In my last post I quoted Jeff Sutherland’s statement in the article The Winter Getaway That Turned the Software World Upside Down. He complained that many Silicon Valley’s companies do not produce results in short iterations. Hence they were not agile – however, they think they were.
My interpretation for the reason and my conclusion of that is the following:
The reason why “they can’t get anything working in any reasonable time” [quote from Sutherland in the above mentioned article] is fear. Fear to deliver something that is not 100 % perfect. Fear of the other’s opinion. Fear to be deemed an imperfect person or team. And ultimately fear to fail.
Yet, working agile means that you accept failures. You see failures as something positive. Why? You can learn from failures occurring. Learning from failures is better than not learning at all! And that’s exactly what happens when nothing is delivered for a long time: you do not have the chance to learn anything.
Agile is all about getting a fast feedback from users.
