James King

There is a lot of material out there that says “Agile is awesome” but a lot of  it is more annoying than useful.  The material seems to consist of a blog article or video with someone saying that they found “waterfall” and “old school” companies to be bad, but then they found Scrum and their team was transformed to utopia.

So I thought I would share a couple of videos that demonstrate how agile can actually be implemented and be really awesome, where the video includes a decent argument about the things needed to make it work..

Each of these videos (I think) shows how the core aspects of agile can really work and be “AWESOME”.  Each shows a utopia that I have rarely or never worked in even though I have been in many agile teams and so it is a bit challenging to compare the teams in the video to my own achievements.

But I find it useful to show these videos in workshops and then have people list the constraints that stop them doing agile like it is done in the videos.  These constraints are the areas for improvement but also sometimes they are constraints we have to live with – so we are not “Unagiile” but rather “as agile as it is practical to be with our constraints.

Here are the videos

Agile is awesome at Spotify:

http://blog.crisp.se/2014/03/27/henrikkniberg/spotify-engineering-culture-part-1

http://blog.crisp.se/2014/09/24/henrikkniberg/spotify-engineering-culture-part-2

The awesome agile product owner “in a nutshell”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=502ILHjX9EE

Hopefully you can see that awesome is possible, even if it is rare.  And getting close to awesome would be a good thing to aim for with your team