So you’ve decided to make the move to Agile development. Congratulations! In order to adopt an Agile process you’ll probably be sending your people to Agile training and you’ll be engaging the services of an Agile coach. You’ll also reconfigure your work environment to facilitate the practice of collocated cross-functional teams.
These are all important steps, but you may be missing another priority — your development tool stack, that somewhat invisible part of your work environment which has a daily impact on your team’s effectiveness.
For many, software development tools are like carpeting in your home — installed many years ago, it’s now coming up at the seams. Similarly, software tools are often completely out of date, patched together with scripts – and the problems are nearly invisible.
In order to maximize the results of your Agile transition, you need to reconfigure your development tools and transition from your existing tool stack to an Agile tool stack. Agile tools must support a high ratio of value to effort in order to fit into the short iterations of an Agile project and they must be quick and easy to use rather than requiring many tedious steps.
In future blog posts, we’ll be looking closer at this challenge – and offering our insights on ways this transition can be done quickly and seamlessly so Agile adoption is successful.
Are you considering a move to Agile development? If you are, have you determined what tools you will use?
