Transitioning to an Agile Development Environment

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Transitioning to an Agile DevelopmentEnvironment

• For PMISAC
• October 27, 2005
• Simon Orrell P.Eng., PMP
• simon_at_snowdolphin.com

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What well discuss tonight

• What is this thing we call Agile ?
• Are there pre-requisites for using Agile ?
• Introducing Agile into a non-Agile
  environment.
• Agile practices Ive used with success
• Agile practices I was unsuccessful at
  implementing
• Experiential benefits of using Agile
• Questions and Answers (hopefully!)

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What is Agile ?

• Definition
• Quick not hurried.
• Balance
• Business needs (scope and schedule)
• Technical and financial constraints
• Facing the reality of technical uncertainty in
  Software Development and adapting

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What is Agile?

• Tayloristic vs. Empirical methods
• SD is a complex process with variable inputs
• Technology
• Requirements
• People
• Inspect and adapt rather than define
• Product Maturity level

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What is Agile ?

• It does NOT mean
• No documentation
• No design
• No planning
• A silver bullet at last

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What is Agile ?

• The Agile Manifesto
• Individuals and Interactions over process and
  tools
• Working Software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan
• This is a holistic approach
• Customer, Dev, QA, Docs, UI

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What is Agile

• XP
• Scrum
• DSDM, Crystal
• Lean
• and many more
• What they all share is an emphasis on maximizing
  value through iterative and incremental delivery

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Why use Agile ?

• Maximizing Value and Productivity
• Respond to Customer/Business priorities
• By reducing the cost of change
• Give the business the ability to see increments
  of the system and choose what to do next.

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Why use Agile ?

• Facing reality early and often
• Success
• Failure/Risk
• Increase ROI by being able to realize the
  valuable features early and perhaps
• cancelling the project
• redirecting the project
• terminating the project early because enough
  value has been realized.

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Why use Agile?

• Just Enough
• In general 60 of features are never or rarely
  used (Standish Report)

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Scrum

• Project Management wrapper for iterative
  development techniques
• Fostering continuous feedback loops
• Removing impediments daily
• Dedicated short development cycles
• Delivering Iterative, incremental sushi from a
  backlog
• Self managing teams

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Agile Map to PMI Process Groups

• Initiating - Charter
• Planning - Iteration Release planning
• Executing - Leading, removing impediments,
  influencing, negotiating
• Controlling - Scrums, Burndown, PRD
• Closing - Customer acceptance, post-partum

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PjMs Role in Agile

• Facilitate communication between stakeholders
• Facilitate negotiation between stakeholders
• Remove impediments daily
• Report tangible progress

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Technical Pre-requisites

• Source Control
• Continuous Build System
• Nightly official build
• Continuous loop builds kicked off by code
  check-in
• Tied into xUnit in order to run unit tests during
  build process
• Ability to re-factor code

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Non-technical Pre-Requisites

• Desire to accept change
• Open development environment
• Virtually continuous access to the Product Owner

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Introducing Agile to a non-Agile organization

• Buy-in from the trenches
• Stealth
• Implemented a customer Proxy
• PdM, Usability
• Demonstrable progression of value
• Focus on Agile techniques and results NOT
  specific methodologies.

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Agile practices that worked

• Requirements in the form of User stories
• A lttype of usergt must be able to ltperform some
  actiongt so that they can ltrealize some valuegt.
• Index cards on a wall
• Simple, tactile, promote communication
• Easily visible to all
• Iterations (4 weeks and 2 weeks)
• Planning Game
• Sushi
• Product Progress Reviews

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Agile Practices that worked

• Evolutionary PRD
• Its all about the business problems and the
  evolving/emerging understanding of those problems
• Reporting
• Burndown charts How much effort is remaining
  NOT how much time has been spent.
• Reporting based on stories completed
• Scrum meetings
• What did you do yesterday?
• What will you do today?
• What is in your way?

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Experiential Benefits

• Increased Product Quality
• Over 5 releases, customer reported bugs decreased
  by an order of magnitude
• Increased Delivery Reliability
• Over 18 months, 4 of 5 releases on time

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Experiential Benefits

• Ability to adapt to Market forces
• MS missed its date
• Improved Team Morale
• Much less OT/stress release day is a BORE!

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Experiential Benefits

• Organization has since decided to roll out these
  techniques (and continue to adapt them!) at their
  two other campuses in the U.S.

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Agile practices not yet tried or unsuccessfully
implemented

• Pair programming
• not tried yet but
• Test Driven development
• expertise limitation
• Geographically distributed teams
• buy-in, cost

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Whos using Agile?

• Among many others, perhaps of note
• Microsoft
• Uses internally and are providing tools within
  Visual Studio Team System 2005
• http//lab.msdn.microsoft.com/teamsystem/workshop/
  msfagile/default.aspx
• Primavera
• Used Scrum to add Scrum support to their flagship
  project management product
• http//www.primavera.com/newsroom/news.asp

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Agile Works!

• This is hard stuff facing ugly realities.
• Its all about solving business problems its
  not about following a methodology.
• All it takes is desire, leadership, and
  discipline.

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Resources

• www.apln.org
• www.controlchaos.org
• www.mountaingoatsoftware.com
• www.JimHighsmith.com
• www.poppendieck.com
• can.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/camug/

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Questions and Answers

• I can be reached for more in-depth discussion at
• simon_at_snowdolphin.com
• 403.630.6442