Agile fluency: Finding agile ways to fit your needs

"In essence, all models are wrong, but some models do work," he said. "This passage comes from George E.p.box, a statistician from the University of Wisconsin in the United States, and the founder of the university's Center for Quality and productivity improvement."

There has always been a saying that James Shore and Diana Larsen together designed an Agile maturity Model (AMM), which introduces a set of agile standards and level proposals that also include the content of the participant assessment and certification program.

That is not the case! The reason: We've just been tested in the field and introduced a model of interest and exchange, and we haven't defined any mature or immature labels for the model.

About 3 years ago, we (James shore and I) conducted a careful review of the methods and techniques we used to teach and guide how to absorb agile principles and practices in teamwork, and after a series of attempts, we got a draft of a model.

After a review by a number of reviewers and continuous revisions, we believe that the model is practical enough to spread it out. In August 2012, Martin Fowler published our article "Your Path through Agile fluency" on his personal website, which describes the agile fluency model.

"We observe that the growth of agile teams undergoes 4 different stages of fluency, and fluency is the way in which a team develops software when faced with stress," he said. If you have enough time to stay in the classroom, everyone can follow a series of good practices, but true fluency is a skilled day-to-day practice, even when you are distracted by other things, this fluency will not leave you.

For agile, we focus more on the fluency of the team than on the fluency of the individual or the organization as a whole. Agile development is essentially a team task, and whether agile can succeed across the organization depends on the fluency of the team.

The fluency of the team depends more on the ability of each member of the team, and also on the management structure, the relationship, the culture of the Organization and so on. Please don't get me wrong, this is not to say that the team's fluency is attributed to the individual, nor does it mean that the presence of a high-level member can guarantee the fluency of the entire team.

Simply put, according to our observations in multiple organizations, agile teams evolve through 4 different stages of agile fluency. We name these 4 stages: focus on value (one star fluency), delivery value (two-star fluency), optimize value (three-star fluency) and optimization system (four-star fluency). Experience tells us that different organizations seem to have found a match between the team and the business needs at each stage. We also note that the pursuit of reaching two stars, the team of Samsung or four-star fluency seems to be trying to gain fluency in a predictable pattern, first by acquiring the skills needed to work in a team, focusing on business and customer value, and then building up enough engineering know-how to deliver according to market rhythms.