After years of working with Scrum teams from various organizations, I have learned that there is not a “one size fits all” approach to working on an Agile team. Every team is unique, based on particular team dynamics and on where the team is in their Agile journey. Operating in an Agile environment is really more of an art than a science.

I had been working as a technical writer for close to 10 years before I started working with my first Scrum team. In the beginning, that team called themselves an Agile team, but really, they were simply delivering user interface (UI) features every two weeks. They did not review work with a product owner or stakeholders nor did they work with a product owner to establish priorities. They worked independently of the database team that supported the UI. As the organization began to see benefits of an Agile approach, Agile coaches were brought in to help the UI teams operate in a truer Agile sense and helped other teams transition to Agile. I became a Certified Scrum master so that I could better understand how my technical writing team could work within that model. Since that time, I have worked with a number of software development and DevOps teams that have adopted Agile processes. The most successful teams take evaluation of their processes seriously and are constantly looking for ways to improve.

I wrote The Art of Agility: A Guide to Optimizing Scrum Teams to provide information to teams on how they can transition to a Scrum development strategy or how to make improvements to their processes once they have worked within the Scrum framework. With the information in this book, you can realize the efficiencies that are supposed to be inherent with self-organizing teams working in short development cycles.

You can find the book for free online:

https://mindylindsey.github.io/art-of-agility/