Agile Development Blog

I’m live here at the LA Agile Success Tour with the success stories of our panelists. In my next post, I’ll cover the Q&A.

Israel Gat – Cutter Consortium member on Agile, former VP from BMC, IBM, Microsoft and EMC

• Software is becoming pervasive in our lives. The key will be how we align the functionality of that software with what the customers actually need, not our guesses about what we think they might need.

• A key component of this is agility in the process between developing software and getting that value into our customer’s hands. He used Flickr and IMVU as examples of the power of using constant deployment as a method to effortlessly deliver software, and ultimately value, to customers.

Chris Babcock – VP of Technology at Real Capital Markets

• Introduced to Agile in 2000 as a reaction to his “death march” experience at another company, where his team worked 100-hour weeks. He moved into a development management role and took on the goal of delivering projects on schedule, in a way that was healthy for the team. One of his development leads discovered the XP methodology and they never looked back.

• Tracking project metrics was an important part of his role at one company. He shows empirical evidence of the benefits of Agile. With waterfall, time = 31 weeks, 16 critical defects and 153 stories. With Agile, time = 19 weeks, 0 critical defects and 234 story points. He was most proud of 0 critical defects into the market.

• Benefits from Agile – faster development, more manageable codebase, fewer defects. Industry average is 15 to 50 bugs per 1,000 lines of code. With each release, through refactoring and Agile development, they are decreasing the size of their code base. Yes, that’s right, more features, with higher quality, with 100,000 fewer lines of code.

Laureen Knudsen – Sr. Dir. of Program Management at Qualcomm

• Laureen has worked in software development teams for about 17 years, and has focused on process and process improvement for the last 10 years. In a regulated environment, Agile has been very beneficial in fulfilling regulatory requirements. Agile expands your view – for executives, it gives insights into projects and standard metrics. For Product Marketing,  it increases consistency and relevancy of requirements with the ability to measure market value delivered. For Support, knowledge capture and transfer to the development group is key.

• She then asks, “What’s in it for me?” A key benefit is aligning to the market in ways that you can measure what you do. This tracking and predictability allows the rest of the business to prepare for and align with releases to the market. The Agile process is highly empowering for the team because they take responsibility for what they are delivering. The key is incremental improvement and retrospectives.

Christophe Louvion – CTO at Gorilla Nation

It’s a cruel world out there, many organizations don’t try Agile and those who can fail. Gave several examples of Agile failure patterns:

Problem: Grass roots movement, little support, treating process like a fad.
Solution: Focus on making: happy customers, stakeholders, shareholders, and teams. If you say “no” to any of these don’t try Agile.

Problem: Hackers? Sloppy developers create lousy software, with Agile they just pile up junk faster.
Solution: Or Talented Engineers? Would you want your surgeon not to follow hand washing procedures? So why not expect teams to follow strong engineering practices?

Problem: A two-day class does not make a ScrumMaster.
Solution: Find some with experience, get an Agile coach.

Problem: A toe in the water.
Solution: A real change of direction – Make no assumptions, continuously experiment, inspect and adapt everything!

Are you ready to fight the odds of failure?

David Annis – VP of Software Development at UTI

• Developing software is inherently evolutionary – all the requirements can’t be known at the beginning of the project. Figuring out what the customer needs happens over time, not by managing change process. He asks how many have read a 150 page requirements document – about 50% hands go up. In Lean manufacturing terms, that 150 page document was waste. He finds that involving business users is critical, but do it in a way that doesn’t break the focus of the team. Focus is critical, don’t swap resources around mid-sprint.

• How do you sell Agile to the business? Describe Agile in terms they understand like Lean manufacturing. Business executives view development as a mysterious black box, so don’t describe Agile in terms only people in the black box understand. Use the language of the business executive to describe the process. David works in the IT space in the automotive industry, so he used the automotive production line as a framework to describe their Agile transformation.

• What’s in it for the business executive? Visibility into the process where development becomes less of a black box – show the transparency of the process. Create a partnership with IT. Business analysis can focus on specific business areas and the IT Scrum teams are aligned with that business analyst and business section.

• The biggest challenge was convincing IT, not the business, to transition to Agile. They ran two different pilots to gain experience and prove to the team that it works.

• A turning point was a key business change that put their revenue at risk. The waterfall team estimated the change would take 3 months, but the business couldn’t handle that. As an Agile pilot, the first Sprint delivered the critical business value in half the time of the waterfall estimates. They didn’t deliver all the functionality in those 6 weeks, but they delivered the most important.

According to David, If you’re bigger than one team, or one product, don’t think you can use a spreadsheet to manage the Agile process; you will need a tool.