How can I get Developers to try Agile Methods? with Eric Landes

Agile Coaches' Corner

This week, Dan Neumann is joined by Eric Landes to answer a listener’s question about development. Our listener asked: How can a non-technical Scrum Master or a Scrum Master introduce technical skills and practices to strongly opinionated engineers?

In this episode, Dan and Eric are sharing how to shift the mindset from wanting to know it all about the design to one where emergence is embraced. They share practical tips and examples of real Agile scenarios to make change easier and lessen its costs.

Key Takeaways

● How to help engineers to embrace emergence:

○ Model the behavior and examples.

○ Go on a learning journey together. Invite them to join the process if they have some technical knowledge.

○ What is in it for them? They don’t have to spend time on a design to release that later could not scale as expected, or didn't address the customer’s needs.

● How to make change easy?

○ Eric shares how he started his Agile journey by creating an application that received a lot of resistance from the management.

● Emerging design is critical.

○ The design is fundamental to the core functionality, but the architecture is probably going to fall over in an unexpected way, even with experts things don’t always get exactly right. Testing rapidly is the way of finding what is wrong earlier.

○ Make critical architectural decisions first, instead of waiting until the last possible moment.

● What are the things people need to get right in the first Sprint?

○ Chose at least one programming language to use.

○ Identify the tools that are going to be used and where are you going to deploy the first iteration.

○ Let’s experiment with the architecture.

● The cost of change in the development is still present.

○ Take it to the Team: How can we lower the cost of change? How can we make architectural change easier?

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