Agile is one of my favorite buzzwords, just like culture. Many people talk about it, sell courses and structures about it… and have no idea what they are talking about. We have tons of Agile companies, Agile Software Development Teams, and Agile Projects, but they can be easily misunderstood.
What does Agile even mean? Why is there so much controversy about it, and most importantly, should you implement Agile in your business and structure your software development team structure around it?
First of all, being Agile is good for business. According to the PMI Pulse of the Profession 2024 Report, 39% of the respondents employing an Agile project management approach had the highest average project performance rate, with an overall project success rate of 75.4%. Meanwhile, 48% of Hybrid respondents (using a traditional method and some Agile methodologies) achieved a smaller percentage of success, 74.6%.
McKinsey showed that Agile companies are more resilient than others. For example, they showed that telco operators that adopted a mature Agile operating model before the COVID-19 pandemic responded significantly faster (up to two times faster than non-Agile telcos). So, it’s undeniable that being Agile is worthy of your time, dedication, and money.
Second, while many Agile coaches out there talk about implementing Agile, Agile is not something that you implement. It’s not a substantive; it’s an adjective.
You are Agile or not in the same way you are healthy or not. If you eat a healthy salad every Sunday and eat fast food garbage for the rest of the week, you’re not healthy. If you are nice to your partner but cheat on them once per month, you are not a good husband or wife.
The same thing goes for being Agile: If you just bring some terms and processes, likely from Scrum, but do not incorporate its Values and Principles into your business, you will not be Agile. And this is where many businesses fail; they adopt tons of Agile practices without understanding what this is about.
For those companies that are really Agile, they couldn’t be more successful; for those who want to label themselves as Agile without understanding its core, they keep asking themselves what is going wrong.
What is Agile?
Agile is a philosophy of setting goals, driving change, executing tasks, making an analysis of what has been done, and changing course to the next goal. Agile prioritizes connection with customers and employees, having an MVP (Minimum Viable Product, finished, not perfect) and changing plans as fast (or as Agile) as possible.
It’s different from the traditional worldview of management, where plans had to be followed at any cost, processes were sacred and untouchable, and product value was defined by the view of a big corpo and not the market.
In short, Agile is about the management being flexible and adaptable. All Agile frameworks and good practices come from that view. If you don’t understand this raison d’être, no Agile team structure will help you.
A long time ago, in the 1990s, there was a group of seventeen talented developers who were tired of suffering from traditional management. These methods not only made them waste time but also put a lot of weight on their shoulders.
So, they decided it was time to think of a new alternative. They all had this question in their minds: How to structure a software development team effectively?
All of them have been testing their ideas during the 90s; some of them were the founders of Scrum, Extreme Programming, and Adaptive Software Development.
They were in touch with each other and they decided to hold a meeting. After gathering and discussing some ideas, they came up with a lightweight philosophy called Agile, and together they published the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.
Dave Thomas, one of the Agile Manifesto signers, had a whole speech about Agile at the GoTo Conference in 2015. He defined being Agile in a simple PowerPoint slide.
Agility — What To Do?
- Find out where you are
- Take a small step towards your goal
- Adjust your understanding based on what you learned
- Repeat
Agility — How To Do It?
- When faced with two or more alternatives that deliver roughly the same value, take the path that makes future change easier.
Agile is so effective that the Project Management Institute took notice of it and decided to study more about it and compile all the good practices related to Agile. They wrote the Agile Practice Guide (a top-tier guide on Agile).
Agile Principles and Values
Christians have the Ten Commandments, Samurai follow the Bushidō, the Jedi have the Jedi Code, and the Democracies have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Agile companies, software development teams, and projects have the Agile Manifesto, which describes Four Values and Twelve Principles. These are not mere gimmicks, you will figure out on the way or perks that you will get rid of whenever you see an opportunity.
Four Values and the Twelve Principles
If you do not uphold these values and principles and values, you won’t be Agile. Here is a breakdown of the Four Values:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Respond to change over following a plan.
Here’s a breakdown of the 12 principles:
- Value: Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
- Flexibility: Welcome changing requirements, even late in development.
- Frequency: Deliver working software frequently, from every couple of weeks to every couple of months, with a preference for the shorter timescale.
- Union: Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
- Motivation: Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
- Communication: The most effective and efficient method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
- Functionality: Working software is the primary measure of progress.
- Sustainability: Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
- Revision: Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
- Simplicity: the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.
- Organization: The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
- Self-Evaluation: At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
Solving the Biggest Misconceptions About Agile
Before discussing Agile and how to implement its frameworks, we have to address the elephant in the room. Most people talk about Agile without understanding how it actually works. I am tired of scrolling through Google Search and finding articles defining Agile as a framework or methodology, then describing Scrum — without calling it by name, but calling it the “Agile method” or “Agile something”.
