Are you agile?

Many development teams call themselves agile. They hold daily stand-ups, have a whiteboard covered with stickies, even try and do regular releases, but are not actually agile.

So what is missing? It is pretty obviously when you think about core agile principles. The customer, or to be more specific, the end users.

Agile is all about relationships between the development team and the users. The customer or user  is king and should be consulted with every decision. But my experience is that customer consulting is a rare event.

The normal reason are

• The BA has already worked out all the details in document
• The developers think they know best
• Getting a decision from a user is too hard
• The customer a actual user of the application 
• Developers are not people persons, and talking to users is hard!
• The project is too small to bother.

So, if you are not talking to the customer

• The Kanban board is  a glorified to do list. 
• The regular releases are just a set of little waterfalls.

You'r not agile

Somewhere over the rainbow

Somewhere there is a company

• Who don't have a HR department.
• Who don't have formal job descriptions written in woftam.
• Where salaries depend on a person worth to the company, not on some complex 'current market salaries' formula. 
• Where knows how much everyone else is paid

Sadly where I work

• The HR department is growing in leaps and bounds.
• My job description goes on for pages - not that anyone reads it.
• The   'current market salaries' formula appears to be designed to insure I never get a increase.
• The management would hang their heads in shame if salary rates where posted on the message board. 

How does one go about finding that company over the rainbow?