Agile Development Blog

The other day, I noticed that the water is draining rather slowly out of my bathtub at home. That is annoying…

It means that I haven’t really kept my drain as clean as I should. Or perhaps I should be “snaking” the pipes more regularly.  One thing for sure, if I don’t get this fixed, eventually my tub will stop flowing entirely. If I try to add water, my bathtub will just overflow and I won’t be able to use it without a major plumbing expense. Ugh!

What does this have to do with my latest topic of cutting costs with Agile development? Well, I’ve been reading a great little book by Linda Booth Sweeney, When a Butterfly Sneezes. It’s a sweet, simple way to learn about systems thinking by using children’s stories for examples of various systems’ archetypes. To kick things off she uses a bathtub analogy to explain stocks and flows and how they impact one another.

Aha! That is what I care about when I am developing software!

Imagine that the faucet to my tub is all the features I am putting into my product. My bathtub is my product stock. As I add features, my bathwater level goes up. Now think of the drain as the “flow” by which I get the “stock” out to my customers.

If my drain is clogged up even a little, I can’t get the flow of features, my value, out to my customers as quickly as I’d like. And if I have a really bad situation, then I actually can’t keep adding features into my stock (my bathtub) because it will just overflow. Features (value) will never get to my customers. They’ll just end up as a major mop up for me, lots of work that doesn’t deliver anything but frustration.

So what are the clogs in my software bathtub? Defects.

A few defects unattended to will just slow down my value delivery. Not too bad. But if I allow defects to accumulate, that technical debt can bring my value delivery to a crawl. I’ve got lots of stock and yet my inattention to defects has cut off flow to my customers. Crumb.

Agile cuts costs because it requires us to keep our drain clean, not let defects accumulate. Agile guides us to not over-emphasize adding features to our tub while disregarding accumulating defect residue. Rather, we are guided to add high-quality features with a zero-defect mentality. Think of it this way -

Adding a little Scrum will help you eliminate the scum.

Now, whenever you are ready to open the drain for a release of software, there are no last minute plumbing repairs necessary to let the value flow. Keeping the drain defect-free means I can keep adding features into my stock and let them flow out anytime I want. I can even have sustainable, even continuous, inflows and outflows to and from my stock. The cost of delivery of value slowly goes down, I have sustainable and reliable flow, and all because I was willing to do a little continuous bathtub maintenance.

Don’t let defects clog your feature bathwater. Use Agile to stop the defect clogs and keep the value water flowing!

Further Reading:

• Sustainable and Successful – Top 10 Characteristics of an Agile Organization
  
• Agile Cuts Costs Through Time to Market Improvements
• Testing, Scaling and Tooling Agile – Open Space Topics from Denver

Over the holiday break, I had the pleasure of spending an hour with Peter Senge from MIT and founder of the Society on Organizational Learning talking through some of the concepts and models in his new book, Necessary Revolution. In particular, he uses the Shareholder Value matrix from Hart and Milstein to help organizations build a comprehensive vision and strategy for sustainable value.

We decided to use that model for our 2-day annual planning session that was led by Jean Tully at Creating Clarity.  The model worked very well and helped us manage four intertwined aspects of strategy, divided on the axes of today/tomorrow and internal/external.

While using the model in planning at Rally, we realized that working in two dimensions allowed us to see the whole, and bound the conversations in a way that made the meeting very productive. We are students of Verne Harnish and Gazelles.com; we have and continue to use his one-page strategic planning matrix. However, we have struggled in the past in only talking  along the time dimension.

Proposed Framework for Agile Adoption

It was so successful that I built an example Agile adoption strategy model to help illustrated its use. I built this model of a fictitious software-driven organization to illustrate the result of completing only the “Today” part of the plan at the exclusion of “Tomorrow.” The trick of balancing short-term and long-term agility  is completing both the top and the bottom to keep the business from myopically focusing on today.

This proposed framework can help you effectively communicate your Agile strategy in the context of the overall business.

