I am starting a new series of brief articles that go through the details of the Scrum process, artifacts and roles. These articles will be one or two paragraphs each and will have a razor-sharp focus on the fine structure of Scrum. I have found that many people know the broad strokes, but are often missing important details. I hope you find these articles enjoyable and informative.
Many of you have heard that Scrum does not solve problems… it just exposes them! Mike Caspar has written a great in-depth article about why Scrum exposes problems (and why this is good!) with lots of great examples. I like his concluding remark:
Scrum does not have answers for not following Scrum.
Glen Wang, a former student of mine, has written another fantastic article about Scrum called “The Retrospective: Know Yourself and Adapt to the World“.
I love Glen’s philosophical take on things! This article is strongly recommended to any ScrumMasters, Process Facilitators and Agile Coaches out there!
I just finished reading an excellent article about a UCLA prof who, for his game theory class, allowed the students to cheat
I strongly recommend reading this because this points to one of the big cultural barriers to using Agile methods effectively: we are focused on individual performance instead of the outcomes of a group (team) of people!
The comic strip at XKCD today is brilliant. It takes a bit of effort to follow it, but the punchline is brilliant. Communication is tough. How does this apply to agile teams? You be the judge! (PS. XKCD is a great comic for geeks, but sometimes nsfw.)
Every once in a while I’m reminded of the very important question: WHY?
If you are considering SCRUM, XP, Lean or any other Agile Framework, or if you are considering using OpenAgile which is an Open Learning System, you will be changing the organization.
Many people think they can do “Agile in a bubble” and therefore not interact with the rest of the organization. You will likely find that you will quickly run into obstacles to using the Framework.
Just the iterative process alone will change the way stakeholders interact with teams, meeting rooms are scheduled, vacation schedules, communication requirements, team spaces and/or seating, the responsibilities of stakeholders, and even the interactions between team members and other departments. Because of this, working towards Agility WILL change your organization.
You may start out with an aggressive framework such as XP(Extreme Programming), or something a little more gentle such as Kanban or Lean (which let you start out as you are and visualize your process). However, please don’t kid yourself; you will eventually need to change the way things get done in the company.
Whether you are the OpenAgile Growth Facilitator, a Scrum Master trying to introduce Agile from the grass-roots, or if you are the CEO or CIO trying to introduce change from that level, you will eventually need to address the WHY for the change.
Managers and employees alike need to know why they are being asked to leave their comfort zones. In some cases they will be going against everything they have learned in the past about people management or how they should work. They need to know the reason.
Whatever level you are in at your company, please be ready to explain why you are making the change to an Agile Environment. Something like “to be more efficient”, isn’t really going to cut it.
I could think of many other reasons. You should have your OWN reasons.
If you started an adoption or transformation a while back, it’s a good idea to restate this every once in a while (if even for yourself). It will remind you why you are continuing to improve and learn every iteration.
Asking yourself once in a while will also allow you to improve your message which will likely change slightly over time as the market and your environment changes.
Please, go home TONIGHT and ask yourself WHY are we transitioning or continuing to work towards being more agile. You will need to answer this for others more than once as you continue on your journey.
If the answer to yourself is “this is our last chance to make sure we don’t disappear as a company”, that revelation is a good one as well, and you will know why you need to stand strong on the changes you are making. Either way, it all starts with the same question.
Please make sure you always know the answer to the question “Why?“.
References:
OpenAgile, Growth Facilitator
XP (Extreme Programming)
SCRUM
Kanban, Lean
I recently had a revelation about the Title “Scrum Master” and why it seems to be so confusing in some companies, especially those that are moving from Command and Control to an Agile Environment.
I was observing the activities of a new team that did not have a Scrum Master but were trying to use the SCRUM Framework. The company had unfortunately not added this role in their new SCRUM team(s). The reasons why are not important. Let’s just say, they now have those roles.
When the Scrum Master was selected, some issues showed up over a perception of that person getting a “promotion” to a management type position. They were now the “Master of the Team” (or so the perception was).
I managed to help that team out by simply reminding them the intention is that the Scrum Master role is as a Master of SCRUM, not a Master of the Team.
There are some management type abilities to be a Scrum Master for sure, but they are more directed to interfacing with the outside world and removing obstacles for the team. There are some management skills required to be able to have the confidence to keep the rules of Scrum and push back and deal with different levels within the organization.
