AGILE2016 Conference Top 10 Presented by Synerzip

Tom Nedwek
Senior Business Architect, Pegasystems
Agile2016 Top 10 Takeaways
Vinayak Joglekar, CTO
@vinayakj
Hemant Elhence, CEO
@HemantElhence

http://synerzip.com
Agile2016 Conference Overview
• July 25-29 in Atlanta
• 2,500 participants from 42 countries
– 19 tracks, 270 sessions
• 4 Special Tracks
– Agile Bootcamp
– Stalwarts
– Experience Reports
– 3-5 min Lightening Talks
• Inspiring Keynotes
– Jurgen Appelo: Managing for Happiness
– Joshua Kerievsky: Modern Agile
– Carrie Kish: Leadership for Genius Tribes

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19 Tracks
• Agile Bootcamp
• Audacious Salon (New)
• Coaching and Mentoring
• Collaboration, Culture &
Teams
• Development Practices &
Craftsmanship
• DevOps
• Enterprise Agile
• Experience Reports
• Government
• Leadership
• Learning
• Lightening Talks
• Open Jams
• Project, Program and
Portfolio Management
• Stalwarts
• Testing & Quality
• The Future of Agile
Software Development
• User Experience
• Working with Customers

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Top 10 Takeaways from Agile2016
But Really Our
Top 14
Note: We attended 40+ sessions.
Where possible, presenters name & references are
listed.

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But Really Our Top 14
1. VJ: Lean UX
2. HE: Modern Agile
3. VJ: Lean UX Toolkit
4. HE: Agile is Mindset
5. VJ: DevOps Antipatterns
6. HE: Lean Startup
Subsumed
7. VJ: Design Thinking
8. HE: #NoEstimates
9. VJ: Roles Not Personas
10. HE: Architecture/ Architect
11. VJ: Visual Test
Automation
12. HE: Scaling Agile
13. VJ: Interesting Soundbites
14. HE: Interesting Soundbites

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Standish Group-State of Agile

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Challenged projects-focus on UX

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Hypothesis driven development

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Scrum Team+DevOps+Lean UX
Agile Sprints
Developer TesterProduct Owner
Cross Functional Team -2006
Release to
Production
IT Operations
Big Design
Up Front
UX Designer
Lean UX Developer TesterProduct
Owner
Developer TesterProduct Owner

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1. Lean UX
• UX designer is a role not a fixed designation
• UX design was done as a part of the sprint
• Each sprint had a distinct hypothesis to
validate

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2. Modern Agile
Keynote by Joshua Kerievsky, www.ModernAgile.org
• “Over the past decade, innovative companies, software industry thought leaders
and lean/agile pioneers have discovered simpler, sturdier, more streamlined
ways to be agile. Today, it makes far more sense to bypass antiquated
agility in favor of modern approaches.”
• Modern agile methods are defined by four guiding principles:
– Make people awesome
– Make safety a prerequisite
– Experiment and learn rapidly
– Deliver value continuously
2001 2016

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Values/Principles, Practices
Modern agile consists of four, overlapping values/principles that include a
dozen overlapping practices
www.industriallogic.com/blog/modern-agile/

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McKinsey + Harvard Business
• Agile is not just for software
development, but more broadly
applicable for the entire organization
– Steve Denning’s Stalwarts session and
book, The Leaders Guide to Radical
Management (www.stevedenning.com)
– Recent McKinsey research
• Agility Hackathons (http://agilityhackathon.com/)
• McKinsey article
http://www.mckinsey.com/business-
functions/organization/our-insights/agility-it-
rhymes-with-stability
– Recent Harvard Business Review article,
Embracing Agile, May 2016
(hbr.org/2016/05/embracing-agile)
• Agile is not a choice anymore, it is a necessity – Steve Denning

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Agility: It rhymes with stability
McKinsey
Quarterly Article -
December 2015

