Why is agile still hard in 2022?

An exploration of the cultural and societal factors that we experience from childhood through to adulthood which often set our agile teams up to fail. We will explore various aspects of the education system from our earliest days, through to University, and how these steer us away from a healthy agile mindset. Then we will look at how our industry's advancements in areas like tooling are often a double-edged sword, helping in one area and hindering in others.

In this talk, we explore why – even >20 years after the agile movement gained traction – agile software development remains challenging for teams, even when they are made up of developers, testers, and managers who have potentially never worked under any other methodology. Specifically, we’re interested in why people who have never worked in a ‘waterfall’ environment are still drawn to traditional approaches to planning, documentation, and risk management – and it almost all goes back to our school days.

Participants will be able to:

• Review each of these values in turn to understand why we have come to value it
• also why it is something that we need to support each other in unlearning if our teams are to succeed

Participants Takeaways:

• Success with agile is rooted in our mindset, which begins to be shaped as children
• Learning how to be successful in agile usually means detaching from what it takes to be successful in other parts of life
• Learning often starts with ‘unlearning’, but our training/support is often set up only to ‘add knowledge’
• Tooling improvements often give with one hand and take away with the other, so we need to be vigilant of side-effects

Themes: Team, Agile transformation, Career, Culture, Thought-Provoking, Bigger Picture, Education, Thought Experiment