Agile Development Blog

In Boulder Colorado, it has been freezing cold and bright blue on the first day of both January and February. These 2 clear and crisp days have formed a meteorological metaphor for me about the year ahead. Let me give you some examples:

Back at 3333 Walnut in Boulder

• In early February, Rally moved our offices to one of our previous Walnut street addresses: 3333 Walnut street in Boulder. This time we are inhabiting the entire building, not just the first floor. The bright paint, open floors, wonderful art and huge windows are providing a clear and crisp view of the Boulder Flat Iron Mountains as well as Rally’s future.
• After a year of working on our Rally 2020 shared vision, starting with individual employees, moving up to groups and then into departments, that vision has now been incorporated into our 3-5 year planning. This long-term visioning has informed our 2011 planning in a way we couldn’t have imagined.  It is amazing how that shared vision exercise has put a clear and crisp focus on our planning.
• The 10 year Agile celebration that Alistair Cockburn held last week in a bright blue Snowbird Utah provided a clear and crisp view of what our industry needs to tackle in the coming 10 years. In Mike Hugo’s post on the event, we gained a clear, crisp of view of our mission: “Maximize value creation across the entire process.”
• Dean Leffingwell just published his Agile Requirements Management book.  I believe this will be the critical Agile requirements text in Universities around the world for many years to come.  Dean’s clear, crisp writing style and big picture model provide a promising vision of the value of Agile for the future of large organizations.
• Our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) team has recently received internal funding from Rally due to some great ideas and hard work. The CSR team’s January planning efforts will become public next week.  This is exciting. Thanks to this team’s perseverance, my early visions in this area of social responsibility are now starting to become a clear and crisp realization.
• We recently hired a new VP of Engineering and Operations, promoted our VP of Products to also be a CTO with me, and promoted a Director of Product Marketing to VP of Products.  With these promotions to support our growth and my upcoming sabbatical, 2011 is definitely looking clear and crisp for me.

What visual metaphor is becoming clear and crisp for you in 2011?

Ryan Martens is a member of NRDC’s Environmental Entrepreneurs, founder/CEO of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder/CTO at Rally Software Development.

I was fortunate and honored to be able to attend the 10 year Agile celebration in Snowbird, UT on February 11th and 12th.   The 2-day meeting in Snowbird had four very positive attributes that allowed the 33 participants to produce a solid retrospective on the last 10 years.

Group busy in Snowbird, UT 2011

It was:

• Thoughtful
• Diversified
• Well-facilitated
• Collaborative

As a result, it was a very satisfying event because of the energy that Alistair put into it and the facilitation by Janet and Bob from Coach4hire.  The event met all of Alistair’s objectives and everyone seemed to have fun.  What more can you ask?

Maybe you want to know what came out? As a celebration and retrospective, we did a very good job of appreciating the positive things of the past 10-years and reflecting on the puzzles and issues.

We agreed that we achieved the following things in the last 10 years:

What we did not do was make a plan.  A small group did spend time discussing ways the Agile Alliance could evolve to support our maturing and growing community.  As we were all from diverse companies and background, we were not in a place to really make a plan.  Rachel Davies, Todd Little and I shared context from having been on the Agile Alliance board.  And, Todd Little is taking many of the recommendations back to the Agile Alliance’s next board meeting in Stockholm.  I have hopes to see some of these ideas surface at Agile 2011 that will be back in Utah in August.

If you are really interested in the events of the weekend, I would encourage you to read these posts and others that will surely emerge during the remainder of the week:

• 10 Years Agile Web Site – with background leading up the event – results will be publish here in future
• Summary of the Twitter Traffic on #10yrsagile – big spike of traffic over the Snowbird weekend
• Dennis Stephen’s Summary of the process we used and the next steps we see
• David Anderson’s thoughtful reflections on what the event means
• Philippe Kruchten’s – summary of the sacred cows that need to be discussed
• Mike Hugo’s – Advice.CIO.com First Article on the Conference – “Business Analysts versus Business Designers”
• Johnathan House’s - My “Ahas” from 10 Years Agile

There were four summary statements that the group developed with regards to what we, the industry, need to do in the next 10 years of Agile.  Please know that the group does not see the high value in these summary statements, but in the details that are below these categories.

• Demand Technical Excellence
• Promote Individual Change and Lead Organizational Change
• Organize Knowledge and Improve Education
• Maximize Value Creation Across the Entire Process

At Rally, we are planning on being here for the next 10 years even as the industry moves from revolution to evolution:

“The mission now is incremental improvement. It’s evolution, education and improving levels of maturity, rather than a revolution. The enemy is now within. The enemy is as Joshua Kerievsky put it “all the crap I see out there” despite 10 years of Agile methods.” – From David Andersen’s post

10 Years ago as the Agile Manifesto was being crafted in Snowbird, UT, I was working at BEA Systems on E-commerce product and its web services strategy.  Agile has had a big impact on my past including the Global Village team in 1995, operating Avitek in the late 1990′s and through the first four releases of BEA’s Ecommerce solutions in 2000.  I had read Kent Beck’s white book, but I did not notice the Snowbird event in 2001.  It was not until I had left BEA in late 2001, that I noticed the snowball forming.  I am very happy to have been personally and professionally part of helping this critical industry scale the benefits of software agility.

I feel like I owe a big Thank You to the whole community, we really made progress and it has been a great last 10 years.  Now, I am really looking forward to the next 10 years where we are able to use these attitudes, beliefs, skills, capabilities, awareness, and sensibilities to work with with some of societies most complex difficulties.

