Agile Demystified

© AgiliX Agile Development Consulting

Agile Demystified

Cesario Ramos


• The idea behind the Agile Manifesto

• Why do we do these things?• What about engineering principles?


Respond To Change


• Promise the business– Respond to change – To stop whining

– Skills– Technologies– Process– Soft enough!


At the start they say ‘it will take us 10 months’


Then they disappear from view!

doing something, not clear what…

then pop up after 8 months and say there might be some delay!!!


One month before the deadline they pop up again….

and ‘we need 3 more months to finish’


So finally in month 13 the testing can begin

Plan shows it should be finished in a month!

…but issues are discovered


Promises of Working software are not enough


Working software means…

• The business gets working software every month!– Could be put into actual use – It has real value, could be validated on

customers.– Proves that there is actual progress


• IT no longer asking for trust but provides evidence.

• Goes on month after month after month– stops when the business decides there

is enough value added!


Scrum

In order to do this the business has to do some things in return


OFTEN Face to Face feedback!!


Do NOT ‘HELP’ IT by telling how to do things…


• The idea behind the Agile Manifesto• Why do we do these things?• What about engineering principles?

© AgiliX Agile Development ConsultingDesignator | author | April 06, 2009 |

Production vs. Product development

What are characteristics of production and product development?

What does it mean for the approach?


• Origins in Lean manufacturing since 1950’s

• High quality, high productivity and low cost

• Highly successful


The New New Product Development Game

• Hirotaka Takeuchi • Ikujiro Nonaka

Harvard Business Review, 1986.


Complex Adaptive System

A Complex Adaptive System (CAS) is a dynamic network of many agents acting in parallel, constantly acting and reacting to what the other agents are doing.

The control of a CAS tends to be highly dispersed and decentralized.

John H. Holland


Lean concepts


VALUE STREAM

FLOW

VALUE

PULLPERFECTION


Overproduction

Delay

Hand-offs Task Switching

Defects

InventoryRelearning


How can we eliminate it?

• Partially done work

– Divide work into small batches

– Limit WIP

• Extra Features

– Do NOT construct a signed list of everything upfront

• Hand Offs

– Face-to-face communication, cross functional teams

• Delays

– Cross functional teams, regular and short feedback cycles

• Defects

– Inspect to prevent defects, move testing to the front


Some evidence for agility


Overproduction of features

Jim Johnson. The Standish Group International Inc. 2002


Origins of defects

Others7%

Logic/Design28%

Requirements Errors41%

Documentation2%

Environment5%

Data6%

Interface6%

Human 5%

Tom Gilb. 2002


What can we do about it?


Prioritized, refined and written down in collaboration between business and development


Could be good enough to gain 80% of the benefits


Implemented and accepted throughout the project


• The idea behind the Agile Manifesto• Why do we do these things?• What about engineering

principles?


[en.wiktionary.org]

• Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem.

– I was doing a bit of yak shaving this morning, and it looks like it might have paid off.• The actually useless activity you do that appears important when you are consciously or

unconsciously procrastinating about a larger problem. – I thought I'd get more work done if I just fixed a problem with my .emacs file, but then I

spent the whole afternoon yak shaving.


Verification

• STOP discussing things with minimal facts….

• Kent Beck: No discussion should take longer than 30 minutes without writing/looking at some code to verify stuff.

Programmers + Code >

Programmers + Time


Continuously improving the

feedback speed!


Fast Feedback

• Getting the architecture right first…. Then we can add feature by feature easily right…?

Hmmm… what if when implementing the first feature it proves that the infrastructure is wrong?

• We build a couple of features and then refactor ending up with the architecture.– Generalize to remove duplication– Building exactly and only what is needed!!!


Fast Feedback

• Automatic Tests – Let the computer provide us feedback

• Peer Reviews– Let your peer provide you with feedback– Spread knowledge

• Take the first bullet– Refactor to the Open Closed


?


Agile Demystified

Cesario Ramos

Agile Demystified

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