Building quality software at a rapid pace to respond to changing business needs is challenging and daunting. Only a few teams are able to get it right in their software development journey. Most development teams underwent a transformation journey from following the traditional Waterfall Methodology to Agile Development because of the same challenge “of building quality software at a rapid pace to respond to changing business needs”. Any software development team that has managed to overcome this challenge has achieved what is referred to as ‘business agility’ by most agile development advocacy groups around the world. It is the aim of agile software development to drive organizations towards ‘business agility’. Since the agile software development took the software development world by storm, the pillar has been the Agile Manifesto which advocated for:

• Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

Since the introduction of the agile manifesto, software development teams have been experimenting with frameworks and lean work approaches in their pursuit to build quality software at a rapid pace to respond to business change. Agile Software Development led to an introduction of different methods and practices, each organization that adopts agile software development chooses one of the agile development methods and practices that suits the human capital they have in the organization. Or based on the method and practice that is most effective. The following are the popular agile methods and practices amongst others:

• Scrum
• Kanban
• DSDM
• Lean Development
• Extreme Programming
• Adaptive Software Development
• Feature-Driven Development

Scrum as an agile software development framework was implemented widely because of its popularity in the ICT Sector. Many organizations have embraced it with a hope to achieve ‘business agility’. Scrum allows for self-organizing teams and transparency amongst team members. Scrum further advocates for iterative and incremental practices in software development. Changes are also welcomed at any stage of development assisting us to respond quicker to business change as it is now a demand in today’s business world. In Scrum, team productivity and progress are enhanced by daily stand up meetings which assists team members to quickly align on the tasks they are busy with and report challenges when they arise. To further drive an environment of productivity, there is a Scrum Master who ensures that all Scrum processes are correctly followed and the team always works in a conducive environment with no impediments. There is also a Product Owner who manages work load that comes in and captures it correctly using proper user stories.

On the other hand, Kanban is another popular framework that enjoys support from agile development practitioners. Kanban promotes the visualization of project work, limiting work in progress (WIP), and
maximizing efficiency (or flow). Kanban focus on reducing the time it takes to take a project (or user story) from start to finish. Unlike Scrum, Kanban doesn’t dictate fixed length Sprints. It promotes continuous flow instead. It allows for continuous delivery instead of waiting for a sprint to end before releasing a working increment. Kanban doesn’t dictate any roles and it can be blended with other frameworks and methodologies. Other organizations were a bit creative and implemented a fusion between Scrum and Kanban to release software packages in an iterative manner with an application of
continuous flow of work and minimum WIP.

With all the agile frameworks and methodologies implemented, it is still every Leader’s dream to build and maintain a high performing team that understands business agility. If the team dynamics are bad and the culture is not right, an agile framework will not save you unfortunately. You will still not meet your targets and frustration will creep in sooner rather than later. And team members will be rattled and start looking for other opportunities. Going back to the aims of the Agile Manifesto, Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools is still a very challenging aim to achieve for most agile teams. The teams end up doing the same thing the agile manifesto was trying to address by focusing heavily on the Kanban/Scrum boards, Metrics, WIP while the team dynamics and the culture are behind the bad performance of the team.

At AgilePowerTeams we have realized that these frameworks and methodologies work only if the team environment and the culture is right. Your team is the base and behind the ultimate goal of business agility. We have developed an approach that aims to supplement and support your agile adoption irrespective of the agile framework or methodology you favour. An AgilePowerTeam is a team that successfully overcomes the challenge “of building quality software at a rapid pace to respond to changing business needs”. We do that by assisting you to build and sustain a high performing team. We start by taking your team through the concept of business agility and stages of team development, then we help you build a ‘rankles team’, set unambiguous team goals, build and sustain a winning team culture and finally sustain the inspiration in the team.

Author: Desmond Mogotlane, a contributing Agile Consultant at AgilePowerTeams and a Solutions Architect. You can follow Desmond on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/desmond-mogotlane-
42b64521/)