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Maximizing Team Dynamics and Overcoming Dysfunction in Agile Environments Change can be painful, but staying stagnant can hurt even more. Deciding to "go agile" may be the right choice for many companies, but seeing Scrum or XP as the next silver bullet can be a mistake, or perhaps the right medicine at the wrong time. In the rush to be faster, better, cheaper, or super-innovative, it's possible to become trapped in organizational dysfunction, even to the extent whereby good medicine won't work. When companies seek to "become agile," what roadblocks might they hit that could increase risk of failure? Michael Mah presents examples of companies that have overcome problems, plus a few who didn't.
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Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.
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A Lean Approach to Managing the Project Portfolio Whether you've been agile for a while or are thinking about it, you have one thing in common with every other software team I've encountered. You have too much work to do. One way to organize your work is with a project portfolio. But if your portfolio is an "as desired" portfolio, you still haven't solved the problem of too much work. Fortunately, taking a lean approach to managing the portfolio helps make those problems of "desired" and "too much work" transparent. Johanna Rothman discusses the several choices you have in managing the portfolio. She presents a project portfolio plan at the highest level and the lowest level, and describes how to apply rolling wave planning to your project portfolio. Johanna discusses ways you can evaluate the projects in your portfolio, whether it's a kanban board, a fixed queue, a fixed timebox, or other evaluation approach.
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Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.
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Test-Driven Development Takes On Embedded Software Embedded software developers face the same challenges as other software developers-unpredictable schedules, poor quality, and the problems that follow. In addition, embedded software developers must overcome the realities of concurrent hardware/software development, scarce target hardware availability, long download times, high deployment costs, as well as the challenges of testing embedded C. Test-Driven Development (TDD), a key agile practice, helps software developers improve schedule predictability and product quality; but very few embedded software engineers apply TDD to their craft. James Grenning describes the problems addressed by TDD, as well as the additional challenges and benefits of applying TDD to embedded software. He provides valuable lessons for doing TDD in the hostile environment of C. After the class, get hands-on experience with James' independent study exercise, "TDD in C".
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James Grenning, Renaissance Software Consulting, Co.
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Agile Development Practices 2008: Making People and Processes Congruent Agile processes work better if developers and customers have specific aptitudes and attitudes, such as the ability and willingness to handle rapid change. Members of an agile product team cannot always be selected to ensure that they have these capabilities. Developers may not appreciate the need for unit testing while customers may not be able to interact easily to create just-in-time requirements. In this interactive class, you first outline people issues you have faced. Based on common issues, the class divides into groups to discuss their challenges in depth. Each group develops ways to approach these issues and improve their teams. At the end of the session, you will have the opportunity to share your key results with the entire group. You will learn to adapt your agile implementation so that team members can work effectively within their capabilities.
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Ken Pugh, Net Objectives
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Agile Development Practices 2008: When to Step Up, When to Step Back: How to Lead Collaboration Leaders can stifle progress when they interfere with team processes. But as a leader, you don't want an on-track project to go over the cliff and deliver the wrong results either. There are times when leaders should stand back and let the team work and times when they should step up and lead. How do we know which is which? Pollyanna Pixton focuses on collaboration and teaches you how to step back by unleashing the talent in your organization and teams. Learn how to create an open environment that fosters innovation and creativity and how to let your team members take ownership and hold themselves accountable. Equally important, develop the techniques to step up and lead without impeding the flow of ideas, yet keep the project on track. Master this balancing act and come away with tools to both motivate and guide effectively.
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Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova
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Selling Agile: Getting Buy-in from Your Team, Customers, and Managers Are you excited by the potential of agile software development, but find that your colleagues are a bit reticent? Is your whole team ready to dive in, but your business partner is only interested in dipping in their big toe-if that? Or maybe you're wishing you could find a way to convince your clients that there's a better way to contract for a software development job-without having to do a full-blown detailed design upfront? Michele Sliger discusses all of these questions surrounding how to best "sell" agile in your organization. Michele focuses on the general idea of a "sales pitch", including what to say and what not to say. Then she discusses selling agile to the team, to management, to the customer, and to others in your organization. She wraps up with a pointed look at not selling, and instead focusing on finding other ways to promote and share agile.
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Michele Sliger, Sliger Consulting, Inc.
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Scaling Agile: Kanban and Beyond... Agile software development has been around for almost ten years. Some believe lean is the next step in our evolution. How do agile and lean play together, and what does the lean influence mean for the future of agile? Kanban is a signaling system, devised by Toyota and used in their just-in-time manufacturing process. Often, it is implemented as cards on a board that shows the status of work. David Anderson describes how you can use the kanban approach to build a high maturity enterprise that can scale agile practices to support large, enterprise software development projects. He describes how kanban facilitates a quantitatively managed, predictable, and continuously improving organization. David also examines future trends in scaling agile, including the real option theory, CMMI's role in high maturity organizations, agile portfolio management, agile governance, and the emergence of lean software supply chains.
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David Anderson, Modus Cooperandi, Inc.
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Collaborative Leadership: A Secret to Agile Success When members of a development project are asked to become a self-directed agile team, some claim that leadership and leaders are obsolete. Or, is a different type of leadership exactly what agile teams need to truly flourish? Pollyanna Pixton describes a new, collaborative leadership style that does not attempt to control or micro-manage. It's one that asks the right questions at the right time to generate new ideas and develop creative products that customers need and want. Pollyanna explains the four areas of collaborative leadership-creating an open environment where the best people can work, learning from stakeholders throughout the enterprise, prioritizing innovative solutions based on business value, and standing back to allow the team to succeed.
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Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova
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Beyond Best Practices: Keeping Agile Agile Adopting "best practices" seems to be an intrinsic part of the transition to agile-with many organizations creating special process teams and hiring methodology consultants to implement and enforce best practices. These practices often are seen as a cornerstone of an agile change program and are even touted as a selling point-"Our projects will surely succeed if we follow best practices!" And of course, there are industries and ecosystems that have grown up around accreditation, auditing, and support of specific agile methods. Do they actually help you, or might they in fact be working against your organization? Dan North argues that best practices are useful only up to a point. Rigidly enforcing them is counter to the values of agile and will eventually drive away your best people.
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Dan North, ThoughtWorks
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Do the Right Thing: Adapting Requirements Practices for Agile Projects Some agile teams rely on user stories alone to articulate requirements, struggle with requirements rework on large agile projects, and spend too much time thrashing on requirements during iterations. Requirements expert and agile coach, Ellen Gottesdiener shares a wide spectrum of requirements practices ranging from traditional to agile to help you break out of the cookie-cutter mentality that some take toward requirements elicitation. Practitioners from a traditional environment learn how classic requirements practices are adapted on agile projects. Agile practitioners learn how they may lighten, tighten, or incorporate a subset of traditional requirements practices to mitigate risks associated with missing, erroneous, or conflicting requirements. Gain an appreciation of ways to adapt requirements practices to fit various project situations so you can do the right things for your project.
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Ellen Gottesdiener, EBG Consulting, Inc.
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