1. A Self Funding Agile
Transformation
(Eating our own Methodological Dog Food)
Daniel Poon
dpoon@romatech.com

2. Will the real analysts please step
forward
● Difficult to optimise and difficult to modify
● An Integration Bottleneck, making it difficult to
release frequently and respond to the market
Layered architecture

3. Simple
architecture
Simple architecture
Cheaper to produce
Better performance
Easier to manage
Simple team
structure =

4. Necessity is the mother of invention
● If you can't effectively design a program up-front,
what makes you think you can create a
methodology up-front?

5. Eat your own methodological Dog
Food
● Apply iterative and incremental design to the
design and implementation of you agile method

6. Bootstrap loader:
Pair-Program with Domain Experts
● Only needs buy-in from two people
● Microcosm of the agile process
● Programmer + Domain Expert = Self Sufficient
– Cannot be sabotaged from outside

7. That difficult second album

8. Technical practices are a
Trojan horse for management
practices
● Tests = Metrics
● Fast build = Feedback
● Gives a sense of
purpose to meetings

9. Explaining the offside rule
● Don't play using excessively complicated rules
● Add rules incrementally to address perceived
problems

10. “I must not do agile because at the
moment I don't know how to scale it
if it is a success”

11. Any Questions?
dpoon@romatech.com
Thanks to
Gareth Owen, Andrew Smith, Sean Akers, Mark
Eccles, Chris Halse, Richard Lord, Chris Bailey,
Andy Poon, Jamie Pears
and everyone else at Romax