Following on from my thoughts from Agile 2006 and the notion of Agile Process Auditing, I started a thread in the Yahoo! group to discuss it.
I'd like thank all those who are contributing and try to summarize some of the initial thoughts.
- Auditing is the wrong term. It has too much baggage. We need a new name for the idea of reporting who well a team is following an agile process or sticking to its agile discipline. Please leave a comment if you have an idea.
- The role of auditor should rightly go to the agile coach.
- The agile coach must be in an independent reporting structure and though involved with the team must not report to the same manager in order for him/her to be objective.
- In the role of auditor it is not a good idea that the agile coach is an external firm or consultant. They might not be objective and try to hide a lack of discipline or adoption in order to continue collecting their fee.
- Auditing of conformance to process or in more agile terms sticking to discipline ought to become a standard part of a retrospective.
- Projects can go wrong for many reasons and simply falling off the agile discipline bandwagon is not the only reason. However, some form of process conformance audit (to use existing non-agile terminology because it is all we have today) is important to help management make appropriate interventions to get teams and projects back on track.
This is proving to be a very lively thread and I don't think we are nearly done discussing this topic. Please join in - either here through comments or in the Yahoo! group (see sidebar for link to join). Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson
