Why Agile Works

Agile, retrospectives, software-development-process I was on an Agile New England panel with some sharp practitioners talking about the good, the bad, and the ugly of agile. My first real experience with agile wasn’t called agile. I was a developer on a three-person team with no priorities and no visibility into what anyone else was doing. I started organizing the work mostly because someone had to. Turned out I liked it. I read the Extreme Programming books, we started doing scrums, and as that company grew from three people to thirty, the process grew with it. We built a product from scratch and iterated fast. The thing that kept working, even then, was the retrospective. Not because it felt good, but because it gave the team a real mechanism to improve the process as they went — and that meant they actually owned it. At GitLab, I led an engineering org spanning many time zones. They didn’t have scrum masters. We ran agile almost entirely in writing — async standups in Slack…