Agile Development Blog

We have all felt the pull of game play mechanics in software. You might be addicted to Angry Birds, Farmville, Foursquare or Mafia Wars? Or, maybe like me, you felt compelled to ski a couple extra runs this year thanks to the Epic Mix from Vail Associates. In either case, the achievement leveling and badging associated with the “gamification” of this software has most likely had some impact on your behavior.

Nowhere have I seen these techniques applied to software like I have experienced in StackExchange, a network of Q&A sites founded by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. Most of my experience is with the Project Management StackExchange, but there are 51 public sites and over 50 other domains emerging. Thanks to smart work by the StackExchange team, the leveling and badging mechanics are used to pull you into an ownership position with the community. As you earn reputation points, you are granted more privileges on the site. This progressive enablement of editing, voting, chatting and commenting capabilities seems perfectly matched with my gaining experience of the culture and ethics of the site. The more I use the site, the more I find myself developing a real sense of ownership and responsibility to the community. This is simply beautiful software for building a community of experts.

My positive experience with StackExchange has been echoed by a bunch of others at Rally. In fact, after playing with site back in March, Rally decided to partner with StackExchange to help share the knowledge from our inaugural RallyON Conference. Specifically, we started working with the project management and programers sites, as they have good coverage of agile, lean software, scrum, kanban, test-driven development, and continuous integration topics.

I encourage you follow our lead and try out StackExchange personally and with your agile teams. I think you will find it to be a great community for capturing and sharing knowledge on agile. Don’t miss Jean’s recent post, “Life in the StackExchange Lane,” to hear about her first month with the site.

Click to register for the webinar- Defining Done

For us, StackExchange is quickly becoming an indispensable community building tool – let me tell you the story and why we are going to use it to clear questions for the next event in our agile webinar series! To get started, please see this example question on pm.stackexchange.com – “How do you define “Done” on a project?” To see how the StackExchange community is preparing for this experiment, you can view the question - “Growing the site with a new experiment” in the meta section of pm.stackexchange.com.

To understand the rational for all this work I want to explore three areas: First, recognizing what was not working for us in our community;  Second, appreciating the stack overflow approach behind StackExchange; Third, comparing and contrasting StackExchange with other Q&A sites.

It’s hard to build a general community, but we need to

Since 2004, we have been a provider of agile solutions through the combination of products and services. For our customers, Rally and its partners deliver large and sustainable gains in software development time-to-market, quality and productivity as well as increasing the sense of purpose and joy on teams. To increase the impact of agile for our users who are spread arcross 100 countries, we launched a social community in 2006; Agile Commons.

Agile Commons provided an open platform to encourage dialogue and discussions with our users and others in the community. Of course there are many places on the Internet to have these general discussions. As a result, the parts of Agile Commons that really took off were those more closely associated with Rally specific content. We just did not have enough traffic to clear the questions with well thought out answers that really covered a problem space. As a result, Agile Commons has morphed into an open commons primarily for Rally customers and users. In addition, the general Agile community discussion has continued to splinter across countless blogs (see the top 200 agile blog list – we are #12!), email lists, and twitter. Due to this splintering, it is really hard to quickly find good, well shaped answers to common agile questions.

This problem has been plaguing the agile community for years and finally boiled to the surface at the 10 year agile gathering in Snowbird this year. In that meeting the following four items were cited as critical steps to keep the community growing for the next 10 years:

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

You can read more about the 10 years agile gathering in my February post as well as the many sites and attendees that I reference. I think the industry is ready to address this problem. Now what is the solution?

StackOverflow thinking

I have been passionate about building and sharing knowledge since I was first introduced to web technology via Mosiac in 1994; however, I would not call myself a knowledge management expert. I have continued to dip in and out of this space but being introduced to David Snowden’s work at the Lean Conference in 2010 has been a significant catalyst in my thinking and passion on social and knowledge management. His work has stoked my fire around this problem and solution space. David’s talks and the morphing of Agile Commons have driven my pursuit of a great space to manage agile knowledge in an open manner. My research took me through:

• Wikipedia on agile
• Agile Alliance Resources
• Lean Software & Systems Wiki
• Scrum Alliance community
• Linked In Groups on agile
• Google’s Knol on agile
• Quora on Agile
• Stackexchange on project management

It was StackExchange that stood out to me as the clear winner for managing what Snowden calls ordered knowledge. StackExchange’s Q&A format is truly amazing, it is first a community of experts and second a well gardened knowledge management system. See the PM StackExchange ABOUT post to understand how it is a combination of four great technologies.

