The Experiment Canvas is a simple means of planning, tracking, and responding to your experiments.
Simple Things
When I say simple, I don’t necessarily mean easy. And I certainly do not mean crude in form or incomplete. Simple indicates something that does not have superfluous parts or multiple responsibilities, is easy to understand, is as independent from the rest of the solution as possible, and meets a need as is.
Simple may not address all use cases, but it does address some use cases.
Over the past several years, as I’ve been helping teams and organizations improve their ability to deliver software products that are desirable, viable, and feasible, I have been experimenting with a Behavior Framework that has proven to be rather effective. And I’d like to share it with you in hopes that you find it useful and that you provide me feedback on your experiences with it.
My plan is to write a series of blog posts all related to the behaviors framework. Some of them will be about a specific behavior. Some of them will be about tools or techniques that help teams express one or more of the behaviors. Some of them will be my own experiences. And some will be damn near complete fiction.
I often find myself talking to people who are in the midst of a switch to agile and who find the change very difficult to get used to. They may be strong advocates, but their team just "doesn't get it". Through discussion, I find that many of them are attempting what I refer to as "Shock and Awe" agile. If you couldn't tell by the name, I consider this another agile coaching anti-pattern.
I saw a tweet this morning that got me thinking about a coaching anti-pattern I frequently see:
"Without knowing you, your Agile coach knows you use should start using stand ups, TDD and pair programming, etc.
Taylor would be proud."
THE PRESCRIPTIVE AGILE COACH
The Prescriptive Agile Coach is armed with a reliable set of practices. The practices have been documented, vetted, and implemented successfully on a number of teams. They are inarguably proven. To the Prescriptive Agile Coach, those not following these practices are not truly Agile.
I think there is great value in reading books on business management. That is, there is great value in reading them with intent, considering their points, thinking through the details, doing some research, assimilating, and drawing your own conclusions.
But there is another approach I see taken far too often.
As an "agile coach" over the past several years, I've seen a lot of different techniques and approaches. I've been impressed with the ability of some coaches to slowly and gently affect change; sustainable, genuine change. And I've been dismayed at the number of coaches who trivialize the complexity of change to check-lists and notions read from books, but never tried.
This series covers some of the (anti-)patterns I've seen among check-list agile coaches.
