agility assessment - roadmap to making your business users happy
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Agility Assessment
21-May-2013
Roadmap to Making Your Business Users Happy
2 © Alliance Global Services 2013
About Alliance Alliance is a software development and testing firm that partners with software,
technology and information-intensive businesses on their mission critical work.
Leveraging agile practices, Alliance architects and builds software applications,
platforms and products that become primary drivers of innovation and revenue
growth for its clients and their businesses. Alliance is recognized for driving quality
and speed-to-market when business success depends on the software inside.
Founded in 1994, Alliance is headquartered in suburban Philadelphia in
Conshohocken, PA.
Today’s Speakers
Lauren Feehrer Ralph Decker
3 © Alliance Global Services 2013
Agenda
Why Agility? What does it take?
Right Software
Culture & Teamwork
Technical Practices
Quality
IT Practices
Assessment
4 © Alliance Global Services 2013
Why Agility?
Key point is to first understand – why are trying to be Agile? What benefit(s) are
you looking for?
From: 7th Annual State of Agile Development Survey 2012
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Challenges / Benefits
Source: VersionOne’s “Five Myths of Agile Development” Whitepaper
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Why Agile?
“In the long run, the only sustainable source of competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than your competition.”
- Peter Senge, MIT
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Agility Impacts Entire Software Ecosystem
From: Forrester Research, Inc.
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Agenda
Why Agility?
Right Software
Culture & Teamwork
Technical Practices
Quality
IT Practices
Assessment
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Trying to Optimize This
Value (Releasable Product)
Quality (Reliable, Adaptable Software)
Constraints (Cost, Schedule, Scope)
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Focus on the Right Software First
Built Right
Right Software
Useless Stuff
Waste of Effort
Maintenance Nightmare
Success
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Do you? Can you?
• Have a common understanding amongst the whole team?
• Have a clear, shared language for domain concepts?
• Have a prioritized backlog of small, independent user stories?
• Have acceptance criteria understood for each user story?
• Get rapid feedback from users and product owners?
• Communicate a new user story in a few sentences?
• Have all your user stories understood by the entire team?
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Agenda
Why Agility?
Right Software
Culture & Teamwork
Technical Practices
Quality
IT Practices
Assessment
13 © Alliance Global Services 2013
The Case for Culture Shift to Agile
I believe that the prevailing system of management is, at its core, dedicated to mediocrity, if forces people to work harder and harder to compensate for failing to tap the spirit and collective intelligence that characterizes working together at its best.”
- Peter Senge, MIT
“ ...of all the events that engage people at work, the single most important — by far — is simply making progress in meaningful work.”
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Culture & Teamwork
• “Favor people over processes &
tools”
• “The TEAM commits to what can be
delivered”
• “The TEAM inspects and looks for
ways to improve”
Inability to changing Organization Culture was the #1 reason cited for Agile project failures.
From: 7th Annual State of Agile Development Survey 2012
People:
• Paradigm Shift: Project Manager to “Scrummaster”
• Product Owners “in the game” from start to finish
• Direct customer (end-user) engagement in full development
process
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Do these people exist in your organization today?
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Can you? Do you?
• Does the team work in specialized silos or as cross functional
generalists?
• Is the entire team dedicated to the release?
• Is the Product Owner part of the team?
• Is everyone required to release software to customers on the
team?
• Are commitments met?
• Is the pace sustainable?
• Do you get feedback for each iteration?
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The Essence of Agile Culture
Team members can be developers, testers, analysts,
architects, writers, designers and even users. The team is
cross-functional, which means that between all its members
they possess sufficient skills to do the work. There is no
dictated leadership hierarchy within the team members.
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Agenda
Why Agility?
Right Software
Culture & Teamwork
Technical Practices
Quality
IT Practices
Assessment
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Technical Practices
• Easiest way to go faster is to automate
• And keep the code Clean
• Easiest place to start … if Agile is a Technology lead initiative
• Mandatory to be able to deliver short, rapid iterations of high
quality software
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Can you? Do you?
• Can any team member build and test the software with pass/fail
result with a single click?
• Or, do you have an automated CI tool to do that for you?
• Does it take less than 10 minutes for the build process?
• Do all developers follow version control best practices?
• Do (nearly) all unit tests pass all the time?
• Does the team self-police for code smells?
• Does the team use code analysis tools?
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Agenda
Why Agility?
Right Software
Culture & Teamwork
Technical Practices
Quality
IT Practices
Assessment
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Quality
• Baked-In Quality
• Not just bugs, include User Experience
• Reducing QA cycle time imperative to short iterations and
flexibility to make changes
• Ensures each iteration is producing valuable, usable software
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Can you? Do you?
• Automatically run acceptance test criteria against any build?
• Test in parallel to iteration development?
• Keep the automated test suite up-to-date?
• Have fewer than 5 bugs per month in team’s finished product?
• Fix bugs before adding new features?
• Regularly deliver fully working, tested software?
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Agenda
Why Agility?
Right Software
Culture & Teamwork
Technical Practices
Quality
IT Practices
Assessment
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Lean IT required
• Developing & Testing faster is nice.
• AND you need more than that to be successful long term
• Project funding and prioritization
• Dedicated team staffing
• DevOps for release & run
• Self-service cloud for dev/test environments
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Can you? Do you?
• Prioritize & budget for projects on an ongoing basis?
• Use a lightweight project management framework?
• Provide the right dedicated staffing for a project to deliver?
• Measure the quality and predictability of delivery?
• Make tradeoffs to get business features out on time?
• Invest in tooling to support Agile dev, test, and ops teams?
• Create visibility of metrics and results?
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Agenda
Why Agility?
Right Software
Culture & Teamwork
Technical Practices
Quality
IT Practices
Assessment
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Assessment Tool
3.00We have a common understanding amongst all team members as to the purpose of
the software and the development project. We all know "Why" we are investing in
this, "Who" the users are, and "What" is important and can use that understanding to
guide implementation choices and tradeoffs.
3.00
The Product Owner and other business sponsors and the technical team members
use a common language with a well-understood vocabularly to describe the roles,
actions, calculations, and entities involved or managed by the system.
3.00
We have a prioritized backlog of features and enhancements that is composed of
small, independent user stories (INVEST)3.00
We regularly (at least once per iteration) review the backlog and ensure that each
story has well defined acceptance criteria, is understood by the team, and meets our
"Definition of Ready"
3.00
Our sprint planning sessions are efficient and effective, because the user stories are
well prepared, the team understands the stories quickly, and is able to provide
reasonable sizings quickly. We rarely have to extend the planning session past the
timebox.
3.00
Providearatingforeachquestion,with1-Stronglydisagree,3-Neutral,and5-StronglyAgree
RightSoftwareCommon Understanding
Shared Language
Product Backlog
Backlog Grooming
Sprint Planning
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Results
0
1
2
3
4
5 Right Software
Team & Culture
Technical Practices Quality
Lean IT
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To Recap
• Define Agile Success • Assess your team & organization • Improve key areas • Continuous Improvement
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QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
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Thank You Lauren Feehrer
Director of Customer Experience
www.allianceglobalservices.com
Ralph Decker
Director - Solution Engineering