If you have not tried stackexhange, jump into pm.stackexchange.com and try entering any project management question you can think of, including anything agile. As you type, you should see a list of related questions based on the keywords in your question. If you do not see your question, please enter it using these simple guidelines and make sure to use tags like agile, scrum, kanban, or TDD. The community will help you shape it into something that will get a good spectrum of answers in a matter of a week. Even in beta the PM StackExchange includes the following site stats:

I don’t care what yahoo group or wiki you are on in our community, it’s difficult find that kind of diverse network to help you with your day to day questions. As I noted, the site is still in public beta. My guess is by 2012, this community will have quadrupled.

Problems with other Q&A sites

This post is about Stackexchange, but, as I mentioned above, there are other solutions for managing a body of knowledge like this. I found a number of short-comings in those communities:

• There is not enough people in community to clear the answer broadly and quickly – too small a sample
• There is only a certain clique of people in a community that provides too much of a myopic answer – 1 right way
• There is focus on discussing and debating, not answering the question in a focused way that matches the question depth – a podium
• There is opacity with regard to governance and content ownership – lack of transparency = low trust
• There is a lack of moderation to keep the community – entropy happens

I believe StackExchange addresses all these issues in a remarkable set of people, policies and bots. I encourage you to help our community move forward by finding ways to organize and share knowledge on Agile in StackExchange. Please share your ideas and other agile resources in the comments.

Ryan Martens is CTO/Founder of Rally and on the way to be the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Unreasonable Institute this summer in Boulder –  See the Institute’s 2011 Fellows – Watch the intro video to the Institute and follow my escapades in the Unreasonable Mansion with twitter @RallyOn

This is a story of how I went from being the poster child for bad posting etiquette on pm.stackexchange.com to becoming their poster child for fast learner! A poignant tale of hubris, struggle, fear, benevolent mentorship, and redemption.

Prequel: The Lure

Some colleagues of mine at Rally Software (Karl Scotland, Ken Clyne, Eric Willeke, Ben Carey, and Ryan Martens) have been telling me about how much they were enjoying their experiences in StackExchange. My CTO colleagues Zach Nies and Mark Gammon have also been enthusiastic about the value of being engaged in the StackExchange community. But I was intimidated. I feared I wouldn’t know how to appropriately engage in either asking a question or answering a question. It turns out my fears were well-founded.

Scene 1: The Leap

I finally decided to jump in. I set-up an account, fairly easy to do. I perused some of the questions already posted by others. I saw the tags and the replies. I saw the voting. Somewhat intimidating. But, I had a topic I was really excited about. I thought it would make a great question. And so I made the leap; I took the plunge. And this is what was wrought:

Scene 2: The Faux Pas

Not a bad question. The problem was that in the text area below the question title, I gave further detail on the question. A lot of detail. I pulled a major faux pas: I waxed poetic on what I thought the answer was. (I’m not going to go into the topic here. Trust me. It was lengthy and unyielding. :-(

Fortunately for me, however, very timely and gentle advice appeared from Mark Phillips and jmort253:

Could they have been any nicer? What a great community!

Scene 3: Meeting with the masters

The good news is that help was on its way. Back in March, we’d spoken with Joel Spolsky (co-founder and CEO of StackExchange.) Ryan’s goal in talking with Joel was to look at how we at Rally could incorporate StackExchange into our upcoming RallyOn conference in May. How could we work together to create community in StackExchange as we were creating community in the conference?

The result? We brought in the great StackExchange masters Anna Lear and Mark Phillips to the RallyOn conference. In his opening remarks at the conference, Ryan introduced our two Zen StackExchange masters and Ryan’s hope for how we could all engage with them to kick start a powerful presence of the Agile community within StackExchange.

