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I'm a solutions engineer lead, GitHub Star, Director of WomenDevsSG, and co founder of ragTech. I work at the intersection of tech, systems, and leadership, and this blog is where I share my journey through all three. Expect honest reflections, real experiences, and thoughts that are still forming rather than polished career advice.
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It’s a spin-off of the classic Taboo game and we call it Techie Taboo. The idea is simple: you have to explain a tech word (for example, Impact) without using the five taboo words on the card. That’s it. Simple, fun, and surprisingly effective, espec...
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In this episode, our team focuses on the implementation of Agile methodologies, particularly Scrum, in various workplaces and teams.
This article is a summary of our 5th episode of ragTech! If you want to get the full experience listen on Spotify or watch on YouTube!
Agile, according to Natasha, is not a defined set of practices, but a mindset and approach to work that fosters flexibility, adaptability, and collaboration. Agile and its related frameworks, such as Scrum and Kanban, are not exclusive to tech teams, but applicable to any team that adopts the mindset. Honesty and openness are essential values in Agile, encouraging transparency and communication within the team.
Through practices like Scrum's rituals, such as daily stand-up meetings, and visualizing progress on a board, teams can reinforce honesty and openness, ultimately improving collaboration and efficiency.
Agile values like openness and honesty are fostered through the use of a visual platform, such as a board, where team members can see each other's tasks. Scrum also prescribes rituals like stand-ups, sprint planning, and retrospectives, which are meant to provide frequent check-ins and opportunities for team members to communicate and reorganize tasks.
We also contrast the Agile/Scrum approach with the "waterfall model," explaining that in the waterfall model, teams follow a sequential process in which each phase must be completed before moving on to the next. This leads to long development cycles and challenges in addressing issues as they arise.
Unlike waterfall where teams work on one service sequentially, in Agile, multiple teams work on different parts of the project concurrently. continuous delivery, feedback, and testing are prioritized at every stage.
Agile philosophy focuses on efficient delivery of items systematically through sprints, retrospectives, and the involvement of various team members such as product managers, designers, testers, and scrum masters.
One intriguing aspect discussed is the role of a scrum master, which is primarily focused on prescribing the rituals of Scrum, spreading the culture within the team, and ensuring its application is contextually relevant. Despite the somewhat obscure term "scrum," it references a legitimate job title, and at one point was reportedly the highest-paid role in tech. The daily duties of a scrum master involve fostering change in teams transitioning from waterfall to Agile, promoting the Agile methodology within the organization, and ensuring that the team follows the specified methodologies.
We discuss the contrasting approaches between Agile and traditional waterfall development, emphasizing the role of Scrum Masters in upholding an Agile culture and overcoming potential pitfalls such as resistance to change and excessive focus on certifications. Whether Agile is suitable for a team depends on their unique context and goals.
We provide an example of a team with different incentives adopting Agile practices and the subsequent benefits gained from it, such as:
increased communication
collaboration
facilitating understanding and empathy
Practices involved in transitioning to the Agile way of working are giving and receiving feedback, retrospectives, and standups.
The importance of a blameless culture and empathy must be emphasized in these practices. We also acknowledge that while the openness, honesty, and collaboration aspects of Agile are beneficial, adopting this mindset may have drawbacks, such as resistance to change and too many meetings.
Appointing a scrum master to ensure meetings run efficiently and encourage team members to prepare their talking points beforehand can make the most of their time together and reduce these drawbacks.
We agree that a Scrum Master is essential in upholding the culture as they can objectively assess the team's progress, identify disengagement, and encourage continuous improvement. However, we were also concerned about the oversaturation and commercialization of Scrum certifications, which may lead people to misunderstand the importance of truly practicing Agile principles and living an iterative, feedback-driven mindset.
Then, we moved on to discuss the applicability of Agile methodologies, specifically Scrum, to various teams and workplaces. Though it's true that constructive criticism is essential for growth, not everyone may benefit from the Agile approach.
For teams in large enterprises with well-established processes and set goals, imposing Agile may not be beneficial, as it could create unnecessary friction. The Agile mindset, which focuses on experimentation and iteration, is more applicable to teams starting new projects. However, even in larger organizations, some aspects of the Agile principles, such as honesty, transparency, and clean communication, can be adopted to improve collaboration and productivity. Ultimately, whether or not Agile is suitable for a team depends on the team's specific context and goals.
To illustrate an example, Victoria describes how her team, consisting of multiple individuals with different incentives, adopted Agile methodologies and Scrum practices while working on separate but related projects. Initially, there was resistance and frustration due to the perceived time-wasting activities, such as cross-team communication and learning about other teams' products. However, as they began to collaborate, they realized the benefits of shared knowledge and potential for reusing each other's components. Over time, they became more open in their communication and started iterating constantly. This led to increased cross-team understanding, reduced stress, and improved ability to cover for team members during absences.
We hope you enjoyed the recap of this episode! We discussed a lot more that we did not mention in this article. We will be going into a lot more topics soon! Do leave your thoughts or any feedback in the comments below! What are some topics you would want us to talk about or cover? What are some areas we could improve on? Feel free to let us know!
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