It seems to me that any good process should provide assistance in four basic areas.
- Predictability
- Quality
- Throughput
- Morale
Predictability is important because you want to be able to tell people approximately how long something will take. Quality is important for obvious reasons. Throughput, the amount of work you get done, should be positively impacted, and morale should go up if your process is a competent one.
Agile is handy for the above if you can create a meaningful velocity because it serves all four areas. If you can effectively break down and point stories and have a meaningful velocity, you can tell people more accurate information about when you will be done. If you effectively break down and point stories and have a meaningful velocity you can measure throughput and know if changes you make increase or decrease your throughput. If you effectively break down and point stories with the input of test and business stakeholders quality should theoretically improve, as well as predictability as stakeholders are more likely to get what they are asking for. If you effectively break down and point stories, and involve all team members as equals, morale is likely to be high.
Stand up meetings are nice, but that does not make for effective Agile. What makes for effective agile is tracking and maintaining an effective velocity. To do so means you are effectively breaking down work into stories that testers and business agree are of value and are done. Agile is really organizing yourself so you can create and track a meaningful velocity. By doing this good things collaterally happen. If you have stand up meetings, and scrum masters and task boards and no velocity you are doing something, but it isn’t Agile as far as I’m concerned. Have only the meetings and artifacts required to track and maintain a meaningful velocity and the rest will take care of itself.
When a group says they embrace Agile, ask them what their team’s velocities are and how long they’ve tracked them. If blank stares are the response, then run.