Scaling Agile How to leverage Agile Techniques in the Enterprise

1. ScalingAgileHow to leverage Agile Techniques in the Enterprise Presented by: Bryan Campbell www.bryancampbell.com bryan@bryancampbell.com http://blog.bryancampbell.com

2. About the Presenter – Bryan Campbell • More than 20 years of IT experience across a wide range of industries and organizations (government, public, private) • The last 8 years focused on Agile and UP software development initiatives. • Project and Program Manager of a wide range of small and very large projects. • Extensive experience working in large scale enterprise environments (Telcos, Utilities, Software, Government, Finance) • Recently the VP of Delivery Services for a consulting company specializing in agile software development. • Articles and blog can be found at www.bryancampbell.com

3. Agenda • Agile Explained • The Benefits of Agile • Challenges with Enterprise Adoption of Agile Techniques • Scaling Agile • The Future • Links

4. What Exactly is Agile? • Evolved in the last 1990s in response to the burdens of heavy documentation and frequent requirements change. • Essentially a ‘family’ of development processes such as Scrum, XP, Adaptive Software Development, Feature Driven Development, Crystal Clear and others (links on the last page) • Emphasizes (amongst other things) • face-to-face communication, • working software as the primary demonstration of progress, • emphasis on effective engineering techniques (Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration, Refactoring to Design Patterns), • frequent demonstrations of progress • Business and developer collaboration • Retrospectives and continuous improvement • Adopts a ‘it’s done when it’s done’ approach over excessive estimating and project completion predictions and has a ‘Just Do It’ feel.

5. Agile Manifesto www.agilemanifesto.org • Customer satisfaction by rapid, continuous delivery of useful software • Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months) • Working software is the principal measure of progress • Even late changes in requirements are welcomed • Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers • Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (Co-location) • Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted • Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design • Simplicity • Self-organizing teams • Regular adaptation to changing circumstances

6. Agile Emphasizes • Agile projects have several core attributes: • Requirements are managed in a lightweight fashion, usually with ‘user stories’, short business narratives of functionality (sometimes described as a ‘place holder for a conversation’ between business users and developers). • Requirements form a backlog which is prioritized by the business users. A Release backlog represents enough functionality that the system can be deployed into production. • Empowered and co-located teams. • Iterations are used to demonstrate functionality to business stakeholders and elicit feedback, iterations are timeboxed. • Based on progress across iterations, velocity is determined which illustrates how rapidly the team is progressing. • Velocity is mapped against the backlog and shows a burn-down for the release. • Team retrospectives at the completion of each iteration to review what went well and what didn’t go well. • Daily stand-up meetings where each team member shares What they Did, What They will Do and what obstacles/roadblocks they’re facing. • A ScrumMaster enables and guides the teams without being prescriptive or commanding.

7. Agile De-emphasizes • Big design and requirement gathering ‘up-front’. • Predictions on project completion. • Death march projects where project teams make up the difference for poor estimates with unpaid overtime. • Use of tools that force behaviors (task management tools, requirements management tools etc.). • Top Down Management/Control. • “Heavy” documentation, particularly status reports, Software Architecture Diagrams, Software Requirements Specifications, Test Plans etc.

8. The Benefits of Agile • Emphasizes many of the ‘right’ things: collaboration, team empowerment, working software, frequent demonstrations of progress etc. • Lightweight, relies on whiteboards, index cards and facilitation techniques (planning poker, Fist of Five etc.) • Very appealing to developers who make up a large portion of most development teams with its development focus. • Business sponsors like the idea of time-to-market opportunities and driving the features of the development lifecycle. • Implicitly focuses on ‘push vs. pull’ • Simple and easy to understand. • Contemporary and ‘modern’ This all sounds great… what’s the problem?

9. Agile Works Well in Specific Situations • Smaller projects with smaller teams (5-8) • Highly skilled teams • Co-located teams • Lower risk initiatives (internal systems, enhancements etc.) • Advanced technologies (object oriented languages primarily) • High Novelty / High Change requirements settings Unfortunately this is a small subset of most Enterprise IT organization portfolios

10. Challenges with Enterprise Adoption of Agile Techniques • Little guidance for managing beyond the ‘Design and Implementation’ disciplines e.g. • Budget/Resource/Communication/Scope/Risk Management • Enterprise Architecture • System/Integration Testing • Deployment (coordination with other releases, release windows) • Most organizations need more confidence on dates and costs before they can commit to a project. • Larger IT Enterprises often have widely distributed teams and business units • Publically traded companies in the US and heavily regulated industries have mandatory documentation/review and testing processes

