It's Not About Working Software After All!

l e a nsoftware development
www.poppendieck.comMary Poppendieckmary@poppendieck.commary@poppendieck.com
It’s Not About Working Software
First Build the Right Thing

l e a n
Gróf András (Andrew Grove)
Strategic
Inflection Point
From: Only the Paranoid Survive, by Andy Grove,
Business goes on
to new heights
Business
declines
10x change in an element of the business.
What worked before doesn’t work now.
The executives are the last to know.
November 10 Copyright©2010 Poppendieck.LLC2

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Is Agile Development
At An Inflection Point?
 Processes and tools
 Comprehensive
documentation
 Contract negotiation
 Following a plan
 Individuals and
interactions
 Working software
 Customer collaboration
 Responding to change
*Kent Beck, Startup Lessons Learned – April 23, 2010
http://www.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/b/262656520
Version 1.0 – Contract Focus Version 2.0 – Development Focus
 Team vision and
initiative
 Validated learning
 Customer discovery
 Initiating Change
Version 3.0* - Customer Focus
Inflection Point:
Customer Focus
2000 2004 2008 2012

l e a n
Team Vision and Initiative
Most product failures are caused by
a lack of Customers.
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently
that which should not be done at all. – Peter Durcker
Not this: But this:
P
R
I
O
R
I
T
I
Z
E
D
!

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Validated Learning
Consider the Entrepreneur –
Starts out with no customers
Assembles a business team:
 Marketing
 Development
 Quality Assurance
 Operations
 Support
 Finance
 Others?
The Objective:
Minimum Viable Product
 Does it do the job?
 Will customers pay for it?
 What do we need to learn next?
Repeat......multiple times
 Experiment – Learn – Adjust
November 105 Copyright©2010 Poppendieck.LLC
First be sure that you are
building the right thing,
then be sure that you are
building the thing right.

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Customer Discovery
Brilliant Systems are the result of a
matching of mental models between
those developing a system and those
who will be using the system.
Ethnography Ideation

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Initiating Change
WebSphere® Service Registry and Repository
 10 month deadline – didn’t know the details
 Solution: Get customer feedback
 Early Access Program
 Customers download new version each month
 User feedback on discussion forum
 Direct developer-customer interaction
 Changed course midstream
 User feedback beat marketing input
 Phenomenal sales the first day of release
 Customers knew they would get what they needed
 Support Calls down by an order of magnitude
 Mental model of users and developers matched

l e a n
Build the Right Thing –
Systems Engineering
1. Control projects by quantified critical-few results: 1 page!
2. Make sure those results are business results, not technical.
3. Give developers the freedom to discover how to deliver
those results.
“The worst scenario I can imagine is when we allow real customers,
users, and our own salespeople to dictate ‘functions and features’
to the developers, carefully disguised as ‘customer requirements’.
Maybe conveyed by our product owners.”
“If you go slightly below the surface of these false ‘requirements’…
you will immediately find that they are not really requirements.
They are really bad amateur design for the ‘real’ requirements.”
4. Estimate the impacts of designs on the quantified goals.
5. Select designs with the best value impacts for their costs,
do them first. “Focus on value estimates, not effort estimates.”
6. Involve stakeholders every week. “There are many stakeholders
with changing priorities. The team needs to keep a line open to all of them.”
Quotes From: Value-
Driven Development
Principles and Values
– Agility is the Tool,
Not the Master;
by Tom Gilb, –Agile
Record, July 2010
Tom Gilb

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Less is More
Cost of Complexity
The Biggest Opportunity to Increase Software
Development Productivity is to Write Less Code!
Cost
Time
Features / Functions Used in a Typical System
Standish Group Study Reported at XP2002 by Jim Johnson, Chairman
Always 7%
Often 13%
Sometimes
16%
Rarely 19%
Never 45%
Rarely / Never
Used: 64%
Often / Always
Used: 20%

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Simple Design
Simple Design = Focus
It’s only by saying ‘no’ that you
can concentrate on the things that
are really important.
– Apple CEO: Steve Jobs
More features make a product
forgettable.
– Apple Designer: Johnathan Ive
The worst thing you can do is
to do what the customers ask. You
have to understand their problem
and solve it.
– Tandberg Founder: Per Haug Kogstad
And finally: Don’t – ever – automate
a process without simplifying it first!
1. No internal changes required of a network
in order to be connected to the Internet.
2. Communications on a best-effort basis.
3. No information retained by black boxes
(gateways) connecting the networks.
4. No global control at the operations level.

