Discipline & Formality - is there a difference?

When I'm mentoring teams for the first time on agile methods and practices, as an introductory discussion, I sometimes ask team members to tell me what they know about agile development or what they've heard about it. If I'm not getting any negative perceptions I encourage them by asking that they tell me what they've heard regarding challenges in using agile or to describe things they've heard that don' t work, or even better how agile won't work in their environment.  Some of the typical responses are:

• Agile means no documentation
• In agile you can do what you want however you want
• It's about cowboy coding & hacking
• No reviews
• You change requirements whenever you want and as often as you want
• We can't use agile, because the product owner will change the requirements and if we don't have a signed off requirements document before we begin our design and planning we'll never finish on time

These negative answers speak to a perception that agile methods are both informal & undisciplined in their approach to software development. 

Reflection

This is Part 5 - the final part of the series

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3    Part 4     Part 5

Well this timing worked out just perfectly. A new year is here; time for reflection which is the last topic in this series on what it takes to improve performance of individuals and teams.

In the previous parts of this series I've used sports and music to evaluate lessons learned on improving  performance. Continuing with that theme, reflection occurs as a natural part of the process of learning. Reflection is also a natural part of agile development and agile coaching. In fact it is the primary way we improve our performance. Inspect and adapt.