| | DECEMBER 20198CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONIS YOUR TEAM AGILE? TAKE THIS TEST TO FIND OUTBy Gilli Aliotti, Agile Coach, Theagilewarrior.comAgility in tech organizations is often tossed around as if it's a buzz word, but very few are actually agile."Oh, we are agile", "We're an agile shop", "Yes, we run sprints". But when you take a look under the hood, there are several KPIs to determine if truly an agile operation.Let's measure your team's agility with some of these digestible, real-life examples following the12 principles of agile.1. Are you delivering working software that is valuable to the customer at the end of the sprint, or even better, several times within the sprint? Good job. Continuous delivery is key and delivering working software in weeks versus months.If you are spending weeks or even months in different development phases, from analysis (requirements phase), to design, to development, to testing, and then if all is approved, released to the customer after a long period of time, you are not agile. Requirements change over large periods of time, and by the time you gain stakeholder acceptance, they've changed their minds all together, let alone our customers may no longer need that feature or functionality. That is why a true agile team have smaller, iterative releases, where you can gain feedback quickly (preferably after a 2 week sprint, or even CI continuous deployment scenarios). This way the team can learn and adjust quickly, and experiment again, without too much time in between. Rapid deployments also foster the ability to get features to market quicker.2. Are you delivering extremely large and complex requirements to the team?If your product owner has handed over a manifesto of 20 pages for the next feature to develop, stop right there. These waterfall type requirements are a thing of the past, and don't allow the team to experiment on several approaches to come up with the solution, and don't capture changing requirements as we sprint. Simplicity is essential. Also, large requirements Gilli Aliotti
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