Example use of the Agile adoption framework for a software-driven organization

In this model, I define Agile as a strategy and not a driver.  I have yet to meet a company who has been successful at adopting Agile development that did not have a higher-level driver or business goal such as a massive increase in quality, cycle-time, customer satisfaction or market innovation.  However, many people argue about what is Agile – a methodology, an approach, a process?  To me it is all of those things, but its success and impact are starting to make it a strategy for many of our customers.

BTW, Peter Senge’s book is great for folks new to sustainability (balancing economic, social and environmental factors – see the SoL sustainability consortium) and deep learning strategies or for folks with a deep collection of both. And, if you are really interested consider attending their two-day training in Boston next week.

Further Reading:

• Growth Hides All Issues and Quick Fixes Mostly Fail
• Sustainable and Successful – Top 10 Characteristics of an Agile Organization
• Get Serious About Your Meetings with Jean Tabaka and Seth Godin

Just got off the phone with Dan Montgomery who interviewed me on his BlogTalkRadio channel on Sustainable Leadership.

Following the ‘More…’ link will show my notes and links from the 50-minute interview using the Decker Grid.

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This last week I was with a number of our extra-large customers and prospects.  A common theme with these large and very successful high technology companies was the statement “growth hides all issues.” 

When we are growing rapidly, we all tend to focus on investment and hiring just to keep up and not limit the growth.

I remember this same feeling at BEA Systems in 2001 as the tech bubble popped. In our Boulder office, we found ourselves staring at 10 times more people than we started with in 1999.  Even though we took Extreme Programming (XP) teams into that growth, we ended up with a 100+ person and multi-location, waterfall process.  Our team reacted by putting back in XP engineering practices and large-scale, nightly, integrated builds to increase visibility and feedback.

Picture from Pegasus Communication - Leaders in Organizational Learning and System Thinking

A Two-Pronged Approach to Agile Adoption in a Recession

What is critically different about Agile adoption in this recession is the need for a two-pronged approach. In December, I wrote for Tech Target on two-pronged approaches to cutting budget while implementing Agile development. This is a systems thinking approach that is effective at breaking myopic thinking.

I was thrilled to see this approach used in the President’s stimulus package – short-term tax cuts to stimulate and provide relief coupled with future-looking government investments in more sustainable and equitable infrastructure. Without this type of approach, myopic thinking tends to increase the chances of “Fixes that Fail.”

It was a really good week last week.  As a result of this positive feedback, our team is going to devote a substantial amount of blog space during early 2009 to covering the strategy, approach, myths, and success stories around the use of Agile development to cut costs and simultaneously prepare for future growth.

Please stay tuned, link back your stories, comment, subscribe and consider your actions.

Further Reading:

• Agile Cuts Costs Through Productivity Improvements
• Where to Turn in a Down Economy?
• Sustainable and Successful – Top 10 Characteristics of an Agile Organization

There was much to celebrate as an American last Tuesday. The President’s speech took me back to core values and principles. This quote struck me hard as we work through this recession.

“Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.”

In the flurry to find ways to take cost out of the business quickly, it is very easy to get carried away and have everyone run to the cost-cutting side of the boat.  There are two things to watch out for as your company’s suggestion box fills-up:

1. Selecting quick fixes without an eye for the long-term implications or unintended consequences
2. Letting your goals or values drift in the short-term at the expense of true on-going success

Cover of HBR Article on Core Values

If you enjoy the writings of Jim Collins, like this Harvard Business Review classic , you believe that only with the guidance of core values and principles can you make the tough decisions needed to steer through this rough time.

Again, from the new President’s inauguration address:

“Our challenges may be new, the instruments with which we meet them may be new, but those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old.”

For many software-driven organizations, I believe Agile development is the “new instrument” to meet these new challenges.  Now for the good news – since core values are “forever,” these certainly do not need to change with even the largest scale Agile adoption across the software development lifecycle.

So, as we explore the notion of cutting costs through Agile adoption, let’s start with a frame of core values. Rally’s core values are captured on our backgrounder for hiring new employees.

Where are your company’s core values? How can you leverage them to adopt Agile in this historic time?

Further Reading:

• Growth Hides All Issues and Quick Fixes Mostly Fail
• Work/Life Balance – Top Characteristics of an Agile Organization
  
• Where to Turn in a Down Economy?

“What can Agile really do for us as an organization?”

