Comments on Amr Elssamadisy's new book Agile Adoption Patterns

I just took a detailed look at Amr Elssamadisy's new book Agile Adoption Patterns - A Roadmap to Organizational Success.

I like it. It brings together a wide range of agile practices and gives good analysis of each. As with good pattern books, it shows why, how, why not, and such for each pattern. Since there are 38 (!) practices, finding the one that matters for you is important. They have been clustered a bit and are still hard to find.

I personally find patterns a useful way to capture and present what is needed and at the same time difficult to understand. Since I already understand these patterns I found them useful and occasionally found a new way to think about a particular one. If I did not already know the pattern, I am not so sure how useful the book would be. I will defer on this to others in that position.

And one comment early in the patterns did catch my attention and has, I hope, influenced my thinking: Amr comments on the importance of learning. Much of the agile feedback mechanisms can be viewed as opportunities for the team to learn.

The importance of the learning cannot be dismissed. Getting better in every aspect of creation - planning, design, measuring, coding, testing, communication, delivery - is critical to create a high performance team. Such teams look at every change, comment, bug, and hick-up as an opportunity to improve.

I use the repetition of activities as an easy way to identify an area for improvement. If the team is spending time on activity over and over again then an opportunity exists for improvement. In particular these opportunities often are automated to eliminate the human time/errors that are present.
So, Amr, thanks for the stimulation.

Comments

[eiweißpulver]

chapter of “Agile Adoption Patterns” starts with the premise that when driving Agile adoption, and even later while executing work within a self-directed team, learning is the bottleneck.In The Goal,Goldratt explains his Theory of Constraints and the notion that the output of any process with a series of dependent steps is limited to the capacity of the bottleneck resource in the process.