Whether you are just starting agile or have already made the transition to using agile in your organization, you may face the issues that Susan McNamara describes. Is your team not firing on all cylinders? Do people feel stuck or bored? Is your team having trouble getting to Done at the end of each sprint? Susan has booted up agile in three different organizations and has found valuable approaches that work across different environments. She covers topics including getting the most out of your product owners/product managers, dealing with organizational constraints in the agile group, encouraging good synergy between development and testers, and ways to keep the team mentally engaged. Based on her real-life experiences, Susan provides simple “agile hacks” that you and your team can use to solve these common problems and lift your team to the next level. Sometimes all you need are creative solutions to turn your team into agile heroes.

1. AT3
Session
6/9/16 10:00 AM
Agile Hacks: Creative Solutions for
Common Agile Issues
Presented by:
Susan McNamara
BIOVIA - Dassault Systems
Brought to you by:
350 Corporate Way, Suite 400, Orange Park, FL 32073
888---268---8770 ·· 904---278---0524 - info@techwell.com - http://www.techwell.com/

2. Susan McNamara
BIOVIA - Dassault Systems
ScrumMaster Certified Susan McNamara has more than thirty years of software
development experience, including twelve years of agile development. Susan has
led agile teams in several different sectors, including GIS, healthcare supply chain,
and pharmaceutical manufacturing operations intelligence. She started as a
member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories beginning as a developer in
waterfall development, navigating pages and pages of requirements for the Audix
voice mail system; transitioning to feature-driven development; and finally to
managing agile/Scrum and kanban projects.

3. Agile Hacks: Creative
Solutions for Common
Agile Issues
Susan McNamara
Dassault Systèmes: BIOVIA
Senior Manager Software Development
June 2016

4. Topics
What’s a Hack?
 My Background, My Journey
 Stories: Let Them Eat Cake
 Release Planning
 Trouble with Sprint Planning
 Nuts and Bolts of Development
 What’s Wrong With our Velocity?
 Never Finishing Anything
 Teamwork

5. What’s a Hack?
For Example:
* http://myscienceacademy.org/2013/01/16/50-life-hacks-to-simplify-your-world/
life·hack
/līfˌhak/
Noun informal
noun: life hack
1.a strategy or technique adopted in order to
manage one's time and daily activities in a
more efficient way.

6. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ASmartphone_In_Glass.jpg
Attribution: By Ravithakor23 (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons,
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode
http://thefunnybeaver.com/life-hacks-for-bachelors/
Attribution: By Josh on November 6, 2014. Life Hacks for Bachelors
Google, labeled for reuse
Life Hacks

7. Agile Poll
 0-1 years
 1-3 years
 3-5 years
 5-10 years
 10+ years

8. Topics
 What’s a Hack?
My Background, My Journey
 Stories: Let Them Eat Cake
 Release Planning
 Trouble with Sprint Planning
 Nuts and Bolts of Development
 What’s Wrong With our Velocity?
 Never Finishing Anything
 Teamwork

9. My Background

10. My Journey: From Waterfall to Agile
 Member of Technical Staff on the Audix project at Bell
Labs in Colorado
 Hart InterCivic - First Brush with Agile
 From Aegis Analytical to Dassault Systèmes– Scaling Agile

11. Topics
 What’s a Hack?
 My Background, My Journey
Stories: Let Them Eat Cake
 Release Planning
 Trouble with Sprint Planning
 Nuts and Bolts of Development
 What’s Wrong With our Velocity?
 Never Finishing Anything
 Teamwork

12. Stories: Let Them Eat Cake
https://www.flickr.com/search/?l=comm&q=tall%20layer%20cake
Attribution: yosoynuts, July 12, 2008
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/legalcode

13. Story Issues
 Quality of User stories can make or break a sprint
 Architectural layers
 Too large
 Too vague

14. Story Hacks
 The Layer Cake - Develop stories that cut through all
architectural layers
 Use Splitting Patterns
 Reference: http://agileforall.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/01/Story-Splitting-Flowchart-
Thumbnail.png
 Create stories as a story team
 Go through twice
 Grooming sessions
 Aim for similar sizes – consistent value streams
 Use Spikes (judiciously)

15. Topics
 What’s a Hack?
 My Background, My Journey
 Stories: Let Them Eat Cake
Release Planning
 Trouble with Sprint Planning
 Nuts and Bolts of Development
 What’s Wrong With our Velocity?
 Never Finishing Anything
 Teamwork

16. Release Planning Issues
 Too much to do
 It’s all Priority #1
 Sizing is hard
Image from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/improveit/1574931134, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode

