Organizations are often reluctant to adopt the more challenging agile engineering practices—first seen together in Extreme Programming and later adopted by the Scrum Alliance as the Scrum Developer Practices. These practices are difficult to implement and sustain, and the benefits are often vague, subtle, and measurable only after months of disciplined effort. For an engineering practice to provide real organizational value, it must effectively address real throughput constraints. Rob Myers describes two techniques that help evaluate the impact of any change to the organizational system―Lean's Value-Stream Mapping and the Theory of Constraints' Five Focusing Steps. He describes the most common set of agile engineering practices from the standpoint of how they provide a return on investment, including their costs and how they often work in tandem to multiply the effect. Rob briefly discusses TDD, pair programming, and continuous integration; he then opens the discussion to evaluate practices chosen by the delegates for consideration.

1. AT11
Agile Development Concurrent Session
11/13/2014 1:30 PM
"Assessing Agile Engineering
Practices"
Presented by:
Rob Myers
Agile Institute
Brought to you by:
340 Corporate Way, Suite 300, Orange Park, FL 32073
888-268-8770 ∙ 904-278-0524 ∙ sqeinfo@sqe.com ∙ www.sqe.com

2. Rob Myers is the founder of Agile Institute. He has twenty-eight
years of professional experience on software development teams,
and has been training and coaching organizations in Agile, Scrum,
and Extreme Programming topics since 1998. He has recently
worked with numerous organizations, from start-ups to Fortune 100
companies, helping them with cultural change and essential
practices during their Agile transformations. His courses are always
a blend of fun and practical hands-on labs, "Training From the Back
of the Room” learning techniques, and first-person stories from both
successful and not-so-successful Agile implementations.

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Assessing Agile
Engineering
Practices
Rob Myers
Agile Development Practices
East
13 November 2014

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Test-Driven
Development
Continuous
Integration
Pair
ProgrammingCollective Code
Ownership
Relentless
Refactoring
Sustainable
Pace
Creative Slack
CRC Cards
ATDD
Mocks
Legacy
Characterization
Tests
Spikes
Emergent Design

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6. five focusing steps
1. Identify the constraint.
2. Exploit the constraint: Maximize efficiency at the
constraint.
3. Subordinate all else to the constraint: Allow the
constraint to set the pace.
4. Elevate the constraint: Invest (wisely) in “more,
better, faster.”
5. Repeat.
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“The results of the case studies indicate
that the pre-release defect density of the
four products decreased between 40%
and 90% relative to similar projects that
did not use the TDD practice.
Subjectively, the teams experienced a
15–35% increase in initial development
time after adopting TDD.”
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/esm/nagappan_tdd.pdf, Nagappan et al,
© Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008

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“Laurie Williams of the University of Utah
…has shown that paired programmers are
only 15% slower than two independent
individual programmers, but produce
15% fewer bugs. Since testing and
debugging are often many times more
costly than initial programming, this is an
impressive result.”
"Agility counts", The Economist, 20 Sep 2001

12. beyond academia
• The obvious:
• Fewer defects.
• Cross-training.
• The subtle:
• Collaboration, courage, & creative
problem-solving.
• Self-control, self-discipline, valuable
breaks, fewer interruptions.
• Readable code, less ego-centric code.
• Fewer “heroes” (a.k.a. single points of
failure).
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“If it’s painful,
do it often.”
-- attributed to Kent Beck, who is not a masochist.

14. so boring, a computer could do it
• What it provides:
• Rapid, automated feedback.
• We know we’re testing/deploying a
version from a stable snapshot.
• Often generates valuable metrics.
• What it helps avoid:
• Dependency integration defects, merge
conflicts, lingering broken builds.
• A need for branching, & branched
releases.
• Code freezes.
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15. a short Continuous Integration recipe
1. A build server.
2. A code repository.
3. A fast suite of automated tests.
4. Build scripts.
5. A Buildmeister.
6. A CI tool (optional, but adds zest)
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Test-Driven
Development
Continuous
Integration
Pair
ProgrammingCollective Code
Ownership
Relentless
Refactoring
Sustainable
Pace
Creative Slack
CRC Cards
ATDD
Mocks
Legacy
Characterization
Tests
Spikes
Emergent Design

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Rob.Myers@agileInstitute.com
http://PowersOfTwo.agileInstitute.com/
@agilecoach