I work with a variety of clients in various stages of Agile adoption. When an evangelist from the Engineering organization has led the charge, the adoption theme is largely about just wanting to get out from under the mantle that waterfall’s unsustainable claims put upon the Engineering team.

Very soon, however, news floats up the organizational flagpole and now the question is asked, “But what can Agile really do for us as an organization?”

One nervous answer is, “Well, Agile cuts costs.” Oh really… How so?

That is often when I get called in. The Agile adoption is underway and it is now time to have the sit-down talk about, “Jean, does Agile really cut costs?”  This hovering question is all the more pertinent now.  We’re in a down economy. We’re having to look, not at just what costs too much, but frankly what can cut costs.

Turning to employees for suggestions on how to cut costs and create revenues

So, imagine that your organization has decided to turn to the employees to find out what you can do to save money.  You set out a “Suggestions” box,  seeking any and all ideas about how to generate revenues and cut costs.

As you rummage through the contents of the box, you pull out one suggestion “Agile Cuts Costs” signed,  “Concerned and Frustrated Employee.”

Hmmmm. So you’ve got at least one employee believing this. It’s time to check this out and find out if it is true.

One cost-cutting suggestion: Agile development

In a number of posts coming up, Ryan Martens and I want to investigate this with you. I’ve been thinking about all the conversations I’ve had with client executives who, with healthy skepticism, bring their doubts and questions to the table. They are not ready to chomp into a silver bullet. They want real-world evidence that Agile cuts costs.

So, I want us to do the same here in this blog: don’t just assume Agile is a silver bullet; evaluate whether it really does cut costs;  determine whether your Agile adoption is reaping you adequate cost savings; and, what to do if your Agile adoption is not cutting costs.

I was passing by my colleague’s desk yesterday while wandering around taking photos at work (more on that in another post.) Erin Rae loves to snack as she works. I already knew that. However, it was only after I uploaded the photos from my camera that I realized that Erin had some pretty interesting snack food right there in the photo. Why am I writing about Erin’s snacking habits?

Because very often when we are adopting Agile development, it can seem something like drinking the Kool-aid.

When I go into organizations to talk about Agile, I may often come across as being a bit to evangelistic, perhaps altruistic, about Agile. That is not my intent. And so I have been trying to pay attention to that. Also, Agile is not always the appropriate message (or in Erin’s case “snack”) for your audience.

Erin snacks with "Go Lean" cereal

Talking about Agile to executives can be like feeding turkey to your family on Thanksgiving; it puts everyone into a sleepy stupor.

What has been more useful for these discussions is talking about going Lean. Through Lean, I am able to tap into discussions about waste versus value. I can engage the executive team into looking at their entire organization. And, these “seeing the whole” discussions help them then understand why they should care about an engineering groups adoption of Agile.

Now it is no longer about just drinking the Agile Kool-aid. It is about following Erin’s example and learning to eat the Lean cereal. Bon appetit!

Further Reading:

• Scaling Lean and Agile Development – Ask Bas and Craig
• Q&A: Creating Leaner, Meaner and Faster Product Development
• My Leaning Bookshelf – 18 Books That Are Influencing My Lean Learning Path

Here at Rally, we’ve been working hard over the last several months to bring our Agile course materials and presentations into the New Age. We want to have what you might call “truly Agile” course materials and presentations.

What does that look like? Well, it started like this.

Thanks to some folks in marketing, we each took the Bert Decker course “Communicate to Influence” on presentation skills. (”Jean, you really have to learn to keep your hands at your sides; you’re all over the place!”) What a phenomenal 2 days of on-your-feet guidance about connecting with your audience!

Two books have been our guide on dramatically reducing the clutter on our slides.

Then thanks  to my colleagues Chris Spagnuolo and Ben Carey, we Rally Agile Coaches began reading Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds and Slide:ology by Nancy Duarte. We’ve also worked to reduce the number of slides. We’ve become more cognizant of the aesthetic of each slide.  So, notice in the slide here about defects, we no longer have a bulleted-list of all the issues around defects and what might cause them to be increased. The slide is no longer the story; it is the backdrop to the story that the trainer/presenter tells.