Yea! I was going to actually be able to work with Mark and Anna to become more comfortable and more productive in StackExchange!

Scene 4 : Lessons Learned

After Mark held a small session on getting started in StackExchange, I saw him in the hallway. I’d missed the session, but he quickly filled me in. It turned out, he’d used MY question/answer fumble as an example of how NOT to engage in StackExchange. I had become the poster child for bad StackExchange etiquette :-(

But both Anna and Mark quickly took my under their wing. We edited my original question. We commented on one of the answers. We created a new question. And we answered another question. The result was a new exchange of comments:

Close: A Happy Ending

Today, good news abounds. Mark recently wrote a phenomenal blog post: Why StackExchange is Hotter than Twitter

I continue to stay engaged asking and answering questions. I’ve learned to keep my questions short, my comments short, and my answers short. And, I’m gaining reputation points and earning badges, still with gentle guidance from Anna, Mark and “jmort253″.

My Rally colleagues continue to post as well. It is exciting to see the Agile community begin to expand in pm.stackexchange.com. Provocative questions with great answers. And through the tags, we can watch the expansion into other topic areas.

For the happiest ending of all, I’m saving the best for last: my email yesterday from StackExchange!

“Congratulations — you are one of the top new Project Management – Stack Exchange users for the month of May 2011! http://stackexchange.com/leagues/month/pm/2011-05-01 ” There was also the caveat that my name would not appear in the list of users because I still need to earn more reputation points. Okay, June, you are going down!

Help keep the story alive!

To wrap things up: I not only survived jumping into StackExchange; I love it. I’m hooked. So, my story is not over.

Now, I’d love your reply to this post to tell me how you are getting involved in StackExchange.

Jean Tabaka is an intrepid intercontinental traveller, a 6-badge holder in pm.stackexchange.com,  author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. You can follow Jean on Twitter at @jeantabaka

In conjunction with the Lean Software & Systems conference this week, Rally is releasing a powerful Enterprise Kanban Board that provides a simple way to visualize the status and flow of work through a software project.

The addition of full, enterprise Kanban support to Rally’s Agile ALM platform provides users with an elegant visualization of work across projects, teams and the entire organization. It can be customized for each project, allowing users to choose which Kanban states are displayed and which states are mapped to Rally’s core schedule states. This allows teams to model their unique processes within Rally and view rollup reports between teams — providing complete visibility into the quality, status and progress of projects.

The Enterprise Kanban Board allows users to:

• drag-and-drop ranking and state changes
• block and unblock stories
• visually flag each story with user-defined states
• customize WIP (Work-in-Progress) limits with color-coded status indicators
• display stories and/or defects
• edit ready-to-pull or blocked items

Cycle/Lead Time and Throughput reports provide valuable metrics around how many work items are completed in a given time period or the average time that it takes a work item to pass from one state to another. The new Enterprise Kanban Board can be installed by clicking the + icon on the Rally menu and then choosing the Kanban Board from the App Catalog. And, if you have been using our current Kanban App, here are instructions on how to convert those stories to the new Kanban board.

In this video, I’ll demo the full enterprise Kanban support Rally is now offering within Rally Enterprise and Rally Unlimited Editions.

Todd Olson is the VP of Products at Rally Software. He is a marathon runner and cake baker. You can find Todd on Twitter at @tolson.

Next week we are running a fun experiment in Boulder, as we host our first users conference: RallyOn 2011. We are experimenting with a number of things as we learn how to engage, connect, and contribute to our growing world-wide customer community.

First, we are trying to leverage social technologies in a number of ways to reach users all around the world. One way we are doing this is by using Stack Exchange, the Internet’s leading community-driven Q&A engine, to meld a community of agile software development and program management experts. Conceivably, this could kick-off a new paradigm in professional conferences, attaining the elusive goal of extending the conference experience of networking, knowledge sharing and community into the online environment with virtual attendees, and living long after the closing session.