Remember, the word is SCRUM Master, not TEAM Master, Team lead, Project manager, etc.
Of course, changing the order of the words would be inappropriate, but perhaps explaining the distinction to others might help clear up some of the confusion for your teams.
The term is SCRUM Master
Mike Caspar
Ken Schwaber, the founder of Scrum, has a blog. In it, someone mentioned that Scrum is changing. Ken responded:
If you change the Scrum framework you just simply aren’t using Scrum and are probably canceling some of its most important benefits.
Thank you Ken! I wholeheartedly agree. Every CSM class I teach, I emphasize the complete nature of Scrum as a single tool, not a collection of tools. Learning Scrum is about learning the tool, not learning how to pick and choose pieces of a tool. Let’s explore this metaphor of Scrum as a tool.
Consider a hammer. A hammer is ideally suited for pounding nails into wood. It has two parts: a head and a handle. If you take the parts and use them separately, they can still be used for pounding nails into wood… but they are very ineffective compared to the hammer (although better than using your bare fist). It is non-sensical to decompose the hammer and try to use the pieces separately. However, a hammer is not suited to other purposes such as driving screws or cutting wood. It’s perfection is not just in its form, but also in its proper application. A hammer works through a balanced combination of leverage and momentum.
Scrum is like a hammer. It has parts (daily Scrum, Sprints, ScrumMaster, etc.), but taking the parts and trying to use them separately is… you guessed it… non-sensical. The parts of Scrum combine to be an extremely effective tool for new product development. Just like a hammer, there are things you wouldn’t want to do with Scrum such as manufacturing or painting a wall. (We might not all agree on the limits of the use of Scrum… that’s something for another article.) Scrum works through a combination of pressure on the organization and “inspect and adapt” (continuous improvement).
Please. Don’t modify Scrum. If you must change things about Scrum, please stop calling it Scrum.
Almost three years ago we wrote a brief article about interruptions. In that article, we described four methods of dealing with interruptions. I would like to expand on those four methods and add three more to present a comprehensive set of options for organizations struggling with this.
Option One: Follow Scrum Strictly
The rules of Scrum are clear: if it isn’t part of the team’s work for a Sprint, then it shouldn’t be done. From the moment the team commits to work in Sprint Planning to the end of the Sprint with the Sprint Review, the team needs to be protected from interruptions. If an interruption is truly urgent enough to warrant the team’s attention mid-Sprint, then the Sprint can be canceled. This is a pretty extreme result however since it invalidates the team’s previous commitment.
The Scrum approach is based on the basic philosophy that Scrum is a system to expose the problems and obstacles in the organization. This is painful! In the case of interruptions, Scrum then is metaphorically throwing them back in the face of the organization and saying “this is bad behavior! Fix the behavior that causes so many interruptions, don’t find a way to accommodate interruptions.”
For example, many teams are faced with interruptions related to their support of the software they are creating. In Scrum, deflecting the interruptions forces the team and the organization to examine the root causes of the support issues and fix them. If the team is producing software with lots of defects, then that needs to change. If the team is producing software that is hard to use, then that needs to change. If the team is producing software without the appropriate level of user documentation, then that needs to change. But what doesn’t change is the team breaking the safety of the Sprint defined by the rules of Scrum.
Option Two: Allocate a Portion of Time to Interruptions
Given certain conditions, the amount of interruption of a team can be “stable”. If this is the case, then the team can reasonably set aside a certain percentage of their time to handle interruptions. Determining if this is possible can be done by tracking the occurrence of interruptions and the level of effort to handle them.
In a team using this method, there are two ways to allocate this time: everyone on the team gives a certain amount of time each day to handling interruptions OR one or two people on the team are committed full-time for a cycle to handling interruptions. In either case, if the amount of actual time spent on interruptions is less than the amount of time available, then that difference of time must be used carefully. Generally, the best use of this extra time is to work on resolving the root causes of interruptions. For example, if one person of a team is dedicated to dealing with interruptions, and most interruptions come from in-the-field bug support requests, then that person might spend any extra time working on fixing older lower-severity defects.
The amount of time that the team is allocated to handling interruptions should never be exceeded otherwise the team’s commitments at the start of the cycle are not really commitments.