Ryan Martens is a member of NRDC’s Environmental Entrepreneurs,  founder/CEO of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder/CTO at Rally Software Development.

After reading the Manifesto for Agile Software Development in January of 2002, Rally really took shape. I am proud of my involvement in the software industry for the last 25 years, but the last 10 have been fantastic thanks to the group pictured below, who came together in February 2001 in Snowbird, UT.

A ten year mark is the perfect time to stop and reflect and the 10-Year Manifesto anniversary is no different.  In this spirit, Dr. Alistair Cockburn, one of the original Manifesto authors, is hosting an open discussion on February 12 with a group of 35 individuals from varied backgrounds in our industry. I am proud to attend and we are proud to be a sponsor of this event.  I look forward to joining in the reflection, discussion and celebration with other attendees at the Snowbird resort. (With these recent storms, the 100+ inches of base and 14″ of fresh snow should make for a great weekend.)

The event theme is “Solved, Solvable, Unsolvable Problems.”  As participants we’ve been challenged to consider the following three questions:

1. What problems in software or product development have we solved (and therefore should not simply keep re-solving)?
2. What problems are fundamentally unsolvable (so therefore we should not keep trying to “solve” them)?
3. What problems can we sensibly address – problems that we can mitigate either with money, effort or innovation? (and therefore, these are the problems we should set our attention to, next.)

What do you think?  What are your answers? What other questions should we be asking of each other? The Agile community needs to be an active part of the anniversary celebration and the conversation it creates. Please take a moment to stop, reflect and make your own contribution to this event. Visit the ‘10-Years of the Agile Manifesto‘ website to join the dialog. You can also post your photos of agile development from the last decade to the event’s Flickr group. Follow and contribute to the discussion on Twitter using the hashtag: #10yrsagile. And, share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

The Agile Manifesto 10th anniversary will continue at the Agile 2011 Conference scheduled for August 7 – 13 in Salt Lake City. Agile 2011 will provide another opportunity for the Agile community to reflect on the Agile Manifesto and how it contributed to software development over the last decade.

Saturday’s Snowbird event marks an amazing 10 years in the software development industry. This is a great opportunity to think about how far we’ve come and what we can accomplish in the next 10 years. What’s on your roadmap for 2021?

Ryan Martens is an active snow shoveler, skier dreaming of skiing at Snowbird this weekend, and CTO at Rally Software Development.

(Note: today’s blog post is brought to you by the letter “N”)

Continuing our series on N Levels of Planning, I realize that even the usage of “N” in our definition of planning levels has been perplexing me. Sometimes, I think I get what N means. Imagine N = 5. In this context, you might do higher level planning for your product teams. Create a great product vision. Build a thematic product roadmap. Have these faithfully inform release planning, iteration planning and ultimately daily planning. Okay great. Here, N = 5.  And then I think, “But what about when I move to more continuous flow of value delivery through Agile? Now what is my “N”? I move away from iteration timeboxes for delivery, so no plan there, right? Do I still think about some sense of planning at a product vision level and a product roadmap level? Do I still have some sort product release planning but it just differs in approach in continuous delivery versus timebox delivery? Perhaps I now have N = 2; or, is it 3 or 4? And, perhaps “planning” has a different meaning as well.

We’re not done with the ambiguity yet

The N levels of planning complexity doesn’t stop at the product planning level. Think about now inviting levels of business planning as a natural part of Agile transformation and maturity. If I add in a Strategic Business plan accompanied by a Business Roadmap plan, I’ve now moved to N = 7. Or not if I am not using timebox-driven planning. What if the business uses a milestone-driven approach? For example, we know we have this conference coming up; we want a release for that date. We’ll still use a prioritized backlog for our work and we’ll declare our release based on what functionality is available by the milestone. What is “N” now?

But wait! There’s more!

You’ve brought the business into your Agile transformation. As you do so, are you transforming business with your IT organization? Or, is your Agile transformation in the context of product lines in an ISV?  Your business context may impact what and how you plan. In both contexts, you are running Strategic Business planning and Product Roadmap planning in your N-levels of planning. But what do these plans produce and how do you use them? Here, “N” now may rely on your business context. In the emerging business initiatives, have we uncovered capabilities that spread across portfolios or maybe across products? Are there initiatives that extend beyond business unit boundaries? Does this boundary-crossing work create capability-driven versus product-driven teams? Now, what are our N-levels of Planning?

I wonder if I am going to end up with some sort of quadratic equation to resolve “N”

As we continue to delve into a guide for “N-levels of Planning” in Agile organizations, I believe we are discovering the “N” is driven by the variety of taxonomies that lie in our contexts. Criss-crossing these contexts and their taxonomies, there seems to be some potential skeletal guide for “N”. At the least, consider 4 basic realms in which “N” derives definition:

1. Your level of Agile Adoption into the enterprise (product line only, one business unit, or multiple business units)
2. Your business’s technical organizational and architectural structures (e.g. ISV versus IT)
3. Your thematic (requirements) structures (themes, epics, capabilities, MMFs, stories)
4. Your delivery structures (timeboxes, milestones, or continuous flow)

“N” is a complex variable in N levels of planning. I no longer believe there is one magic formula for “N”. I know for sure “N” does not forever equal 5, something I had been so sure of at one time. I will say, I don’t think “N” is an imaginary number :-) I believe “N” reveals itself as we apply intention around the four structures above for our Agile transformations and maturity. And, your mileage may vary.

More to come on our old friend “N”. But first, what’s your “N”?

Jean Tabaka is a “why bother” latte sipper, crash skier, college hoops fan, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. You can follow Jean on Twitter at @jeantabaka