Agile Development

What are you building?

That reminds me of a story about three masons hard at work on a hot day. The first looked miserable and when asked what he was doing, he answered, "I'm breaking my back all day working stone." The second stone mason seemed more purposeful, and when asked what he was doing, he answered, "I am building a wall." The third stone mason was absolutely cheerful, smiling and working as if the heat did not bother him. When asked what he was doing, he said, "I am building a cathedral."

When I first heard this story, it resonated with me. Too many times people working in agile environments are like the first stone mason, doing uncreative, boring and repetitive work, not building anything one would recognize other than a component. Even in the best cases, team members or even managers may only recognize that they are building a wall like the second stone mason, and never truly see how their end product makes the lives of end users better.

Unfortunately, too many teams, despite transitioning to Agile, are still operating as component teams where each team member work on a particular component or layer, and his or her responsibilities remain within these boundaries.

You can easily identify these teams by looking into their backlog, as stories will not be written as end-to-end functionality of a feature. Not surprising, the morale of team members is usually very low and there is no product ownership.

An alternate approach to component teams is to use feature teams. Feature teams are cross-functional teams and are responsible for getting a feature from Not Started to Done. However, this often requires changes that many organizations are not willing to make.

So how would you answer if you were asked "What are you building?”