This option is by far the most common systematic approach to dealing with defects
Option Three: Visible Negotiation of Change
Another common method of handling interruptions is the “fluorescent note card” method which requires visible stakeholder negotiation around the impact of interruptions. With this method, any time a stakeholder comes to the team with an interruption request, the ScrumMaster/Coach/Process Facilitator writes the request on a bright colored note card so that it is easy to distinguish it from the other tasks the team is working on in their current cycle. The ScrumMaster then asks the team to do a task breakdown on the card and using their normal process (whatever that is) estimates the work effort. The requesting stakeholder then has to negotiate with any other stakeholders (and in particular the Product Owner/Growth Facilitator about what work to remove from the iteration in order to make room for the new work. This process works well primarily because it makes the tradeoffs visible. It does not work so well with letting the team make and keep their commitments which can have a long-term impact on trust.
This approach requires a few things to be in place to be effective:
Option Four: Separate Team for Interruptions
This option is fairly self-explanatory and in fact is just a way of saying that you have a separate support group who deals with interruptions. The more technically capable this group is, and the more authority they have to make changes to the code/database/etc., the more effective they will be at protecting the agile teams from interruptions.
In some ways, this is a good approach because it makes the cost of interruptions very visible to the business: how much does your support team cost? If this cost is growing, then it means that the development teams are creating software that is harder and harder to support.
If you follow this approach, please ensure that you do not rotate development team members through the support team as this damages the team-building process for both the development team and the support team.
(One radical option to try as an add-on to this is to defray the cost of this support team by tying developer’s salaries to the cost of support. To make this palatable, you might simply say to the development team that any time a support person can be laid off due to improved quality in the product/system, that person’s salary will be permanently distributed and added as a raise to the salaries of the development folks. PS. I’ve never seen any organization do this – it’s just a theory.)
Option Five: Extremely Short Cycles
A less common, but interesting method for handling interruptions is to have extremely short iterations. In this method, choose your iteration length to be so short that you can always start work on urgent interruptions before anyone gets impatient! This can be exhausting, but it is one of the best ways to get the team and the organization to understand the large toll that these interruptions take.
There is a simple way to determine how long your cycle should be based on measurement. Choose a “normal” duration (e.g. one or two weeks) and for several cycles track how many interruptions are submitted to the team, and how urgent is the turn-around time on those interruptions. After several cycles, the team can then adjust its cycle length so that, on average, the team is able to start and finish a cycle in a time shorter than the expected frequency of interruptions.
For example, one team I worked with found that in general, they were getting interruptions that needed to be handled within three or four days, but more urgent interruptions were rare. They decided to use a cycle that was only two days long so that on average they would complete handling an interruption in three days. (Interruption comes half way through a cycle and is put on the backlog at the top. The next cycle they start and finish the interruption. Elapsed time is three days.)
Option Six: Status Quo / Suffering
There is nothing inherently wrong with continuing with your current approach to handling interruptions. It probably makes some people miserable, but there are also some people who really enjoy crisis and constant change. In fact, it may be part of the culture of your organization or something that is strategically important in your particular industry. That doesn’t mean you can’t be agile, but it may mean that you are making compromises where you are trading off team performance for some other benefit. it is important that if you choose to continue with your status quo, that you make the trade-off transparent. Tell everyone on your teams exactly why you are making the trade-off and what is the expected benefit of doing so.
Option Seven: Commitment Velocity
The most sophisticated option is based on measuring a special kind of velocity called “Commitment Velocity”. This is a mechanism that allows both interruptions to be handled mid-cycle and for teams to make commitments that they can keep. In the simplest terms, Commitment Velocity is the minimum historical slope of a team’s Sprint burndown.
For example, if a team in Sprint 1 has 240 units of effort at the start of the Sprint, but, partly due to interruptions, does not finish and then has 40 units of effort left unfinished at the end of the Sprint, then the Commitment Velocity (slope) of the team is 240 – 40 = 200. In their next Sprint planning meeting, they would plan such that they had at most 200 unites of effort in their Sprint plan. The team then does their second Sprint and again, partly due to interruptions, they don’t finish everything. Perhaps this second sprint started with 195 units of effort (<200) and finished with 10 units of effort remaining. Their new Commitment Velocity is 195 – 10 = 185. They do a third sprint, but they finish everything.
It is tempting for the team to perhaps take an average – maybe they finished 200 units of effort in their third Sprint so they average 200, 185 and 200 leaving 195. This is not Commitment Velocity. By definition, an average means that the team will successfully complete all their work 50% of the time.