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3.Lean UX Toolkit
• Various Tools used by Lean UX
practictioners

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3.Empathy Map->Affinity Map
I see people
looking at their
phones & not
noticing my
shop
I see kids & elders
play Pokemon go
I see people
going to my
competitor for
Pokemon lures
I see younger
people
spending more
money
Outside shop
Inside shop
At home

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Empathy/Affinity Map -> A3
Outside shop
Inside shop
At home
Title ____ Owner____Date Started____
Date Finished____
Background
Current Situation
Analysis
Hypothesis
Experiment
Measurement
Outcome
Next Steps

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PDSA in A3 Map
Title ____ Owner____Date Started____
Date Finished____
Background
Current Situation
Analysis
Hypothesis
Experiment
Measurement
Outcome
Next Steps
Plan
Do
Study
Act

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Three types of assumptions
It is
technically
feasible to
build this
Customers
will
accept
this
It will
be
financially
viable

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Feasibility Desirability
Viability
Business Model Canvas
Key Partners Key Activities
Key Resources
Value
Proposition
Customer
Relationships
Customer
Segments
Channels
Revenue StreamsCost Structure

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Order of assumption validation
Known Unknown
Important
Unimportant
Validate important
and unknown
assumptions first

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4: Agile is Mindset
• Tools & processes drowning out the core Agile
mindset - “DeJirafication” needed
• “It is not enough to change strategies, structures,
and systems, unless the thinking that produced
those strategies, structures, and systems also
changes.” Peter Senge, The Dance of Change
• Think of scrum ceremonies as the training wheels
for learning Agile, evolve to Kanban flow
– Don’t need to constrain to 7+2 team size. Make teams larger (even
to 30) to reduce inter team dependencies
– Give each team autonomy to define their flow, their Kanban board
– Do away with iteration planning, just pick up the next highest
priority story and start working on it

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5.DevOps Antipatterns
● It works on my PC - give me access to prod
● We built 200 microservices and forgot to set
up Jenkins
● We’ve got fully automated deployment
pipeline but release twice a year
● We crammed this monolith in a container
and called it a microservice
● I used the latest version and it crashed
● I deploy from separate images of dev, test
and prod env
● Rollback is a separate process than rollfwd

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DevOps wall of confusion

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Solutions
• Automate deployment from day 1
• Choose well - some S/W resists portability,
resilience & automated deployment
• Decoupled components with clearly defined
responsibilities & network isolation
• Immutable containers/n/work isolation in dev
• Don’t treat your containers like VMs
• No config.yml in filesystem-> Env variables
• Use one codebase for all deployments

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Microservices are at the end

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Follow the 12 factor app

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6. Lean Startup Subsumed
• Lean Startup ideas now
completely integrated into Agile
– Minimum Viable Product
– Experiments
– Hypothesis testing 2011

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7.Design thinking
● There are 2 types of problems: mysteries or
puzzles. Or wicked or tame problems.
Design thinking applies to the 1st type.
● Four stages: empathize, ideate, prototype
and learning launch.

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What is design thinking?

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Design Thinking Toolbox

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8. #NoEstimates
• For schedule or cost predictability, there is no
information value in story points (or detailed bottom
up estimates)
– Just count stories completed per sprint (thruput), and use
burn-up chart to forecast schedule/cost completion
– Error range is more predictable, than the effort value
• Use statistical techniques to forecast date/cost
– Use historical data (stories done/time)
– P90/P10 = approx 4
• There may be learning value for team to go thru
bottom-up estimation exercise
Todd Little’s Open Space session, http://toddlittleweb.com/Estimation.html

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Predicting Completion Date
P10=10% confidence
P90=90% confidence
Example
P10 = 6 months
P90 =12 months
P90/P10 = 2
toddlittleweb.com/Estimation.html

