Agile: What and Why?
David Draper
Agile Coach / Senior Consultant
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Valtech: The Global Agile Company
delivering business agility
• c1100 Employees
• 17 Locations
• 8 Countries
• UK: London, Manchester, Cwmbran
• France: Paris, Toulouse
• Germany: Dusseldorf
• Denmark: Copenhagen
• Sweden: Stockholm
• India: Bangalore
• Korea: Seoul
• USA: Dallas, Houston, Raleigh, New York
• Established 1993
• €100 million turnover 2
Valtech © 2009

Valtech: What We Do
delivering business agility
• Agile Transformation Services
• Agile Coaching, Mentoring and Seeding
• Agile Training
• Agile Academy
• Engineering Toolsmiths
• Agile Project Management
• Agile Software Development
• Provide flexible engagement and commercial model
• Our Differentiators
• Pragmatic Approach to Agile
• Flexible Commercial Models
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Valtech © 2009

Agile: What and Why?
David Draper
Agile Coach / Senior Consultant
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delivering business agility
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Valtech © 2009

Businesses adopt Agile to ...
delivering business agility
• Version 1 - 3rd Annual Survey: 2008
• State of Agile Development
• What was the MOST IMPORTANT reason for adopting
Agile within your team or organisation?
• Accelerate time to market - 22%
• Enhance ability to manage changing requirements - 21%
• Increase productivity - 12%
• Enhance software quality 10%
• Also:
• Alignment between business and IT, project visibility, risk
management, simplified process, increased engineering
discipline, reduce cost, enhance maintainability, improve team
morale. 6
Valtech © 2009

Economics
delivering business agility
cumulative waterfall cumulative iterative
period earnings waterfall period earnings iterative
Release
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What?
delivering business agility
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delivering business agility
http://www.agilemanifesto.org 9
Valtech © 2009

Agile was a reaction to ...
delivering business agility
• Heavyweight software development processes
• High cost of Failure
• Low Trust
• Project success perceived to depend on
• Defined processes
• Early comprehensive, fixed specification
• Progress established through creation of artefacts
• Punitive Change Management
• Requirements perishable
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Valtech © 2009

Myths
delivering business agility
No upfront planning Incremental approach spreads planning throughout the project.
No documentation Only usable and valuable documentation produced.
Loss of management Project status measured on working, tested software provides full
control visibility.
Lack of predictability Replace speculative plans with feature-driven short and long term
planning.
Lack of engineering The continuous delivery of running, tested software every few weeks
discipline requires ultimate discipline.
Inability to scale Large projects broken down into co-ordinated smaller projects reduces
risk.
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Am I Agile?
delivering business agility
Continuum
Contracts Collaboration
Command and control Servant Leadership
Distributed teams Collocated team
Predictive Adaptive
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Project Landscape
delivering business agility
Business
Agility
Agile Project
Management
Agile Software Engineering
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What does an Agile Process look like
delivering business agility
• Beware, processes cannot be copied
Industry
best-practice?
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Plan  Do  Check  Adapt
delivering business agility
Do
Complex
Plan Adaptive
Check
Systems
Adapt
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SCRUM
delivering business agility
• A light-weight framework for product development
• Extremely simple and very hard
Daily stand-up meeting
Sprint planning (‘daily SCRUM’)
meeting
Sprint demo and -
Workday:
One day review meeting
Product Owner Product
Backlog
Sprint Backlog Sprint:
Working software
14-30 days
Other deliverables
SCRUM master
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Valtech © 2009

Extreme Programming
delivering business agility
Values:
Feedback
Communication
Simplicity
Courage
Respect
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Valtech © 2009

Lean Software Development
delivering business agility
• Focus on Value
• Focus on Flow (Inventory, WIP)
• Inventory is a liability
• Eliminate Waste
• Kaizen
• Continuous Improvement
• Pull
• Limit Work in Progress
• Balance Demand and Throughput
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Valtech © 2009

Impediments to Agile
delivering business agility
• Dedicated Team
• Commitment is difficult in a culture of interruptions.
• Co-located Teams
• Distribution is a major impediment.
• Cross Functional Team
• What does complete mean for the team?
• What are we demonstrating?
• The team must be able to complete a feature without outside help.
• Management Sponsorship
• To protect and support the team.
• To resolve impediments. 19
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Enablers
delivering business agility
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Valtech © 2009

Organisational Change
delivering business agility
• Servant Leadership over Command and Control
The greatest
leader is a
servant. Don’t be
a boss. Be a real
leader ...
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Individual Change
delivering business agility
• Responsibility
• Trust
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Helpful Engineering Practices
delivering business agility
• Test First Development
• Refactoring / Evolutionary Design
• Continuous Integration
• Pair Programming
• Retrospectives
• Relative Estimation
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Retrospective
delivering business agility
• Questions
• What went well?
• What have we learnt?
• What would we like to do differently?
• What still puzzles us?
• Actions
• What actions can we take forward immediately?
• What larger actions should be negotiated?
• What issues need taking back to the organisation?
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Valtech © 2009

Doneness
delivering business agility
• Define Done early
• Review Done-ness often
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Valtech © 2009

Beware of Technical Debt
delivering business agility
• Use this term and ensure that Project Sponsors
understand
• Consider who owns Technical Debt
• this is an attribute of the system
• Managed Debt in terms of
• cost of ownership
• risk
• cost of removal
• benefit of removal (related to risk and opportunity)
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Valtech © 2009

Questions?
delivering business agility
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Valtech © 2009