We invited representatives from Stack Exchange to join the conference, promoting and shepherding the community experience. As a result, two members from the Programmers and Project Management communities will be in attendance, sponsored by Stack Exchange. Mark and Anna, who have coauthored this post, have already brought guidance and energy to the interactions between communities, and are sure to do so during RallyOn, as these two communities closely align with the goals of the conference and the interests of our attendees.

Cool stuff about Stack Exchange that I bet you did not know:
You may be familiar with Stack Exchange’s most popular site, Stack Overflow, the flagship software programming Q&A site that receives tens of millions of visitors each month. However, the vision far exceeds that single site. Since August 2010, the company has launched 49 new vertical-oriented Q&A sites. By building vibrant communities of experts around specific topics, Stack Exchange is able to facilitate answers to 94% of all questions network-wide.

• Questions generally average 10 answers, giving you different insights and approaches to tackling problems or issues.
• Answers are peer-reviewed by experts within the community, with those answers receiving the most positive votes rising to the top, guaranteeing the most accurate, relevant or acceptable answer to even the most difficult question.
• Optimized for search engines, these answers help hundreds if not thousands of other people who are seeking answers to similar questions on the web.
• The experts forge a community of subject matter enthusiasts, earning reputation and recognition for their contributions through the reputation point system.

At Rally, we have a fantastic marketing department that puts on great regional events and huge webinars, but we have never done a users conference. However, we are not sure what the best model for our users conference should be. So we are bringing a community of experts and Agile enthusiasts together around the RallyOn 2011 conference. With the help of two enthusiastic Stack Exchange members to showcase the power and benefits of a community-driven Q&A network like Stack Exchange, we are excited about adding a whole new group of Agile experts to our current communities.

To help track the success of this endeavor, we’ve created a special RallyOn11 tag on each Stack Exchange site. Please tag your questions with this tag and also include it in your profile. Participation is a snap, and we’ll be there at the conference to give you a hand.

While exploring the Stack Exchange sites, check out the RallyOn11 tag to discover peers with similar questions and interests. We’ll also be streaming live feeds from the sites directly to a monitor at the conference, allowing you to observe the community’s activity in real-time.

What’s in it for you?

• As a director, the sites give your team an existing resource to crowd-source problems and find solutions from a group of subject matter experts.
• As a director, the Project Management community often addresses management level problems including those involving other managers, executives and team members.
• As an Agile coach or internal champion, these sites are a resource your customers can turn to stay on the right track.
• As an Agile coach or internal champion, you can build your reputation and find inspiration for new ways of approaching issues.
• As a developer, you can find answers to programming problems, project management concerns or challenges interacting with management.

Find Me at RallyOn!

Community: Programmers
Programmers attracts software development experts with interests in subject areas such as development methodologies, architecture practices, and algorithm and data structure concepts. It evolved out of the flagship Stack Overflow site when it became apparent that a separate place to ask questions about general software development concepts and programmers’ professional development, rather than specific implementation details, was needed. An example of this type of question can be found here.

Anna Lear (@aalear) is joining us from the programmers community, and is one of the community’s respected moderators.

Find Me at RallyOn!

Community: Project Management
Project Management covers a wide array of topics including: learning and implementing project management, challenges in managing projects and people (as well as challenges with project managers) and specific techniques and best practices from different methodologies. Project management approaches discussed include Agile, Waterfall, the PMBOK Guide, PRINCE2, ITIL and mish-mash of methodology that often gets implemented in the real world.

Mark Phillips (@mpmobile) is joining us from the project management community, having been a member of that community since its earliest days.

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.

We’re looking for a Director of HR

Rally is proud of its continued growth since our inception 8 years ago. In the last 2 years, we’ve practically doubled in size. And now we need help sustaining our pride in our company, our culture, and our people. We need a great, unique Director of HR.

Rally Looks Different

Taking its lead from Jim Collins “Good to Great”, Rally truly lives by its core values. For us, our Director of HR would be both an internal and external model and supporter of these values: Create your own reality; Respect people; Make and meet commitments; Give back to the community; Theory-driven decision making; Sustainable work-life balance.

