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Terminal Velocity for Agile Teams

The most popular metric for agile software development teams, by quite a margin, seems to be velocity. Yet, experienced agilists don’t find velocity particularly useful. Even some of the authors of the Agile Manifesto who played a part in defining velocity, as well as story points and planning poker, have moved on. But today, as large organizations undertake major initiatives to “transform” into agile organizations, there is a strong emphasis on velocity as a key metric.

Despite the advice of leading agile consultants and coaches, and books like Doc Norton’s Escape Velocity and my own Software Development Metrics, corporate leaders stress the importance of velocity in their transformation programs, and require their software development teams to track and report it.
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Lack of fluency

A recent article by James Shore and Diana Larsen, Your Path through Agile Fluency: A Brief Guide to Success with Agile, has generated some buzz. I have tremendous respect for the authors, as well as for the people I’ve seen posting positive comments about the piece. To be honest, though, I’m having a lot of difficulty buying into it. I don’t want to offend any of those people. On the other hand, they might just dismiss me as stupid and not be offended at all. Either way, here goes.

The gist of the article appears to be that we can effect organizational improvement in a large company by driving change from the level of individual software development teams. The major problem with that idea, in my opinion, is the bottom-up approach. The authors suggest beginning the organizational transformation initiative from a single software development team and then extending the cultural change outward. They also want to tie together the various parts of the organization by reaching out from the team. I suspect this is because their own professional background is in the area of software development, as well as the fact that both of them have enjoyed a measure of success with the approach, at least up to the second "star." But the approach doesn’t address the core structural problems in companies; it only works around them somewhat.

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