Amazing fact: The lookout crews for the RMS Titanic were without binoculars. Due to a last minute change in personnel, the team member who was in charge of spyglasses, binoculars and other optical equipment was not on board the ship, and all of this equipment was unfortunately locked away, crew members unaware of the location.
We all know the rest of the story; by the time that the lookout crew saw the iceberg, the opportunity to change course already passed. There was not enough time for the crew to respond to the problem and correct it. They had no visibility (literally).
Agile is about adaptation. It’s not about sticking to the plan; it’s about exposing and responding to change in your development cycle. But how can you respond to problems if you don’t know what they are?
Our last blog post was about “inspecting and adapting”, and I don’t want to get these 2 success factors confused. The real point that I’m trying to get across is that visibility in an Agile environment allows your teams the ability to inspect and adapt to impediments.
Why is Visibility in an Agile Environment Important?
Information in an Agile environment is viewed more often, and scrum teams need to see this information on a daily basis in order to change course if necessary. Visibility in an Agile environment allows teams to use information in their stand-ups, sprint reviews, demos and retrospectives.
Visibility also needs to happen on a large scale, and everyone needs to be involved. Just think, if we gave only one pair of binoculars to the entire look-out team on the Titanic, it would have been much less effective than if each team was equipped with the proper visibility gear. Everyone needs to be aware of the problem in order to change courses.
But here’s the real trick. Centralize this information, make it visible to everyone and all your tools. If you do this, you can integrate with all of your processes. This guarantees the information in the tools is correct. For example, if you have an integration in your SCM tool to your project management tool, you can see what changes correlate to what iteration, guaranteed. You can also integrate your build, test and deploy tools to provide tractability on all levels of the stack. Centralization also provides a single place where everyone can see what’s happening. Scattering the information against multiple tools that aren’t “Agile aware” will only confuse the process.
So having a global visibility can help re-route a ship that’s traveling on a disastrous course. It can also help your development teams change course when they need to.
Wouldn’t it be beneficial to get your whole team some binoculars?
