Challenge 1: Developer fear caused by transparency of skill deficiencies.
Recommendations:
• Make stand up meetings voluntary for new junior developers.
• Assign dedicated mentor for new staff.
• Pair weaker developers with those who had more experience.
Challenge 2: The need for developers to be a”master of all trades”.
Recommendations:
• Use pair programming and pair rotation to distribute knowledge and facilitate learning.
• Encourage task self-assignment to allow developer work in different areas.
Challenge 3: Increased reliance on social skills.
Recommendations:
• Combine development and training program to provide customized training materials on social skills.
• Using proper documentation to back up communication
Challenge 4: A lack of business knowledge among developers.
Recommendations:
• Ask Customer to run training sessions on basic topics within the business domain and on company specific areas.
• Provide small training modules on a frequent basis.
• Recruit staff and graduates with a combination of IT and business Knowledge
Challenge 5: The need to understand and learn values and principles of Agile, not just the practices.
Recommendations:
• Ensure multiple members get agile training or attend agile conferences.
• Agile coaching and championing.
• Ensure cross-team observation/validation of agile practices.
• Assess agility in terms of Agile values not practice adherence.
Challenge 6: Lack of developer motivation to use agile methods.
Recommendations:
• Try to have multiple”bought-in” developers on each team.
• Collect and share successful adoption stories and positive experiences.
Challenge 7: Implications of devolved decision-making.
Recommendations:
• Build a sharing and learning environment to empower team decision making.
• Implement a democratic voting system.
• Project manager should play the role of facilitator
Challenge 8: The need for agile compliant Performance evaluation.
Recommendations:
• Performance evaluation needs to consider breadth of skills, not just depth.
• Performance evaluation to apply much higher weighting for mentoring, voluntary contributions etc.
• Perform 360 degree feedback
Challenge 9: Lack of Agile-specific recruitment policies and suitably trained IT graduates.
Recommendations:
• Develop specific recruiting practices tailored for agile methods to hire right people.
• Use team recruiting to find right person working in the team.
• Put newly recruited graduates on agile projects to get hands on experience.
Challenge 10: In any project/product development communication is the main medium to connect all the stakeholders including customer and keeping everyone on the same page. Agile insists about co location and Daily scrum of the team members to avoid any communication gap, however in distributed environment it’s not feasible to co locate all the stake holders at one place because of time zones and Language barriers.
Recommendations:
A workable solution would be agree upon a common time slot for having scrum calls with video conferencing, and use instant messengers to communicate with colleagues, however we team need to be very planned to sort out issues soon after scrum having a technical discussion individually, to achieve this one needs a good planning skills
Challenge 11: Lack of ownership by the team
Recommendations:
Lack of owners Team members who are accustomed to receiving instruction often have difficulty engaging
With Agile projects initially because they are waiting to be told what to do. To help individual team members take ownership, teams need to communicate openly. If you are having this issue, try some of these approaches:
• Let the team work directly with the customer
• Encourage team members to own and solve their own problems instead of letting organizations control technical conversations.
• Solicit input from different members of the team
Challenge 12: Some team members refuse to interact with the team
Recommendations: It is not uncommon for some team members, such as architects, developers and testers, to refuse to participate in the Agile process. Their justifications are many—they have too many prior commitments, their work cannot be broken down in a fashion that’s amenable to Agile software development, their time is too important, they work better as an individual—but these are nothing but excuses. Regardless of the reason, the end result is that they are deliberately putting themselves outside the team. The team has to make its best effort to resolve these issues and to work with others who are attempting to separate themselves. Every member of the team needs to contribute, and if one or two members of the team are putting themselves above the team, this needs to be quickly addressed by management. Oftentimes, this results in the quick remove of the individual(s).
Challenge 13: It can be difficult to convince management for the need for a new development approach.
Recommendations:
Educating a new client on how to build an Agile organization can be very slow and difficult
The first step in educating an organization about Agile development is speaking to the team or to individual members of the team. After that to Functional Manager, PMO and HR
Management require education, coaxing and convincing to recognize
that there is a better way to develop software
Topics of conversation differ between management
and developers
Challenge 14 : Senior management is giving mixed signals regarding their support for Agile.
Recommendations:
Senior management needs to decide that they are committed to Agile methods before introducing it, and, once adopted, they are obligated to publicly support the effort.
Challenge 15: No single Product Owner can be identified.
Recommendations:
By working with the sponsor, and clearly articulating the need for a single business representative on the project team
Challenge 16: The Scrum Master refuses to protect the team.
Recommendations:
Scrum Master Role is essential to maintaining healthy communications between team members and protecting the team.
If the Scrum Master is ineffective at protecting them team, this person needs to be replaced
Challenge 17: Team does not have a reliable build system and processes.
Recommendations:
If it takes 2 hours for a developer to check in code and do a build, it would be better if this process could be automated process
Challenge 18: QA issues are not addressed
Recommendations:
With traditional development methodologies, testing is usually addressed at the end of the cycle.
Code quality will quickly become a problem with repeated Iterations
Delaying testing until the later stages of a project will result in late discovery of unanticipated side-effects
Can achieve this by implementing the Extreme Programming engineering practices, such as Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration, Refactoring and Pair Programming
Challenge 19: External parties have mandated ineffective tools
Recommendations:
Scrum Master and project team need to address the issue with senior management.
Challenge 20: Friction can exist between teams
Recommendations: Standard approach is to prioritize dependent functionality early and to code to an agreed upon interface
Teams need to recognize that there is a dynamic relationship between dependent teams that needs to be actively and continuously improved
Challenge 21: The way company rewards employees is in conflict with the “values” of Agile development
Recommendations:
Long-term solutions are dependent on rewarding
Team work and breadth of understanding.
No single or easy solution, some ideas include having team goals and bonuses, eliminating individual performance reviews, and allowing teams the opportunity to make mistakes.
