Agile Development Blog

This and other great questions from the LA Agile Success Tour below. My next post will cover the open space breakout sessions.

Question: What would you ask your CEO to bring Agile into your organization?

Christophe – Are you ready to get rid of 50% of your managers?
Jean – Agile brings about organization change, 20% of engineers won’t adjust.
Israel – What are you trying to accomplish? Pick one and focus on it.
Chris – Why just Agile in engineering? The whole business can use Agile throughout the whole organization.
Laureen – Are you really committed to the change?

Question: What metrics do you ask the teams and upper management to embrace?

Chris – Measure what you want to improve and care about like: velocity, unit test coverage for the team. For the executives, align business metrics with your development metrics and make it as public as possible.
Laureen – Make sure you have a goal before you come up with your metrics. What do the metrics mean to us? Data should support your goals.
David – Had no metrics before Agile, now we can have value based metrics that the business can use.
Israel – Establish a baseline before you do any process changes – you need to know where you stand. Pick the metrics to help you know where you stand and establish that baseline.
Christophe – One tracked 3 metrics: dollars, customer satisfaction, and time to market.

Question: What do you believe is the #1 discipline that had to change or understand to enable successful Agile adoption?

Chris – The toughest and most important one is getting the development team to embrace continuous integration, it reveals so many of the improvement areas within the development team. This is hard because it can expose so many sacred cows within the organization. Getting to a point where you are always ready to release is key.
Israel – Changing how the sales force and marketing departments sell products. Getting these groups able to sell value and benefits to the customer rather than a pure feature focus. This is key to end-to-end Agile.
Laureen – Agile isn’t just another process with associated documents; it’s a change with how people interact with each other on a day to day basis. If people don’t want to grow and change with the business, then they may need to leave your organization.
Christophe – Are you good at multitasking? Instead ask: Are you good at single tasking? Limit the amount of work in progress! Nothing gets done when you focus on too many things. The most difficult thing is to get teams to focus on one thing at a time.
David – Moving away from an upfront requirements document to user stories that can change over time. A key piece was to break the stories down into smaller and smaller stories that can be worked during the iterations. Even people who thought they understood this process of breaking stories down struggled.

Question: How do you educate clients to Agile in a service provider based businesses?

Israel – Involve your customers with the iterations, the release planning events, and the end of iteration demos. The commitment is small from the customer and the benefits are tremendous in that the customer can be involved in the development process.
Chris – Agile is such a wonderful and easy way to get customer involvement. Each iteration, they deploy to an external environment where they get feedback. Create a feedback loop with your customer so they can see how their feedback affects the direction of the product.

Question: How do you do performance management in a highly functional organization?

Christophe – I don’t do formal performance appraisals in my organization. Do the right thing for your team.
Jean – Look at performance with this question: In what ways did you contribute to the success of this team?
David – Unlike Christophe, it’s a little different in big organizations with SOX issues. If you have managers that span Scrum teams, make sure they understand what’s going on in the Scrum teams. Your focus as a manager totally shifts from micromanagement to one of removing impediments, roadblocks, and preparing the team for the next project.
Israel – Keep information about how the team is doing secret to the team. Decouple the performance appraisal process from the process improvement within the team.

Question: How do you estimate how much work will go into a release and do more development and do it faster?

Christophe – Make sure you fix the date of your release and vary scope.
David – I agree, resources are fixed, time is fixed and scope varies.
Laureen – We use a train analogy. There is no question when the train is leaving, the question is what features will be on the train.
David – When we started we had about 60% estimation accuracy. We now have over 90% accuracy in our estimates. A key point is DON’T LOAD YOURSELF TO 100% CAPACITY. Give yourself some flexibility, someone might get sick.