We’re proud of our awards!

Named the Best Company to Work For in Colorado in 2009 and 2010, and ranked the #6 Best Places to Work in the nation from Outside Magazine in 2010, Rally offers a highly collaborative culture and work-life balance that attracts top talent. Our product gets plenty of accolades too, winning four consecutive Jolt Awards (the software industry’s equivalent of the Oscars®) in our category 2006-2009 and recently recognized by industry analyst Forester Research as “offering the best combination of capability and strategy of Agile ALM tools.”

Agile organizations look different

From the start, Rally has prided itself in being a truly Agile organization in the software industry. What does it mean to be a Director of HR in an Agile company? Here are a few characteristics of Agile we value:

• Servant Leadership — our management model takes a page out of the Robert Greenleaf approach to leadership: lead by serving and serve by leading. Our Director of HR must be someone who can sustain this environment, mentor others in it, and create professional development opportunities for growth in this management style.
• Self-Organizing Teams — part of being an organization of servant leaders includes a strong belief in the value of self-organizing teams. We eschew command-and-control style management. Rather, we seek insights from teams and turn to them to guide our solutions that align with our corporate vision.
• Emphasis on Teams — Rally embraces a strong culture of collaboration. For us, that means that we value team accomplishments over individualism or heroism. Our HR Director needs to help us guide employees in the value of team ownership and the intrinsic rewards therein.
• De-emphasis on hierarchy — Finally, in our Agile company, we de-emphasize traditional hierarchical organizational structures. Rally is proud of maintaining a fairly flat organization even as we grow upwards of 250 people.

Could This Be You?

So, our Director of HR may look a bit different than you might expect. Still, we are looking for some great solid HR credentials that should look very familiar to you. If this sounds like you, we would love to hear from you via the career section of our web site. There you will find a detailed job description and other benefit details. If this is not you, but you know someone who might be interested, please share this with your friends and with your networks using the “ShareThis” button below or through our LinkedIn post.

Tim Miller is a dropout from the University of Colorado but somehow has two degrees from CU. He keeps sane by playing golf and tennis and is the CEO 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.

Time for another installation in our “One Hit Wonder Friday” series! Today, I am thinking about work I’ve been doing in the many layers we apply in Agile planning. I’ve been trying to bring some of that to light in our “N-Levels of Planning” series. Working with my colleague Greg Frazer, some thoughts about what we mean by levels and planning have emerged.

Agile planning isn’t just one way

Greg and I have this notion that in truly Agile contexts, planning occurs not just top down (from the organization’s vision to the team’s committed velocity) and not just bottom up (from the team commitments and velocity to the product release). We also have a sense that plans at one level inform its immediate neighbors up and down as well as side to side. Think of a portfolio situation where the plans for different initiatives impact the plans of others. Each plan level and each parallel plan is informed by its neighbors. That makes the plan more organically useful over time. But, to be clear, this does not suggest high dependency of plans; any given plan also has a sense of autonomy. It holds itself and takes in information and radiates information as is useful to its overall commitment. That commitment, it turns out, is tremendously valuable to the “n-levels” around it.

Agile planning isn’t just planning

Greg and I are working with a group here at Rally called the “N-Level Rock.” Our small but mighty team investigates not only what we’ve seen change in the world of Agile planning; we bring in what seems to have persistence.  In particular, our rock team is inviting a big sense of planning. It stretches beyond the team, beyond a product line and into the real business of the organization. It’s a big world! And, it is NOT just about planning in that big world. It’s about steering in that big world. That is, bring trust and check and guidance into your planning world.

Agile planning is big and small

Back to N-levels. Yes, there is a sense of hierarchy in this nomenclature. More importantly, think about a symmetry of attributes around very large horizons into release horizons, iteration horizons and then daily horizons. In a continuous flow environment, you still have a long term horizon; it simply is informed by continuous flow of value evaluated and updated in each daily plan. When we embrace up and down Agile planning, planning as steering, and planning as both big and small, we avoid the pitfalls of traditional planning, We avoid that feeling of, “Another promise fallen through, another season passes by you.”

