Learning from Anemic Reviews: Improving your Agile Feedback Loop

Consider an agile utopia executing a lean build-measure-feedback loop for software development. How would you feel if your biggest strength of receiving early feedback from your end-users turns out to be your Achilles heel? Recently I faced this dilemma where my end-users unfortunately were a group of introvert individuals. This led to Monger project’s MVP almost declared as a failure since it did not fulfill the end-user’s requirements. Many a times, projects transform their delivery mechanism from traditional models to agile with a myth that agile is a recipe for success. In reality many projects fail since agile is not well understood by the teams. A few times (like in this case) the agile process falters not due to incorrect implementation but due to incorrect participants responsible to execute a part of the process. Experience with me what happens when your end-users falter your feedback loop just because of the nature of individuals. If you’ve ever been a part of a group (or may be in the future) where your end-users are introverts, learn from this experience report how we overcame this problem on the Monger project by strengthening our anemic reviews. At the same time, if you as a participant have been there and done that, I would love to hear about it.