Be agile? How?

Why?

Agile is quite interesting subject. It is like the sword, can help you to kill enemy, but you can get killed by it easily. What it means? According to agile manifesto it means following things:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
• Working software over comprehensive documentation.
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
• Responding to change over following a plan.

I am doing software development, what all above means to me? In a nutshell it means that I need to be focused on my customer and be able to respond fast on the change.

How?

Sometimes fast response in software development means no plan = total chaos. This is very true when you work with team, as most of us do. In the team people might not have the same level of understanding for various aspects starting from technology, communication style, business you work for.

Ok, lets stop for a moment, technology skills, communication is something that given person can upgrade on their own. Right, but how about business understanding? Is it right to assume that person in the team can level up alone? I doubt, because every business is different, it has different rules and style. Maybe general idea is similar but devil is in the details and software is all about details. If you want to write good software you need to consider most of the corner cases and at least plan some behaviour - it does not necessary mean you need to add more features, it means you need to expect it. It is very hard to work with application that is unpredictable, it is irritating for users.

How to get business knowledge? What is the best method?

I doubt you will find here the best method, I want only to point your attention to the method that works for me. Worked few times, and I like it because it is pretty much flexible.

Event Storming

What it is according to Wikipedia it is a workshop. This form gives a big flexibility. Main goal for it is to level up knowledge and understanding of business domain. From my experience, we can do it with different levels of abstraction - staying on high level or if we have more time we can go into lower level touching details of the processes. It is good to start with creating own legend. Not always we have all card colours or colours are not exactly the same. Flexibility is the key. After the workshop, we should take a picture of our board. It will be useful later for us to go back after some time. I recommend doing it again after some time.