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Guest View: Fear and Embrace Tools For Agile Teams

By Ronica Roth

September 15, 2007 — (Page 1 of 4)
“Tools are scary.” I heard that during a session on tools for Scrum teams at the May Scrum Gathering. The guy was referring to software tools for agile teams, and he explained that when he hears that a team, program or organization is looking for tools, he fears they will soon be abandoning agile practices.

Tools can be scary to agile developers. Not like monster scary—storming in loudly to drive developers back to their cube caves to generate huge design docs while destroying the focus on potentially shippable code. More like disease scary—an insidious cancer slowly replacing face-to-face communication just a little too often, turning focus away from working code just a little bit, tempting teams to gather one or two non-agile metrics.

Tools can also be, well, tools—helpers that foster communication, enable burning visibility throughout the organization, and enhance collaboration among team members and with customers.

What’s an agile team to do? Just three things:

1. Newly agile teams should avoid software tools at all costs.

2. Wait until you have a problem.

3. Choose tools designed to support agile principles and practices, then choose one barely sufficient to solve the problem.

New Teams Should Avoid Tools
Agile practices can feel awkward and unfamiliar. As individuals and as teams, we have habits about how we work that run counter to what agile principles recommend. For example, we may tend to avoid face-to-face conversations, preferring to stay safely within our cubes. Or we may keep progress reports vague, to avoid being held accountable for elements out of our control or for early, unfinished ideas for solutions.

Instead, team members need to develop new habits, like talking daily to the customer/product owner while implementing stories and reporting honest task updates in daily standups. When we make these changes together, as a team, we build the trust and habits that allow agile methods to succeed in improving planning and communication.

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