Agile is all about common sense

Tom Breur

20 October 2013

People adopt Agile for different reasons, and invariably did something “different” they plan to supplant with Agile practices (for now we’ll forego the practices/principles discussion). There seems to be an interesting paradox: people try something different (“Agile”) to improve productivity, to facilitate teamwork, etc., yet these same people often seem to resist the fact that they actually need to do something different in order to reap those rewards.

From my experience, the way to overcome this paradox is to shed new light on “peculiar” Agile practices. Once you consider some counter intuitive notions from an Agile perspective, they all of a sudden make a lot of sense. Common sense, so to speak. What appeared odd, then becomes natural. And along with that change the resistance against trying something new seems to vanish.

Take the notion that efficient teams must have “slack”, or pair programming. Instead of thinking of one person being “idle”, you can focus on verification and knowledge sharing. What about value placed on a  “sustainable pace”: either because of the need for Agile planning, or because of awareness about costs of expediting, something has to give if you want to make changes.

Now that we have established that Agile practices really are common sense, provided you view them in the appropriate context, isn’t it odd that when we refer to “common sense”, it often turns out that common sense isn’t always very “common”…?!?