Instead, the team maintains its Commitment Velocity of 185 for their fourth Sprint. By the law of large numbers and the central limit theorem, as the team uses this tool of Commitment Velocity for more and more Sprints, eventually their ability to keep their commitments, even with interruptions) will become closer and closer to 100% certain.
Selecting an Option
Ultimately, the most important thing in selecting one of these options is to do so consciously and in the spirit of learning that underlies agile methods. Choose an option and then stick with it long enough to truly understand if it is working for you or not.
There are some things to consider as well:
Recently, I was able to witness a remarkable event in a company that is relatively new to Agile. They have several teams at about Sprint 12, with several new teams just starting up. Many of their processes are waterfall based.
A failed waterfall project was moved to an existing Agile Team.
In the second Sprint, the Team (feeling trust in the organization and the process), came to the Scrum Master and said, “We’d like you to talk to management. We are not sure this project should be using the platform we develop on. We think another team’s platform may be more appropriate”.
The company had spent time developing a “specification document” for this “project” before Agile was introduced. There were detailed specifications as to how the product was to be created and which platform to use. NONE of this was done with the benefit of asking those that would actually be doing the work.
The project was initiated before learning about applying Agile. One developer was tasked with following the specification. After 2-3 months of frustration, the developer left. This left the company in a bad position. Not only was the project incomplete, but there was also no knowledge transfer. The project was basically stopped.
As Agile was now the new target way of doing things, the project (and new developer hired through the previous process) were added to an existing SCRUM team. The team is using one week Sprints.
After only two Sprints (two weeks), the team had recognized the futility of the approach that was “specified” and took this to management.
Traditionally, large organizations staff for projects. In an environment such as this, how could team members be expected to be truthful and honest about the state of affairs? It would mean the end of their jobs or contracts.
The key here is to allow teams to stick together. Not only will you avoid losing all the efficiency the team has built up, but you will also allow them to be truthful about their situation.
If you are a manager reading this, ask yourself. “Do I want to know that things will go wrong at the beginning of the project or wait until 5 months have gone by to be told, ‘We knew it would never work”". Or even worse… “We knew the product owner was asking for ridiculous features that had no Return on Investment for the company, but hey, you hired us for this contract. We just follow instructions”.
As it turned out, the project did continue with the current team, but with some changes to the specification. The parts of the system that were going to be problems in 5 months were re-evaluated and were removed as they really did not have any real value to the company. It was then decided to stick with the same platform.
Discussions did occur regarding moving to the alternate platform, but were deemed unnecessary after open discussion between the teams and the managers involved. Realistic expectations were set based on value to the company.
Sometimes features are absolutely mandatory for the product. This cannot and should not be taken away from the process. What we gain here is that we are able to have a discussion about necessity. In the end, the business has to decide what is valuable, not the development team.
In a case like this, ask yourself, “If my team is very against this, maybe I should at least think about it”.
The company is working in a very short iterative environment, they quickly recognized a flaw in the system design and dealt with it after only 2 weeks into a several month project.
Working incrementally allows the company to “Inspect and Adapt” on a regular basis. This has to include the question, “Does this still make sense?”. If you need to go backwards, let it be to reverse one or two Sprints of work, not months, or even years.
Fortunately, for the company, the product will come out on time, with appropriate technology based on Return on Investment, and likely with significant cost savings over the initial design. This will also allow the team to get started on other high value projects. Talk about win-win.
This project could have gone to another team. It would not have been negative for the first team. The next project would have just come down the pipe for them.
The early signs helped adjust the “expectations” and everyone is moving forward with a clear understanding that they are on a more appropriate path going forward.
For those of you out there trying to convince companies (or yourselves) that Agile is an effective framework, don’t be afraid to talk about “RISK MITIGATION“.
Think about it this way; The company wants to know early on that there will be a problem, not near the end of the project. This is part of the purposeful transparency of any Agile framework.
Mike Caspar
Mike Caspar’s Blog
A manager I am working with recently sent me this link. I have seen this topic discussed before, but never so nicely worded. Thanks Charles.
It is a discussion about how Jazz music is different than Classical music and how that knowledge could help to understand Agility.
Great post. I think we’ll hang this on the wall somewhere in the team room.
“I now can see why Corporations have such a hard time identifying the Scrum Master in their organizations. Scrum Masters basically don’t fit either category, yet most corporate hiring is done based on hiring of “leaders” and “managers”.”
