Way back when, when we were learning Agile as a company, we sometimes hesitated to present it as such to our clients. We weren't sure how clients would take it. We took what might call it a "stealth Agile" approach. Over time we got more confident with it and could point to successes as well as a few failures. But we learned from both. From that experience we extracted a few rules of thumb that are good to remember. In this post, I want to share those rules of thumb with you.

Keeping aligned is really important to Agile teams and, according to the Scrum methodology, daily standup meetings are the tool of choice for that. When done effectively, they provide visibility and transparency to all stakeholders. Just as importantly, they help the team catch problems early.

In a recent post, Tim Kastelle pointed out that "how you define a problem determines if you can solve it."  But even if you start with the right question, how you approach the solution makes the difference between whether you'll up with an innovation or more-of-the-same.