Incrementally provide incremental approaches to deliver value

Hola! This is the first entry of my 'Agile' Blog. Welcome and please feel free to read it while having a coffee! This is a Blog created to document and track the last thirty-days of 2014 focusing on the Agile vision. The aim is to post real-life experiences related to Agile - somehow. As I defend in many places and conferences also to demonstrate that "Agile" is not just following ceremonies. The most important part (and surely the most difficult) is the Agile mindset. Being Agile via thinking Agile. The idea is to illustrate via my day-to-day examples that Agile is just everywhere.

Let's start off..

My company has just sent me to visit one of our teams which is based in Athens to provide with Agile training/coaching. Compared to other companies, I can say that this is quite an Agile team. However, as in other teams, there is a lack of what I called "aggressive" mindset. 

The conservative Scrum implementation tend to transform the sprint days into an encapsulated Waterfall process. Yes, we keep the scrum meetings, stand-ups, retrospectives, but the truth is that we don't move to the next phase until we are "safe enough". Having roles (Devs and  Testers) clearly separated and functions well defined and reducing the communication and interaction into a minimum. "Hey amigo, after 7 days of development (on a 2 weeks of sprint) you can test your thousand test cases". All the guys that were following up the talk agreed in that: "It's true, this is not efficient and we always end up finding the major problems at the end of the sprint" (where there is no much time to react)

Today I have presented an incremental approach. Why don't we try to deliver value at any-time if possible? Why don't we deliver - for instance - just the first 2 acceptance criteria of a user story into our Continuous Integration environment so we can respond as soon as possible to changes while we are developing the other two? Is that possible via TDD and BDD? Do they also help us to design better solutions and continuously help us to keep growing up our product? Isn't Agile about all of this? 

The audience - as expected - was a bit scared of these changes. "This is so radical and difficult to adopt". We don't grow up as genius, we do stuff better as soon as we try, we observe and then we improve. So instead of changing drastically... why don't we incrementally provide with these incremental practices?

Incrementally moving into real incremental approaches :)