I'm actually really interested to hear from people who are getting what we call "better-than-not-doing-it" results. Here's how we describe it in Learning Agile:
It’s not uncommon for team members, and especially team leads, to feel ... a little disappointed after their first attempt at agile adoption. The blogs and books they’ve read and the training they’ve attended talked about “astonishing results” and “hyper-productive teams.” This team feels like the jukebox project is an improvement on their previous projects, but they definitely don’t feel “hyper- productive,” and nobody’s really been astonished at the results.
There’s a general feeling that the project has gone from dysfunctional to functional, and that’s very good. They’ve gotten what we like to call better-than-not-doing-it results. But is this really all there is to agile?
Jenny and I interviewed many developers, team members, managers, etc., over the years, and we've found that a lot of people feel this way -- that their adoption of Scrum, XP, or another agile method or methodology is somehow a little "empty", like they're going through the motions. It's worth doing, and they're getting results, but it doesn't seem worth the hype.
There's so much more to agile than better-than-not-doing-it results, and a lot of the book (and a lot of what we focus on in our own careers) is about how to get there.
Is this a familiar feeling to people here?
Andrew
Andrew Stellman
Author of Head First Agile, Learning Agile, Beautiful Teams, Head First C#, Head First PMP, and Applied Software Project Management (O'Reilly)