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Whole Team
Case Study: Large, Successful Web Site
 Six Vertical Markets
 1 team / market
 Web analytics – tied to revenue
 Most Product Managers struggled to produce stories.
 “Product Owners” were added to keep up with the workload.
 These teams faltered.
 A few Product Managers negotiated overall objectives
with the development team, which figured out how to
develop features to meet the high level goals.
 Web analytics were displayed and updated in real time.
 Team members quickly adjusted the system to improve key metrics.
 These teams were highly engaged; their business was very successful.

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Optimize the Whole
Optimizing a part of a system will always
sub-optimize the overall system.
Beware of Layer Teams!
“The” Business
Process
Software
Operations
Support
F
e
a
t
u
r
e
F
e
a
t
u
r
e
F
e
a
t
u
r
e
F
e
a
t
u
r
e
F
e
a
t
u
r
e

l e a n
Case Study: Amazon.com
It’s all about scale.
2000 – Hit the wall
2001 – Started transition to services
Each Owned by a 2PT
 All functions – including operations!
Encapsulate data and business logic
Basic Services and Consolidator Services
2009 – Completed Transition.
Conway’s Law
Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs
which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

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Cost Center Disease
What’s Wrong with Cost Centers?
No way to focus on superior customer outcomes
No basis for trade-off decisions
No engagement
No passion
Focus on cost reduction instead of delivering value.
Where is the disease most likely?
IT departments
Government Organizations
Outsourcing Companies

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People Strive to Reach
Their Full Potential
Remember the times when:
 You are deeply engaged
 Distractions disappear
 Time evaporates
This is called FLOW.
Factors that Lead to
Better Performance &
Personal Satisfaction:
Autonomy:
 The desire to be
self-directed.
Mastery:
 The urge to
get better.
Purpose:
 The aspiration to make a
contribution to something
larger than ourselves.
Skills
Challenges
Boredom
Anxiety

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An Inflection
Point?
Open Source
“The impossible public good.”
 Incredibly stable
 Impossibly complex
 No monetary rewards/sanctions
 No central authority
(in the traditional sense)
This defies known social
and economic theory.
 Markets and hierarchies are
no longer the only organizing
mechanisms available. In fact,
peer networks can work better.
Mark Shuttleworth
 Born in Welkom, South Africa;
went to school in Cape Town.
 Started Thawte in 1995;
purchased by VeriSign in
1999 for ~$575million.
 Became a cosmonaut in 2002,
@ ~$20 million and 18 months of training.
 Founded Canonical in 2004 to support the
development of a Linux distribution for
desktops and laptops – to make computers
more affordable for all.
 Ubuntu* has won the hearts and
minds of open source developers
and has gained significant laptop/
desktop market share.
 Mark bet a fortune that Ubuntu
would be a successful volunteer
effort – and he’s winning the bet.
 This is a new economic landscape.
*Ubuntu means:
 Respect
 Helpfulness
 Sharing
 Community
 Caring
 Trust
 Unselfishness

l e a n
Passion 3.0
Know why.
Follow your passion.
Be great at what you do.
Teamwork 3.0
Semi-autonomous teams
with internal leaders.
End-to-end responsibility.
Economics 3.0
The new scarcity:
The time, energy & brainpower
of bright, creative people.
Motivation 3.0
Autonomy
Mastery
Purpose
Upgrade to Version 3.0
The Next Generation

l e a nsoftware development
www.poppendieck.comMary Poppendieckmary@poppendieck.commary@poppendieck.com
Thank You!
More Information: www.poppendieck.com

It's Not About Working Software After All!

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