For the complete text click here
I have worked with a lot of people, teams and organizations over the last 8 years helping them to adopt Scrum and I have seen some interesting patterns about where Scrum works well and where it doesn’t work so well. I wanted to share my observations to see if they correlate with what other people are experiencing.
So first off, I want to describe what I mean by Scrum working well:
So now I can describe where I have observed Scrum to work really well:
I have also seen Scrum be inappropriate and not lead to the results I mentioned above:
Scrum can definitely transform the world of product development. It can definitely act as a catalyst to get teams and organizations out of crisis. But that isn’t the whole world of work. I’m also concerned about the idea of using Scrum for general project management. There might be some good practices that are part of Scrum that would also be valuable in general project management (e.g. regular retrospectives, daily team meetings) but that doesn’t make Scrum a general project management framework.
I don’t claim that any of the above observations are “correct”. That’s partly why I am sharing – I would love to have a good discussion here about this because I think it is critical for us as Agilists to be able to answer this question well when we are asked: “what is Scrum good for?” – particularly since Scrum is by far the most popular Agile method.
I would love to hear other people’s observations about where Scrum works well (as I have defined “well” above) vs. where it either is only a modest improvement to existing approaches or where it might even not work at all.
A few weeks ago, David Parker and I had a conversation about some of the differences between Scrum and OpenAgile. We hit upon one really interesting thing: Scrum strongly emphasizes that it is a purely empirical approach to doing work… and OpenAgile does not make that claim. In fact, OpenAgile, while it includes empiricism, is definitely not an empirical process framework.
Ken Schwaber has long been adamant about empiricism with his phrase “Inspect and Adapt” which is the core of Scrum. All the artifacts, meetings and roles of Scrum are meant to be supportive of the inspect and adapt approach in a product development environment. A Scrum self-organizing team inspects and adapts on the product it is building. It inspects and adapts on the obstacles that arise as it does its work. It inspects and adapts on all the organizational processes, technical tools, team dynamics,… everything! This is Good.
But Scrum, in its pure empiricism, also lacks something.
OpenAgile has components of Scrum’s empiricism. Certainly, OpenAgile owes a great deal to Scrum. The concept of “Systematic Learning”, one of the foundations of OpenAgile, is similar to Scrum’s empirical framework. The process structure of OpenAgile is also similar to that of Scrum with short cycles of work delivering value on a regular basis. The main difference comes from a simple concept: Guidance.
In OpenAgile, guidance is a critical component of systematic learning. Guidance allows someone outside the team to intervene. This might be a manager, a stakeholder, a family member… anyone who sees things from an “outside” perspective. It might also be someone within the team pulling in guidance: asking for advice, doing a web search, reading a book, or even meditating in the hope of inspiration.
In Scrum, there are some very strong boundaries around outsiders providing guidance. No changes mid-sprint. All requests for work go through the Team’s Product Owner. The ScrumMaster “protects” the team from outside interruptions. ”Chickens” cannot participate in the Daily Scrum. The team self-organizes with individuals volunteering for specific tasks. Team members discard all organizational titles when working within a Scrum team. All of these boundaries support a pure empirical approach to working. They also provide a form of safety for the team. This safety is deemed necessary with the implication that stuff from outside the team is dangerous.
In OpenAgile, guidance comes to the team through the conduit of love. Yes… love.
The team develops a love for its work. This love then opens the team members to guidance. Think of the opposite: if I hate my work, I’m not likely to be interested in taking any advice about how to do it better. If I love my work, I will always be seeking ways to improve it.
Of course, love is not binary. It’s not on or off. In that continuum, the more an OpenAgile team loves its work, the more receptive it will be to guidance. The more receptive to guidance, the more sources of guidance will be “safe”. And the less reliance on pure empiricism will be necessary.
Let’s be frank: pure empiricism, in its most extreme form, means that Scrum teams would re-invent things that may have already been invented many times before. In the Scrum community, the most obvious example of this is the Agile engineering practices that come from Extreme Programming. Scrum teams seem remarkably resistant to adopting these practices at the outset… despite the fact that eventually most Scrum teams working in software succeed or fail based on their eventual adoption of these practices. Scrum teams are often left without the guidance that XP practices can help them. Instead Scrum teams seem expected to re-discover XP practices on their own.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that Scrum is fatally flawed. In fact, I think that in some environments, where teams truly are unsafe, where people tend to hate their work, where dysfunctional bureaucracy is deeply embedded in the organizations culture… in these environments Scrum is actually the right place to start. Scrum is great for product development in high-crisis situations: save your product with Scrum!