Think about it. If you were about to undergo a heart surgery… Would you trust a doctor who doesn`t remember the names of all the parts of the heart?
Digital’s 17th State of Agile Report says that, in 2022, the companies’ satisfaction with Agile was about 72% and it dropped to 59% in 2023 — still a good margin, but why had it dropped?
The reason, says the report, “their company still has many legacy systems requiring a mixed approach”. In other words, you must implement Agile principles and values correctly to extract its benefits; you have to understand the difference between Agile and its frameworks, or you are doomed to fail. Here are the mistakes you must avoid at all costs.
1. Agile and Scrum are not the same
Agile is a philosophy, guided by principles and values, breaking old and traditional paradigms of management and software development.
Scrum is a framework, the most common and the oldest Agile framework. But there are others, like: Disciplined Agile (a mix between Lean and Scrum), Kanban, Extreme Programming (XP) etc.
2. Traditional approaches are compatible with Agile principles
While I am a big defender of changing traditional management, Agile is 100% compatible. Agile can even spark the needed change for a software development team or a company to restructure itself into a better version of itself, but it doesn’t necessarily need to change its traditional ways.
However, you will benefit from Agile the most when you change your software development team structure to accommodate Agile principles and values. Do you remember when I showed you Digital’s 17th State of Agile Report and showed you the reason why some companies are dissatisfied using Agile? They weren’t allowing Agile to change their company culture!
3. Agile allows change
It does. It lives by it. It’s not a cult. The whole point of Agile is to respond to changes as quickly as possible, therefore the name. The thing is: which changes does your software development team structure have to respond? Stakeholders? Unexpected bugs? If the framework you had chosen doesn’t have a way to respond to the changes, you are free to change the framework to suit your needs. Frameworks are toolboxes, not Gospels.
4. Don’t just pay lip service
Talking about Scrum meetings and using Agile terms won’t magically turn your project into an Agile project. Adopting the names and rituals without understanding the principles and values of Agile will turn your company into chaos.
For example, let’s say you implement Scrum without understanding Agile principles and values. That will turn the Product Manager and the Scrum Master into “Boss 1” and “Boss 2”. You will make them compete for the control of your software development team structure. It will be a terrible scenario where the whole team is paralyzed due to conflict.
How to Build an Agile Team Structure
To become Agile effectively in your software development team structure, you must understand that Agile is a philosophy and a way to think and interact. Only then, you may adopt an Agile framework. Here is how you become Agile effectively:
1. Understand and adopt values and principles from the Agile Manifesto
This is the most important step by far. If you implement an Agile framework without understanding the values and principles, everything will go FUBAR. Yes, being Agile will allow your software development team structure to develop software with ease… only if you are committed to:
- Focus on individuals and interactions over nice tools or operational processes;
- Have a program that works as intended rather than writing a gargantuan and extensive documentation – unless you love making your devs waste time;
- Collaborate with the stakeholders rather than doing only what is written in a contract;
- Respond to change rather than getting frustrated because you designed a perfect, careful plan, and now no one will follow it anymore.
I can’t emphasize it enough. This is the essential requirement for being Agile. Period.
2. Ask constant questions about the job and look for new ways to work
Since you are willing to answer to change, you are willing to change the workflow. Maybe even going remote. Why not?
There is a book that I love, studied in many MBA courses, called The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt.
The Goal is a story about a factory manager obsessed with making people, causing bottlenecks, and making the factory produce less and less by day. Finally, he meets a mentor who shows him some process management techniques, and they change the factory workflow. The factory unleashes its hidden potential, and it produces as never before.
The same can happen with your software development team structure and even to your company. Are you up to the challenge?
3. Prioritize collaboration and interaction between people
Teamwork, feedback, and improvement are more important than your expensive hardware. What scares most AI companies the most about DeepSeek is that their team had no access to certain GPUs crucial to AI development, and yet they developed an AI as good as the best in the US.
While many people seem to be impressed with the feat — and, in fact, it holds merit — I bet that they know how to collaborate well with each other. They are young programmers in their 20s, without the stubbornness of “I have been working like this for decades and won’t change”.
Don’t forget to build trust and effective communication.
4. Focus on delivering value incrementally
Incremental delivery focuses on delivering a series of smaller pieces of the project over time, instead of delivering the entire project at once. It’s important to celebrate the first values, that is, the first part of the project done well. In that way, the software development team can track the progress more easily.
5. Be open and ready to respond to the changes
The Market changes and the Stakeholders also change their minds often. You have two options. Tell them “It’s not in the contract,” and they will change for a company that changes things as they wish. Or you can change the project and keep track of the market’s needs and your stakeholders as well. It’s up to you.
