We’ve all heard of the KISS principle. It stands for: keep it simple, stupid.

Well I want to apply it to software development leadership. Particularly those leaders that are in an agile context.

I’ve been hearing a tremendous amount of pushback and whining amongst leaders in agile contexts of late. What you say. How can this be?

Here’s a sampling of the running types of dialogue (complaints, whining, pushback, etc.) that I’m referring to:

We’ve already committed to customers a release date for a new, highly profitable product by June 1. However, the agile teams keep saying it will take till January. I thought agile would allow us to get more…faster. It’s sounds like every other time when the teams couldn’t seem to meet our demands. Where’s the creativity? Where’s the can-do attitude? Where’s the commitment to hard work? Where’s the agility?

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I’d like to begin this post by trying to describe some of the anti-patterns or characteristics of non-transparent work behaviors. This list will probably not be complete, but it should give you a sense of the other side of the transparency fence—obfuscation.

There are several show-stopping defects in your current code base and you are either not tackling them with your best people or hoping their intermittent nature won’t surface inopportunely before general release. So essentially you are throwing a few bodies at the problem and hoping nobody truly notices.

...If you’re transparent, you must acknowledge and manage quality—being willing to “stop the line” if things aren’t’ right and fix them. This takes courage and commitment.

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