OpenAgile, by accepting guidance into its framework, allows teams to progress rapidly when they can leverage other people’s learning. Scrum does not dis-allow this, but it sets up an environment where the team culture tends towards the “Not Invented Here” syndrome. OpenAgile puts teams on the other path: the path of allowing for greater and greater learning from others.
Recently, I was helping a friend of mine introduce OpenAgile into their environment. They are a software development house with some local and some overseas developers. I am occasionally following up with my friend to see how they are doing.
Their development has been going well since adopting Agile practices with the exception of a recurring problem with “returning bugs”.
A bug will be discovered, fixed, and then several weeks later will show up again after some other modifications. This is a sure sign that Test Driven Development is not happening.
Consider the following:
Introduce the Test Driven Development Mindset.
| Shipment Entry Screen Tests | ||
|---|---|---|
| Shipper | Field is Empty, CTRL-N pressed | List Appears, paged 20 at a time, sorted Alphabetically by Company Name within 3 seconds |
| Shipper | Field has “ABC”, CTRL-N pressed | List Appears (filtered to show all companies containing “ABC” in the company name), paged 20 at a time, sorted Alphabetically by Company Name within 3 seconds |
| Shipper | Field has an invalid entry “INVALID”, CTRL-N pressed | Within 3 seconds, a pop-up appears indicating “NO COMPANY FOUND”, the shipper field is blanked and the cursor is returned to that location. The popup disappears. |
If any developer works on that screen, before checking in, they need to do all the tests on the SHIPMENT ENTRY TESTS document to ensure they have not broken anything.Don’t get me wrong. The idea is not to document the entire screen up front! Try to avoid designing the ENTIRE UI up front in this way. That has it’s own non-agile problems. This is just an easy way to introduce future changes using a different mindset.In my example above, there is a field called “Mode of Transport”. It currently shows a list of numbers which internal employees “KNOW” from years of experience with the application. When that number is selected, it gets converted into something like “MAIL”, “COURIER”, when it is printed on the final document. Your team has agreed to do work to have it show the appropriate labels in a drop down on the screen.Traditionally (non-test mindset), you would send out an email or open up an issue with a request for this change. Then, the cycle will continue again. As time goes by, you will always need to re-check this is working properly.
Try something like this instead:
When you have finished your planning and have decided this “story” or “feature” will be introduced to this cycle or Sprint, simply modify this document as follows;
| Shipment Entry Screen Tests | ||
|---|---|---|
| Shipper | Field is Empty, CTRL-N pressed | List Appears, paged 20 at a time, sorted Alphabetically by Company Name within 3 seconds |
| Shipper | Field has “ABC”, CTRL-N pressed | List Appears (filtered to show all companies containing “ABC” in the company name), paged 20 at a time, sorted Alphabetically by Company Name within 3 seconds |
| Shipper | Field has an invalid entry “INVALID”, CTRL-N pressed | Within 3 seconds, a pop-up appears indicating “NO COMPANY FOUND”, the shipper field is blanked and the cursor is returned to that location. The popup disappears. |
| Mode of Transport | Entry into Field | Within 1 second, when entering this field, a drop-down list appears show full descriptions, sorted alphabetically by Mode of Transport. |
Granted, the tests will eventually become cumbersome. However, please remember that someone will eventually be testing these screens and find these bugs in a never ending circle. My friend found that every morning they were having to go through all the screens to see what “new things” were broken.
Why not just try to get it right during your Cycle or Sprint ?
In the above example, as soon as someone takes on this task, they will have a failing test (Red), they will do what they need to do to get the test to pass (Green), and then will adjust the code to be efficient (Re-factor).
Although Test Driven Development is better done at other places in the code, this is a great way to introduce the “Mindset” into your team.
Someone will eventually say “This is getting to be a hassle. Can we automate it somehow?”, which as an Agile person is exactly the words you eventually want to hear.
Maybe now, you can start to introduce it at the Unit Test, or Functional Test or whatever level is appropriate to your organization. There are some more formal ways of doing TDD such as Extreme Programming (XP).
The important thing is that your company will have shifted to a Test Driven Mindset.
The quality of your product will increase and stay that way and the need to go back and fix old bugs in a never ending cycle can soon be a thing of the past.