You will notice I am not giving practical examples and good practices here. There is no quick-and-dirty guide: Each team needs to build its way towards Agile principles and values, using an Agile framework as a starting point. As soon as you choose an Agile framework for your software development team, we can talk about practical examples.
Also, you must acknowledge that Agile works not only on projects but throughout the company as a whole. It will be much easier for your team if you adhere to Agile philosophy as a business and not only as a structure for your software development team.
Scrum: An example of an Agile Team Structure
As soon as everyone understands Agile principles and values, it will be easier to implement any Agile framework suited for your software development team structure.
As an example, I will describe Scrum, since it’s the most widespread, and when people talk about Agile, they are usually confusing it with Scrum.
Scrum works well for software development teams, but you are free to use any other Agile framework and even mix them! For example, you may have a Scrum Team that uses a Kanban board, avoids wastes like in Lean, and follows some XP good practices. This example has at least four Agile frameworks and that is pretty common!
1. Scrum Teams
Scrum Team has three main roles: Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Developers.
The Product Owner is the social face of the Scrum Team. He talks with the stakeholders, makes market analysis, and informs the Scrum Master about the feedback on the project.
The Scrum Master is the mastermind and manager. He is responsible for getting the feedback provided by the Product Owner, planning the project, its objectives according to the stakeholders’ interests and the market trends. Then he distributes the tasks and assigns them to the developers.
The Developers will develop the software under the guidance of the Scrum Master.
2. OKR and KPIs
As soon as you have the Scrum Team, the first step is to define a SMART objective that signals the project’s success.
Here are some examples of specific objectives: an institutional website, a landing page, a web app, a custom program for internal usage…
To measure the success of your project, you need to attach the objective to a metric.
We call this method Objective and Key Results. The Key Results are also called Key Performance Indicators.
3. Break your objectives down into a Backlog
Now you will take a big hammer and smash that objective into smaller tasks.
For example, let’s say your software development team will develop an institutional website tied to a web application.
The tasks needed for that would be: buying the domain and hosting service, installing WordPress and the needed plugins, writing the text for the website, choosing a programming language for the web application, planning the layout…
Put all those tasks in a big list. That list will be in your Backlog.
4. Plan the first Sprint
There are many tasks with a dependence relationship with each other.
For example: You can’t program the web app before choosing the programming language in the same way you can’t prepare a sandwich before getting its ingredients.
Your Scrum Master will choose which tasks must be done first. A good practice is to use an ICE Score.
I for Impact, C for Confidence, and E for Ease.
- Impact: How much the task will impact a key metric.
- Confidence: The certainty that the team will deliver the task.
- Ease: The level of effort required to complete the project.
Assign a score from 1 to 10 for each factor (1 being low, 10 being high). Multiply them by each other. The tasks with the biggest ICE Score must be done first.
A Sprint is a time, usually a week or a month. The Scrum Master will take into account both of dependence between tasks and the ICE Score while planning the Sprint.
5. Daily Scrum
The team will meet every day to evaluate their progress in terms of quality. They will ask themselves the following questions:
- What did we do yesterday?
- What are we going to do today?
- Any blocks on our progress? From the stakeholders? From the team itself? From the universe?
In that way, the team will remember what they must do and not fool around. If you want to know the progress, go to the meeting with them.
6. Sprint Review and Retrospective
The team will meet every week to evaluate their progress, this time, in terms of quantity. They will ask themselves the following questions:
- What has been delivered?
- Is it done? (by a Definition of Done)
- What should we have done better during the week?
7. Backlog Update
Before planning a new Sprint, the Scrum Master has to decide what has to be removed from the Backlog (Tasks Done or Canceled).
He also may have to add new tasks to the Backlog, since previous tasks allow the availability of new ones.
8. Plan a New Sprint
Step four starts again. The cycle continues until the end of the project.
Conclusion
Agile enables a software development team to deliver software on time to market. It facilitates communication between the team and stakeholders. Agile also identifies bottlenecks and addresses them quickly and swiftly. Finally, it adapts to any circumstances as if your company were water.
Take note that Agile is not a magical solution to stubbornness. You may have noticed while reading about Scrum that an Agile Team Structure is very flexible and adaptable, ready to change course at any moment. However, if the company’s decision-makers do not desire changes in the project, an Agile Team Structure can’t do much.
I already mentioned Digital’s 17th State of Agile Report. Agile teams can’t deliver value if the company focuses on processes instead of people, or if the executives want to stick to a failed plan.
Agile teams can deliver value if you are ready to take the Agile step alongside your team. It pays off, so why don’t you try it now?
Now, maybe you need to a hire a dev, a scrum master or a product owner to get ready and start it as soon as possible. Contact us and we will find you the best remote hire in the world!
