Agile Onion
A Scrum Master I was working with once pointed me to the concept of the Agile Onion. In a nutshell (pun intended), there are five layers to the onion. From outermost to innermost, they’re mindset, values, principles, practices, and tools and processes.
It may look counterintuitive that mindset isn’t at the core and why tools and processes aren’t the outermost layer. It does make sense though: everything begins with the mindset, once you’ve adopted that, you can go deeper, until you reach the concrete implementation.
This reminded me of seniority (as in: maturity, not: age). Seniority, too, comes with a mindset. Let’s take engineering as an example domain. A truly senior engineer will not engage in programming language or editor wars and tabs-vs.-spaces conflict unless in jest. Knowing a broad range of tools and applying the one that’s most fit for the job is what makes a senior. Of course there are preferences, but they’re not fussed about.
In that vein, it would be fair to say that a solid agile mindset denotes a certain seniority when it comes to processes. Not bad.
Tags: work