The 7 Deadly Sins Of Almost Being Agile

The 7 Deadly Sins of Almost Being Agile
Bob Hartman
Richard Lawrence
www.agilecooperative.com
Presentation Copyright © 2009, Agile For All, LLC. and Humanizing Work. All rights reserved.

Logistics
Please turn cell phones, pagers, PDA’s, etc to the “stun yourself” setting (rather than the “annoy everyone else” setting)
We will take a break after about 1.5 hours
Please ask questions when they come up rather than waiting
Be prepared to participate! This presentation requires a lot of work on your part.

Our Fictional Team
Waterfall
Agile
W-Agilists

Sally the Project Manager

Bill the Business Analyst

Tom the Product Manager

4 Developers

2 Testers

The First Agile Project
6 months
Expected 25 features
Delivered 10 features
3 “most important” cut
Prior release 72 defects
Agile release 70 defects
Customers unhappy

The Second Agile Project
6 months
Expected 25 features
Delivered 8 features
5 “most important” cut
Prior release 70 defects
This release 79 defects
Customers VERY unhappy

Fixing the W-Agilists
Enter Cindi, director of the company PMO

The Thinking Process

Lack of Meaningful Feedback Loops
We are too busy to stop working!
Daily stand-ups are useless, let’s just use a single weekly status meeting.
When we ask people for feedback they don’t show up or don’t participate anyway.
We aren’t really sure why we would want feedback or how we would use it anyway.

Undesirable Effects
Building wrong products
Building the product wrong
No improvement
Lack of visibility
Lack of trust
Key people out of the loop
What are some of the undesirable effects the W-Agilists would see from the lack of feedback loops in their process?

Phrase to remember
Things can’t be improved without regular feedback

No incremental deliveries of software

Causes
Not using iterations at all
Building by architecture instead of value
Can’t make stories small
We’ve always done it that way
Takes time we don’t have
Sometimes need to integrate with other teams that aren’t agile
What might be some of the main causes of not building software iteratively (remember, this is supposed to be an agile team!)

Phrase to remember
Late integration will lead to late shipping. Instead deliver completed value every iteration.

Our story continues…

Looking deeper…

Silo’d Teams
Deep domain knowledge is best
Experts better than generalists
Work will be evenly distributed
Organizational structure cannot be changed
What assumptions cause many organizations to deliberately use silo’d teams?

Phrase to remember
We don’t care what your business card says, we care what you can do for the success of our team!

Digging deeper in an iteration…

Too much work in process
Using the evaporating cloud from the Thinking Process

Phrase to remember
WIP = Waste in Progress!

Lack of customer voice

Create an evaporating cloud in your group

Phrase to remember
Build the simplest thing that works – then get real customer feedback!

Unrealistic deadlines

Create an evaporating cloud in your group and role-play how you would convince managers to stop using unrealistic deadlines

Phrase to remember
Customer/stakeholder needs do not alter the realities of the universe.

Manual testing doesn’t scale
(or happens in overtime)
Testing that doesn’t happen, but should
Regression testing
Testing capacity
New feature testing
Sprint 1
Sprint 2
Sprint 3
Sprint 4
Sprint 5

Automate and get regression tests for free
Automated tests that are now regression tests
Testing capacity
New feature testing
Sprint 1
Sprint 2
Sprint 3
Sprint 4
Sprint 5

Manual Testing
Create an evaporating cloud in your group. We will role-play with Richard and Bob playing the roles of managers needing to be convinced of the benefits of automated testing.

Phrase to remember
Automate any tests that will run more than once. Do you know ahead of time which tests those are???

Recap of the 7 Deadly Sins
Missing feedback loops
Not building in iterations – large scale integrations
Silo’d teams
Too much work-in-progress (WIP)
Manual testing

Questions?
www.agilebob.com
bob.hartman@agileforall.com
www.richardlawrence.info
richard@humanizingwork.com

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The 7 Deadly Sins Of Almost Being Agile

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The 7 Deadly Sins Of Almost Being Agile — Presentation Transcript