And now to our “One Hit Wonder Friday!”

Well, I’ve laid in a few clues about our band this Friday. (Thanks again to Wikipedia for feeding my one hit wonder trivia passion.) A small band singing their heart out about big things. BTW, my colleague Greg in the picture above is from Canada, roughly 3,850,000 square miles in size. THAT is a big country! But I digress. Back to our one hit wonder. While they were a fairly successful band in the UK, they managed to muster only one hit on the US charts. Our small but mighty band from Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland took a stance in 1983 about what it means to live with big dreams and yet hold them close, to not let them be shattered or to be expected to grow flowers in the desert. Tony, Bruce, Stuart and Mark are still active today with something of a cult following. But some of us will never think of them in any other way as “Big Country”: a small group from the great country of Scotland (square miles: roughly 30,400) who believed in greatness on many levels. With that said, today I offer you “In a Big Country.”

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

(Creative Commons D. Sharon Pruitt)

On this last Friday of 2010, I thought I’d try to get a quick “One Hit Wonder” in before the horns toot and the bubbles flow. And maybe these New Year traditions are apt images for my topic today. I’ve been thinking about what we do for the New Year and what we do for Agile. We like to scoop up information to help us figure out what we can best do next. On New Year’s Eve we sometimes call that “resolutions” for the next year. Ugh. Not my style. Rather, I’d like to think about intentions. So bear with me as I reveal my style of  “inspect and adapt” for my personal New Year:

Accentuating what is positive and whole is best

Years ago, a friend of mine had told me about how she prefers to reflect on the last year. She has a way she moves into the New Year, answer three questions:

1. What will I let go of that has drained me or perhaps has caused me to feel guilt or shame?
2. What will I choose to continue to do, those things that energize and delight me?
3. What new things am I prepared to invite into my life to help me to continue to let go and grow?

I like this metaphor for Agile teams as they retrospect from iteration to iteration, or from release to release, or even year to year. I like paying attention to the positive.

1. What has not worked for us, caused us angst or distress whether in our process or our technology, that we are prepared to let go of?
2. What do we choose to continue to embrace about our work as we move forward?
3. And, what new practices or agreements are we prepared to invite into our team or with our stakeholders that will help us to continue to grow and improve?

Start simply: where you are

So for me, I start today, here, now. I could think about how I have seen my life from day to day. I can watch how my life has unfurled from week to week or month to month. Using appreciative inquiry, I can take what has brought me the greatest delight and pride and then look at what was happening when that occurred. And then I can choose to replicate those circumstances, sort of like what our guest blogger Lee Devin refers to as “Planning to Get Lucky”.

For Agile teams, we can apply this philosophy each time we demo functionality to our customer, whether at timebox intervals or as each new function or minimally marketable feature is completed. We’ve learned. These demos, often on a Friday afternoon, lead us to inspect and adapt. These demos also feed the team and the customer. We all learn. AND, we do this through the pride of completing working functionality.

I believe in the humanity and delight of this form of retrospection. Do you see why I shirk New Year’s resolutions? Instead, I look for the accomplishments that have helped me grow and move forward. Agile teams, through their demos and reviews invite the same.

And now for our one hit wonder!

I am thinking of a song that accentuates the positive, invites us to let go of what may be drudgery and to plan instead to get lucky. Oh the metaphors!

Thanks in advance to Wikipedia for helping me fill in the tale of our one hit wonder. The band (yes, not a solo act this time) started with a husband-wife team who then added another male/female contingent. The album that held their #1 hit song actually did quite well on the charts. And this was 1976 when you could buy songs as single 45 records (no, single MP3s were not yet available ; -).  The band received two Grammy Awards that year, “Best Arrangement (voices)” and “Best New Artist”. And yet two subsequent album outings not only produced no new hits; the husband and wife team were soon divorced. Oh the tragedy of it all after such success from a song that you can still hum today.

So what is our One Hit Wonder this last Friday of 2010? We’ve got Starland Vocal Band and their great tune with which to say, “Happy New Year, dear readers!”

