A goal, whether stated or not, on many software projects is to mitigate risk. There are many blog posts written on the subject, and I believe there is even software to help companies with this.
A fairly common way that companies try to mitigate risk is to plan everything in advance (big design up front) and then micromanage people so that they stay on track.
This could not be further from Agile principles and practices.
Agile teams are self-organizing, meaning they decide who is going to do what tasks within a given sprint. The team is 100% responsible for ensuring that they deliver what they agreed to. At the end of the sprint, we find out if they completed everything or not. If they did, everyone is happy and we plan the next sprint accordingly. If they don’t then we look at what went “wrong” and work to ensure that doesn’t happen in future sprints. Doing this over and over helps to mitigate risk.
What we do not do is impose more controls on the team, and assign task to individual team members.
If we revert to that, we are being counterproductive, and at the same time telling our people that we don’t trust them, and that we expect perfection. They might also think that we are trying to tell them how to do their jobs.
Will that help? Not that I’ve seen.
What is your experience?
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