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I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that…
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As a general observation over the years and across a few organizations, it seems many software engineering teams simply go through the motions of Agile Ceremonies without embracing the spirit of those meetings. They know enough about Agile practices to know these meetings should be held but fail to seize the opportunities these team get-togethers can actually yield.
For example, in Sprint Planning a team will assign story-points to each story but will often do so without too much discussion. There can be a whole dynamic at play here, especially if the team is newly formed or there’s a mix of clear introverts versus clear extroverts, where some people take the lead while others stay quiet. One way to generate some debate and have a little fun as well is to play ‘Planning Poker’, either with real cards or with one of the Apps. Perhaps the most fun happens when there are wildly differing estimates with those on each of the extremes asked to explain their reasoning for their estimate.
This was my favorite part of Sprint Planning. Not because there were differing views but because it presented the team with an opportunity to pick requirements apart, share knowledge and for more junior engineers to learn from more senior engineers (and vice-versa on occasion). Quite often, you had that “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that” moment when the more experienced engineers explained why the user-story wasn’t as simple as the less-experienced engineers had estimated. It was in those exchanges that you could see growth and knowledge-transfer, where experience was shared. Those moments were golden!
One further benefit of these discussions was that the entire team got a deeper insight into the underlying requirement and by implication, a better understanding of the ‘problem domain’. Having a team with a deep understanding of the problem domain is ‘half the battle’ when it comes to building highly productive teams.
So, don’t just go through the motions of what you think Agile says you should be doing and instead, make those meetings work to your advantage.
Donnacha Forde
August 2023
Note: The quote above attributed to Ben Goldacre is from his book with the same title. He’s also known for his book titled Bad Science, which is a good read for anyone remotely interested in science or the scientific method.