Category: scope

My First Agile Project Part 5: Our Top 5 Agile Mistakes

September 29, 2008 by mattgrommes

Picture courtesy of DWQ Online@flickr

In the previous parts of this series (1, 2, 3, 4), I went into a lot of the initial issues of how we ran our project and some of the things we did wrong. For Part 5, I'm going to focus on the 5 big mistakes we made in the project before I move onto another phase of the series.

For some background, the project was to integrate an off-the-shelf (but highly customizable) billing system to replace an aging custom Oracle forms app. This was our company's first foray into Scrum and Agile as well as the first Agile experience for most of the development team. After we sailed past our second management-imposed deadline I started thinking about how we could correct our process for this project and the next ones we do, which led me to write it all down in this series. Keep reading for the Top 5 mistakes we made (in no particular order). Where possible I also give some detail about how we've worked on correcting our process. I hope this list helps you avoid these mistakes and make your own all-new ones. :)