This concludes and summarizes our winter-holiday series on the 10 common mistakes of going agile. The ten mistakes that Levent Gurses identified in the Dec 2006 edition of Dr. Dobb’s journal. Here are links to the ten previous articles, and a summary of the mistakes.

Don’t over-hype the approach. Don’t be one-dimensional in your message. You will lose credibility. And if you over-promise, you risk making agile the scapegoat.

Agile projects succeed or fail largely on the strength of the team. Don’t pick people based on experience or cost. The former is backward-looking and the latter is unrelated (or inversely related) to potential. Make staffing decisions based upon the likelihood of the team succeeding.

In short, this mistake is the mistake of not documenting. Computers make documentation tasks easier. Don’t discard them as “overhead.”

If everyone is forced to sit in the same room too early, then some people will be underutilized. At the start of a project, not everyone can start working – there is some up-front planning that has to happen before getting started.

After doing the ‘prep work’ for the project, you are ready to begin. When “the boss” asks for a project plan, tell him to wait 6 weeks.

We have to define the roles and responsibilities of each person within the team. This helps both with execution and communication (to people outside the team).

If we don’t identify the champion of the endeavor to convert to agile processes, we can’t keep them informed of progress. Their expectations need to continually adapt to progress just like every element of agile.

Many companies operate with each department acting as a silo. Agile techniques rely upon cross-functional contributions. When there are barriers (“not my job”, “not your job”) within an organization, they have to be addressed before agile will work.