Agile Development Blog

Question: How did you get started from waterfall?

Answer 1 -  Started with whiteboards and sticky notes.

Answer 2 – Started with in-house tool, then open source and finally Rally.

Answer 3 – Started with Rally training for the first year with a Rally pilot in parallel to show management and staff the whole solution.

Answer 4 – Put good consultants alongside the team from day 1 to apprenticeship with the best – we went Rally training and consulting.

Question: We have lots of concurrent features in parallel. Does anyone do concurrent feature branches?

Answer 1 – Peggy – At Avaya we do this, but first go back to the product owner to prioritize better.  We use private views in ClearCase to manage features branches with continuous integration in the views.

Answer 2 – Israel – Never allow the backlog to be larger than twice the capacity of a release.

Question: Please talk about the adoption challenges of adopting with your external customers.

Answer 1 – Israel – It took us 18 months to change the perception of my group with sales.  It was critical to get field engineers to come to release planning and every iteration demo. They get exposed to the software engineering approach and real status and built the best evangelists and advocates in the process.

Answer 2 – Richard – Rally has developed a social networking site with what most people see as shocking openness.  As a result, we have had tremendous success in engaging customers and focusing priorities.

Question: What is the cheapest and best way to get started as an individual?

Answer 1 – Take trips to visit other local companies – everyone says yes.

Answer 2 – “XP in Trenches” – was recent great book find- read a ton of books but most only focused on single team.

Answer 3 – Richard – Come be a fly on the wall at a Rally release planning.

Question: Big Six Sigma background – What tools do you use QFD to find what customer really wants?

Answer 1 – Failed with all upfront tools, only thing that works is communication in every iteration.  Too many edge cases in our industrial software.  Given up trying to spec this in advance.  Invest more in bringing the customer in.

Answer 2 – Israel – Try to reach the point where the developer can code faster than marketers can release.  As soon as that happens, you can decouple and get more feedback during the cycle.  You are also able to bring more of the business into learning after you decouple.

Question: How do you solve the coordination of many teams in a large adoption? Tell me more about Meta Scrum.

Answer 1 – We do a meta scrum every week with the owners of seven product lines.  In parallel the product owners and development leads do the same.

Answer 2 – Israel – Scrum of Scrums everyday with all the ScrumMasters following a 10 to 15 minute approach.