11. Scaling Agile • Difficult to be completely prescriptive but there are areas of guidance that are valuable. • Start with an appropriate ‘meta-model’ that approach the project in distinct phases with clear exit criteria • The Rational Unified Process is very good • Variants like OpenUP, Enterprise Unified Process are also very good • Ensure well defined roles and recognize roles outside of the development team that are needed • Assess project risk using a framework like that supplied by Boehm and Turner in Balancing Agility and Risk: A Guide for the Perplexed • Ensure solid commitment and buy-in at senior leadership levels • Can’t overemphasize enough • Ensure clear understanding of the trade-offs

12. Determining an Agile vs. Plan Driven Approach Agile home ground: • Low criticality • Senior developers • Requirements change very often • Small number of developers • Culture that thrives on chaos • Plan-driven • home ground: • Highcriticality • Juniordevelopers • Requirementsdon'tchangetoo often • Large number of developers • Culture that demands order

13. Plan and Estimate • Planning is necessary for large scale projects. This includes Release Plans, Iteration Plans, Schedules with Milestones/Dependencies, Resource Plans. • Differentiate between Estimates (wide confidence level) and Commitments (narrow confidence level). • Ensure appropriate communication and reporting (Status Reports) against plans. • Familiarize stakeholders and teams withthe Cone of Uncertainty.

14. Manage Risk • Understanding and managing risk can be the difference between success and failure, some guidelines that RUP emphasize that strengthen agile techniques include: • Do the hardest things first • Start developing as early as possible • Mitigate risks explicitly by identifying stories and iterations they will be addressed • Don’t leave Elaboration without risks being mitigated • Prioritize using a Project Troika • Ensure a balance between architectureand functionality • Project Manager, Architect and BusinessAnalyst

15. Distributed Teams • Where geographically distributed teams are necessary remember that co-location is ‘good’ so optimize around this as much as possible • Have development teams focus on ‘Feature’ sets • Keep Feature Teams as ‘agile’ as possible • Ensure teams receive sufficient detail to build what is required: • Architecture • Requirements • User Interfaces • Ensure that teams are enabled by an effective ‘ScrumMaster’ to escalate issues and resolve roadblocks • Ensure retrospectives occur at the team level at the end of iterations • Support teams with a Program Team to provide overall guidance/direction • Establish an Architecture Team which is responsible for ‘feeding’ Feature teams with frameworks, components and guidelines.

16. Emphasize Architecture • Architecture is too important/complex/expensive to most large organizations to rely on an ‘emergent’ form. • Ensure architecture and design considerations are understood early in the project. • Associate stories to architecture requirements. • Document architecture stories and ensure they are prioritized appropriately in the backlog. • Establish an Architecture Team that can build frameworks and components for the Features Teams to leverage. The Architecture team under guidance of the Software Architect builds difficult or critical components of software that can be referenced by the development teams in their iterations. The Feature team architects work closely with the Architecture team and ensure/review the quality of the code developed by the programmers. Architecture Project Support Developers

17. Effective Requirements Management • Large projects need more than index cards with one or two sentence user stories. • Ensure a web-accessible, requirements tool is available. • Put someone in charge who is responsible for all requirements • Leverage Models and Executable Requirements as much as possible. • Agile terms like ‘Placeholder for a conversation’ need to be backed up with documentation.. This can be lightweight and it can be done in real-time! • Balance breadth and depth: Ensure basic flows of requirements are fulfilled and worry about exceptions later.

18. Post-Agilism or Pragmatic Agilism • A growing movement is beginning to recognize that there is more to agile development than many of its more dogmatic members proclaim. • Jonathan Kohl is one of its proponents and describes Post-Agilism as: A growing movement of former Agilists who have moved beyond Agile methods, using a wide variety of software development tools and methodologies in their work. • Lean software development is also seeing considerable interest as it emphasizes ideas such as minimizing waste, deliver as fast as possible, build integrity in and empower the team.

19. The Future • This was a very high level overview on Agile and techniques for effectively Scaling Agile to leverage its benefits in the future. • Agile does have many benefits but it needs to applied differently in larger enterprise environments. • More discussion and exploration is required. • Let’s discuss our own experiences

20. Agile Development Links Methodologies • Scrum • Crystal Clear • Extreme Programming • Adaptive Software Development • Feature Driven Development • Dynamic Systems Development Method • OpenUP • Enterprise Unified Process • Lean Software Development Techniques • Planning Poker • Fist of Five Reference Information • Agile Wikipedia Reference • Post-Agilism • The Project Troika