How to be Agile in a non Agile team?

[Qunfeng Wang]

I'm an Agile fan, but unfortunately work in a non Agile team. How can I introduce Agile to my team? If I can't do this, how to get Agile practices as much as possible in my current team?

I've tried to import some tools often used in Agile team to my team. CruiseControl and CheckStyle. But the result is not good enough. We have no unit tests, the CruiseControl only helps us build(compile) the project when change happens in CVS. And we have to delete many good CheckStyle rules to get the build pass. Otherwise, there are hundreds of errors need to be fixed.

Everyone sits in his/her cube, I don't have the rights to let everyone sit together and pair programming.

No one in our team has TTD experience. I can't find an entry point to introduce Agile to my team. Do you have some ideas?

I don't think I'm the right person to introduce Agile. Initially, i just want to learn Agile in this process. I think i'm failed. But i still want to get some Agile experience, would you have some suggestions?

Thanks.

[Ilja Preuss]

You definitely have full control over one entry point for introducing Agility: yourself. If you want, you can start immediately to organize your work using user story cards, write your code in a test driven fashion, learn how to refactor your code etc. pp.

Once you have some experience with at least some of those techniques, you will already be in a much better position to suggest them to your coworkers - it's not just something you heard about, it's something you can tell your own stories about! And once you got some of them hooked, you can start convincing them to also try some other techniques together.

A good book on the topic is "Fearless Change".

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Originally posted by Louis Wang:
We have no unit tests,

This sounds like the low hanging fruit as it doesn't require management to allocate resources. Can you write some unit tests as part of your coding tasks? You are testing your code anyway.

When I started writing unit tests, I got agreement from my teammates that they wouldn't break any tests. At the time there weren't any so it was easy to get agreement. After I wrote some for a while, I was able to demonstrate their value.