5 signs your agile development process must change

"Maybe your agile development process isn't that bad, and teams are sprinting, releasing, and satisfying customers. Perhaps teams have matured agile methodologies, formalized release management, established agile estimating disciplines, and developed story writing standards. Hopefully, they've partnered with operations teams, and their agile tools integrate with version control, CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) pipelines, and observability platforms."

"Chances are, the teams in your organization fall somewhere between these two extremes. Although many agile organizations have an ongoing process to mature and improve agile practices, at times the development process must change. Some organizations utilize agile KPIs (key performance indicators) and devops metrics to acknowledge progress and signal when changes are required. But some organizations may not have formal metrics in place and rely on people and processes to indicate if and where adjustments are needed."

"There's a shallow backlog and insufficient planning Agile teams figure out fairly quickly that polluting a backlog with every idea, request, or technical issue makes it difficult for the product owner, scrum master, and team to work efficiently. If teams maintain a large backlog in their agile tools, they should use labels or tags to filter the near-term versus longer-term priorities. An even greater challenge is when teams adopt just-in-time planning and prioritize, write, review, and estimate user stories during the leading days to sprint start."

Agile development can range from dysfunctional "fragile" or "fake" forms to mature teams that sprint, release, and satisfy customers. Mature teams formalize release management, adopt agile estimating disciplines, standardize story writing, partner with operations, and integrate tools with version control, CI/CD, and observability. Many organizations fall between extremes and must continuously mature practices. Some measure progress with agile KPIs and DevOps metrics; others rely on people and processes to signal change. Five indicators signal when the agile process must change. One common problem is a shallow backlog and insufficient planning that hampers shared understanding.

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