17. Release Planning Hacks
 Sizing themes is similar, scale is different
 Prioritizing tricks
Give the PMs $$ to spend on features
Use formula to calculate business value of Epics

18. Business Value Calculations
Business Value = (Customer Value + Internal Value) * (Business Risk)

19. Some Math…
When is 40 != 40 ?
Epic size of 40 does not mean child story points add up to 40!

20. Topics
 What’s a Hack?
 My Background, My Journey
 Stories: Let Them Eat Cake
 Release Planning
Trouble with Sprint Planning
 Nuts and Bolts of Development
 What’s Wrong With our Velocity?
 Never Finishing Anything
 Teamwork

21. Sprint Planning Issues
 Stories are a mess
 Sprint planning sessions are not efficient
 Overcommitting
 Plans fall apart again and again

22. Trouble with Sprint Planning

23. Sprint Planning Hacks
 Practice makes (nearly) perfect
 Inspect and Adapt – vary the inputs to see what helps
 Story Grooming Sessions
 Working with PM and other Stakeholders
 Use your Velocity
 Identify Capacity each time
 Heed your Retrospective findings
 Book: Agile Retrospectives by Esther Derby and Diane
Larson

24. Topics
 What’s a Hack?
 My Background, My Journey
 Stories: Let Them Eat Cake
 Release Planning
 Trouble with Sprint Planning
Nuts and Bolts of Development
 What’s Wrong With our Velocity?
 Never Finishing Anything
 Teamwork

25. Nuts and Bolts of Development
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ANuts_and_Bolts_sequence.jpg
• Attribution: © Tomas Castelazo, www.tomascastelazo.com / Wikimedia Commons, via Wikimedia Commons
• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode

26. Development issues
 Problems with Quality?
 Legacy Code Challenges
 Integration Issues

27. Development Hacks
 Unit Testing
 Test Driven Development
 Functional tests
 Continuous integration!
 Automate, Automate, Automate

28. Continuous Integration
Continuous
Integration
Use Case
Tests
UI TestsSmoke Tests
Automated
Deployment
Functional
Tests
Unit Tests
Static Code
Analysis

29. Topics
 What’s a Hack?
 My Background, My Journey
 Stories: Let Them Eat Cake
 Release Planning
 Trouble with Sprint Planning
 Nuts and Bolts of Development
What’s Wrong With our Velocity?
 Never Finishing Anything
 Teamwork

30. What’s Wrong With Our Velocity?
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peking_To_Paris_Autorace_(1907)_Attribution_Unk_(RESTORED)_(4074429874).jpg
• Attribution: By ralph repo [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode

31. Common Velocity issues
 Can be constrained by QA or Dev or PM
 Ignoring Past Performance

32. Velocity Hacks
 Account for Capacity
 Share Duties
 Educate
 Annotate Sprint during Retrospective
Identify Pain Points
 Gather Metrics and Make Visible

33. Topics
 What’s a Hack?
 My Background, My Journey
 Stories: Let Them Eat Cake
 Release Planning
 Trouble with Sprint Planning
 Nuts and Bolts of Development
 What’s Wrong With our Velocity?
Never Finishing Anything
 Teamwork

34. Never Finishing Anything
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thai_House_Under_Construction_Trat.JPG
• Attribution: By Khaosaming (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)
or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons
• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode

35. Stories not getting finished
 Bugs found late in cycle
 Late Stakeholder feedback
 Not having a Done-Done agreement

36. Getting to Done Hacks
 Define your Done-Done agreement
Revisit often
 User Story Acceptance Criteria
 Stakeholder acceptance techniques

37. User Story Done-Done example
 A Test Case for each Acceptance Criteria
 Code is checked in and tested in a build
 Code Review has been completed and addressed
 Unit tests have been completed
 Exploratory testing has been completed
 No Known Bugs
 Sponsor has reviewed and accepted the story
 If required, an upgrade path has been defined and documented
 User Documentation is completed and reviewed
 ……

38. Topics
 What’s a Hack?
 My Background, My Journey
 Stories: Let Them Eat Cake
 Release Planning
 Trouble with Sprint Planning
 Nuts and Bolts of Development
 What’s Wrong With our Velocity?
 Never Finishing Anything
Teamwork

39. Teamwork
 Is everyone a Specialist?
 Do people just care about
“their work”?

40. Teamwork Hacks
 More pairing
 Trade off jobs
 Story Teams
 Innovation Sprints
 Celebrate your accomplishments

41. Summary
 Review Pain Points
 Any Hacks you want to share?