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The Denver Agile Success Tour continued with four open space sessions. For about 20% of the room, this was the first open space session they have ever participated in. Groups broke into discussions on leadership, testing, scaling and tooling and then did a read-out to share their conclusions with the larger audience. (For my other live posts from the Denver event, see 5 Stories of Agile Success and What’s On Your Mind?) 
#1 Open Space – Executives and Agile Adoption, led by Israel Gat
This group included new as well mature Agile folks and teams of 9 to 280 people – Given that spread, there was an overwhelming agreement that “our executives do not understand it” and “I, the executive, wants the whole iron triangle fixed – time, budget and scope.” For executives who do not understand agile, it is very hard for people to communicate “What is in it for the executive?”
Conclusion – Socializing Agile is as important as doing Agile well. Your adoption will regress if your executives are not sold. Without time spent with executives, there is a bitter slide back down coming for the team. A slide like this is really hard to recover from.
Recommendation – At the point of scaling your agile adoption, contract up-front with your executive on the results, but only pick only one dimension. (Productivity, Time-to-Market or Quality)
#2 Open Space – Testing, Quality and Leadership, led by Zach Nies and Peggy Reed from Avaya
Topic time spent on willingness of test teams to move to Agile and what does pulling testing forward mean? Can I be Agile if I do not test inside the iteration? At Avaya, they do a lot of testing outside the iteration due a large matrix of configurations.
Conclusion – Make sure testing team is at iteration planning and release planning. Always honor your time box and retrospect on your testing coverage.
Recommendation – Focus on making story sizes smaller to bring testing into the iteration.
#3 Open Space – Scaling and Large Scale Adoption, led by Evan Campbell
Topics focused on collecting metrics while the guerrilla insurgency is working and before they get “busted” doing Agile. The result of not collecting metrics means getting stuck in an “Agile Ghetto.” Top-down adoption approaches are becoming more common, but came back to Rally’s Enterprise Adoption model called Flow-Pull-Innovate that is based on Lean.
Conclusion – It is inevitable that you are going to have to evangelize the Agile adoption. Start building the case from day 1.
Recommendation - Focus on the change management process for large scale adoption. Practices are a key focus for small teams, but not the key focus of large scale adoption.
#4 Open Space – Tooling Agile, led by Karen Kagiyama and Amy Wiley
Tools enable best practices, and integrations are inevitable because one tool cannot support all types and nuances of development teams and technology needs. Continuous integration, build management and test coverage metrics and reports correlate into the context of iteration, release, and program of teams are critical for know “where are we right now?”
Conclusion – The ultimate goal is a single dashboard to support the insights and planning.
Recommendation - Use Rally’s Mash-up Platform to provide those insights.
[...] with executives of this mindset usually converge quickly on what is most important to the business: time-to-market, quality or productivity. It is a small step from here to getting into the “hows” of Agile [...]
[...] captures my more important takeaways from the event, based on the panel Q&A session, my own breakout session and various one-on-one interactions during the [...]