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Estimate for Budget?
• For capital budgeting (Go/NoGo) decision,
use the same fidelity of “cost estimate” as
the fidelity of “value estimate”
• “#NoEstimates is a hashtag for the topic of
exploring alternatives to estimates [of time,
effort, cost] for making decisions in software
development. That is, ways to make
decisions with ‘No Estimates’.” - Woody Zuill
http://zuill.us/WoodyZuill/links-to-simple-noestimates-examples/

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9.Roles not Personas
• Limiting the number of personas benefits the
product owner not the customer.
• Role cards work better with story-mapping as the
customer journey is role driven.
• Personas suffer confirmation bias. Data=Noise
• Use active voice while writing user stories e.g. As a
guest when I am checked in.

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10: Architecture/ Architect Role
• What is architecture?
So, What Is Architecture?
Shared
design
under-
standing
Decisions
about
things that
are hard to
change
The
important
stuff.
Whatever
that is.
Architecture: Shared Design Understanding
Architecture is the understanding of a system’s design shared
by its expert practitioners
For software architecture, this includes only those components
and interfaces that are understood by all expert developers
• Irreversibility is a core driver of complexity
– Poorly architected software becomes more difficult to
change over time
– Architects find ways to make hard-to-change things
easier to change
– To help scale, architects should only worry about the
important stuff
Tom Nedwek’s session on Architects in an Agile World
Michael Vincent’s session on Emergent Architecture

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Emergent Architecture
• Some architecture decisions will need to be made before
you write your first line of code
• “Don’t over design, but don’t under architect” - do one-day
architecture session, invite everyone who has something to
contribute
• No “Architecture Sprint” or “Sprint #0”

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Architect Role – Spotify Guilds
• Secret sauce: architects are hands-on developers,
core part of the (dev) team, not a separate team
• Architect’s job
1. Serve the business, i.e. “economics over craftsmanship”
2. Help IT serve the business
3. Educate, inspire, teach others, i.e. create more
architects, “Teach your team to fish”
• Modes of architectural leadership: Observer, Scout,
Coach, Team-member
• “Stop moving information to those with authority,
start moving authority to those with information”

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11.Visual Test Automation
● Not just pixel to pixel comparison as image
scaling resizes images resulting in false
positives.
● Applitools claims to be a better tool than
Imagemagik or Sikuli
● Applitools maintains version control of images.
Large binary image files can’t be checked into
Github or SVN

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Branching and merging images

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12. Scaling Agile – Update
• New scaling framework, Nexus, by Scrum.org
• SAFe most common, v4.0
• General consensus – pick & choose components
from each scaling framework and tailor for your own
organization
– Jeff Sutherland’s Scrum at Scale/Scrum of Scrum
– Craig Larman’s Large Scale Scrum (LeSS)
– Scott Ambler’s Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)
– Dean Leffingwell’s SAFe
– Spotify model
– Scrum.org’s Nexus

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Scaling Agile w/ Nexus
• Nexus is a framework that drives to the heart of scaling: cross-team
dependencies and integration issues
• It is an exoskeleton that rests on top of multiple Scrum Teams

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13. Interesting Soundbites - VJ
● Triads focus on building other’s relationship
● Accountability structures to value driven culture –
Carrie Kish
● If you can’t build a well structured monolith what
makes you think you can build well structured
microservices? – Mike Gehard
● If you have a culture of fear, none of the fancy
tools or practices can help you – J Kerievsky
● Xamarin TC can test on 90 devices having 17 OS
vers in 19 mins; Android fragmentation from 11k to
25 K in 2012-15 – Dan Waters

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14. Interesting Soundbites - HE
• Zero tolerance - have no bug tracking system! Just
keep fixing bugs as they surface
• A-TDD works – use it
• TDD is like dual-entry accounting system – robust.
• “Stop moving information to those with authority,
start moving authority to those with information”
• Organization’s objective is to deliver most value to
customers NOT to extract most value for the
shareholders
• DevOps will be gone in 3yrs

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Questions?
Confidential – August 2015

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