You read this all the time online – people complaining that their team is doing some weird variant of agile and even that it failed because they didn’t find the mythical “true agile” way. Add to that the fact that being developers we tend to see things, how shall I say, a little more black and white than most.
Don’t worry about “not doing it right” and instead focus on how you are improving. Where were you int he past and where are you now? What’s next? Focus on that. Too many times people assume that because their agile adoption is imperfect they are missing some critical part or have generally failed. You may be right! But, it doesn’t really matter. In my experience you shouldn’t wait around for the perfect process/team/org adoption to arrive. Just keep moving and keep improving. Plan on team cohesion around a workable process taking a year or so. Most of that year will seem pretty wonky but go with it and don’t fret. Don’t sweat the fact that after 6 month your velocity is still erratic, or your stories are too open ended, or your product owner doesn’t have a vision (introduce them to Customer Development!), or that you can’t keep your standups focused, or that you don’t pair enough, or that storypoints don’t map to reality, or that you have too many bugs that they trow off your planning, or that you can’t really ship every iteration, or that you can’t test enough, or that you test too much, or…
Take a breath and keep going.
