit Test Developer

This involves creating small, automated tests that validate the functionality of individual code components, ensuring they perform as expected.

Importance:

It is crucial to catch defects early, facilitate continuous integration, and maintain code quality, leading to more reliable and maintainable software. By implementing effective unit testing, agile teams can reduce the cost of bug fixes, enhance code stability, and accelerate the development process, ultimately delivering higher-quality products to the market.

3. Stringent Code Review Led by Tech/Team Lead

A stringent code review is a thorough examination of code conducted by the tech lead or agile team lead. It ensures adherence to conventions and standards, verifies functionality, conducts secondary testing, and assesses performance and scalability.

Importance:

It is essential for maintaining code quality, consistency, and efficiency, and it helps identify issues early, reduce technical debt, and improve overall project outcomes.

Effective code review can identify 60% of issues before they reach QA, UAT, or production, which is incredibly powerful. Each code review should offer a meaningful list of feedback changes rather than just being a rubber-stamp process.

By implementing stringent code reviews, agile teams can enhance code reliability, boost performance, ensure compliance with best practices, and foster a culture of continuous improvement.

Boost Code Quality with Rigorous Reviews: Thorough code reviews by tech leads enhance code reliability, adherence to standards, desired functionality, performance, and compliance with best practices.

4. Team Group Testing in Agile Teams

In an agile team, "Team Group Testing" refers to a collaborative approach where every team member takes on the role of a tester in addition to their primary responsibilities. This means that regardless of whether a team member is a Product Owner (PO), Scrum Master, Tech Lead, Developer, or holds any other role, they actively participate in testing activities.

The mindset is "I'm a tester first, and then I'm [my primary role]." This approach involves dedicating at least 2 to 3 hours per week (or more) for collective group testing, especially after code is integrated into the QA testing environment. The goal is to identify and address issues early in the development cycle.

Importance:

• Early Detection and Cost Efficiency: Involving everyone in testing helps catch issues early, reducing the likelihood of bugs reaching higher environments (QA/SIT) where fixing them is more costly and resource-intensive.
• Improved Quality and Collaboration: Collective testing enhances product quality through diverse perspectives and fosters a culture of collaboration, leading to more cohesive and integrated work.
• Reduced Lead Time and Increased Customer Trust: Early identification of issues shortens delivery cycles, allowing for quicker market responses and consistent delivery of high-quality products, thereby building customer trust and satisfaction.

Everyone is a Tester First: Prioritize collective testing within agile teams to detect bugs early, enhance product quality, and reduce lead times and costs.

In summary, adopting the mindset that "everyone is a tester first" in an agile team promotes early bug detection, cost savings, improved product quality, reduced lead time, better team collaboration, increased customer trust, and overall efficiency. This approach ensures that potential issues are addressed promptly, preventing them from becoming costly problems later in the development cycle.

5. Post-Production Monitoring?

Post-production monitoring involves tech leads and developers actively reviewing production logs to identify performance issues or unexpected errors. This practice is essential for proactively catching and addressing issues before impacting customers. When errors or performance problems are detected, tech leads and developers immediately troubleshoot and resolve these issues to ensure the stability and reliability of the system.

Importance:

• Proactive Issue Resolution: Monitoring production logs allows tech leads and developers to identify and address issues before they affect customers, maintaining a stable and reliable system.
• Enhanced Performance: Early detection and fixing of performance issues ensure the system runs efficiently and meets performance expectations.
• Improved Customer Experience: Proactively resolving issues prevents customers from encountering problems, leading to a better user experience and higher satisfaction.
• Increased Stability and Reliability: Regular monitoring ensures the code functions as expected in the production environment, reducing the likelihood of unexpected failures or bugs.

Stay Ahead with Post-Production Vigilance: Proactive monitoring of production logs helps identify and resolve issues before they impact customers.

In summary, post-production monitoring by tech leads and developers is crucial for maintaining system stability, performance, and customer satisfaction. It allows for proactive issue resolution, ensuring that the product works reliably and meets customer expectations.

Conclusion:

By implementing these 5 dev best practices, developers and teams can significantly enhance reliability and stability, fostering customer adoption, trust, and confidence. These strategies reduce development costs, shorten lead times, and minimize effort hours while preventing missed opportunities and production issues. Embracing these practices paves the way for a more efficient, effective, and successful development process.

Boost Efficiency and Reduce Costs with 5 Best Dev Practices: Implementing these practices leads to reduced development costs, faster delivery times, and higher customer satisfaction.