That is how I view it:
- "big A" Agile has books and approved tools and coaches from outside the company holding week-long all-day workshops.
- "little a" agile has devs/QA/etc. suggesting ways to make the process of building and shipping software smoother.
I'm currently working on a "little a" agile team. Upper management doesn't really care what our process is, as long as they get their quarterly release with (most) of their priorities.
I'm becoming increasingly convinced that, to be successful, a team's agile practice needs to largely fly under the radar of upper management.
As soon as upper management catches wind, you'll need to justify every little process flow change to them, or they'll start demanding regular reports with burndown charts and plots of velocity over time and crap like that. At which point, you're done. Things officially suck forever.
That isn't to say that I think Scrum coaches and whatever have no value to offer. I've done a 1-week Agile training course, and I thought it presented some really great ideas. But their potential value is severely undercut by the fact that there's no way to bring one in without attracting the attention of the mothership.
I had that once, the bit where management wanted to see the burndowns and velocity, then fixated over same. The only way to move past it was to stop producing them. I did, as the Lead/SM/Dev Manager, have the clout to say no, so that was lucky. I explained it's the working software you need but I don't think they were happy.
> As soon as upper management catches wind, you'll need to justify every little process flow change to them, or they'll start demanding regular reports with burndown charts and plots of velocity over time and crap like that.
I think that's a management problem you'll run into with any development methodology you use. There are a lot of management types that slavishly focus on metrics whether or not they make any sense, and they can do tremendous
damage to any organization.
Give those people a tool and they'll find a way to misapply it, whether it's velocity, or performance reviews, or LOC, or whatever.
Prime example of this was stack ranking at Microsoft. How much productivity was lost due to the political maneuvering and backbiting caused by their misunderstanding of bell curves?
I'm currently working on a "little a" agile team. Upper management doesn't really care what our process is, as long as they get their quarterly release with (most) of their priorities.