Jean Tabaka is a snow shoveler, crash skier, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. You can follow Jean on Twitter at @jeantabaka

As a part of our series on Scaling Agile to the Strategic Level, I have invited our product lead on this project, Catherine Connor, to tell us about her experience in creating Project Stratus. Thank you for the great work and help on this series Catherine.

Project Stratus was conceived over a year ago from numerous customer discovery interviews geared at understanding the challenges of strategic planning with agile execution. From these interviews we started to form an idea of what an agile strategic planning tool could look like, but we also knew that we would need to do serious customer validation before getting to productize a solution.

We’d already selected a disciplined approach to customer validation based on The Four Steps to the Epiphany – Successful Strategies for Products that Win by Steven Blank. Although the book focuses on startups, many of the ideas, such as diligently conducting customer validation and creating a sales roadmap (i.e. a repeatable process to sell your product) can also be applied to new products in existing compagnies. The basic premise of Blank’s approach is that if you solve a problem for customers (called “earlyvangelists”) who are so acutely affected by that problem that they are willing to build a solution themselves, you are more likely to deliver a product that will solve that same problem for many more customers.

Four Steps to the Epiphany © Steven G. Blank

Project Stratus was drastically accelerated in April 2010 at the LeanSSC conference in Atlanta, when one of our customers unveiled the agile product portfolio scheduler application they’d built to solve their own strategic planning needs. Not only did the application visualize where we were heading, it also happened to be built on the Rally Platform. We’d just found our first earlyvangelist.

Four months later, at Agile2010, we privately introduced Project Stratus to a handful of industry analysts and customers to gauge their reaction. Based on their overwhelming excitement, we proceeded in identifying additional earlyvangelists from past customer interactions. An earlyvangelist is like a P1 defect, when you find one, you know right away. These customers are so excited to see a provider like Rally think up a commercially supported solution to the problem they have been trying to solve themselves, they are anxious to guide you, and some are even irritated by the fact that the product is not out yet; when all along we’ve been thinking not to deliver such a thing! I could tell when I first engaged with Paul, Dale, Nina, Christophe and others, that they would be partners in shaping Project Stratus to become a valuable product. The beauty of Blank’s technique is in its reciprocity. We, the solution provider, get to build a product that solves real needs, earlyvangelists get to shape a supported solution to replace their manual solution, and customers get to benefit from their peers’ expertise.

With earlyvangelists on hand, we sat down to define the set of hypotheses to validate. This is an important step to ensure that interviews provide meaningful outcomes. Nothing is more deflating than spending an hour with a customer only to find yourself with no good answer to “exactly what did I learn from this call?” Listing hypotheses is also a great way to communicate to yourself and others in your company what you are trying to find out and what you are purposefully setting aside for another time. This is very much like “theory-based decision making”, one of Rally’s corporate core values.

Since August, we have been incrementally evolving Stratus, one weekly build at a time, diligently validating our hypotheses one at a time.  Earlyvangelists’ real-life experiences combined with our coaches yearning to apply agile and lean principles to the strategic level are informing the direction of Stratus. I feel really good about where Stratus is going.

As an agile product manager who has seen several projects being productized prematurely, I am truly enjoying following Blank’s rigorous Customer Development approach and definitely would recommend it to my product manager comrades. You do need executive support which thankfully Rally provides me. Following Blank’s technique is no small feat however, it is hard and diligent work with no guaranteed productization plans until you pass his customer validation final exam: “you have proven you have understood customer problems, found a set of earlyvangelists and delivered a product that customers want to buy, developed a repeatable and scalable sales process and demonstrated you have a profitable business model.”  Then, and only then, will we graduate to Blank’s customer creation step, aka the delivery of an official Rally offering for Strategic Planning.

The customer validation step for Project Stratus is going full steam. We welcome more earlyvangelists to partner with us in this exciting endeavor. The more input we receive, the more valuable the product will be. If you have strategic planning challenges and a passion for applying agile principles for solving them, I invite you to reach out to us at stratus@rallydev.com. – Catherine Connor

The work done by Steve Blank on this method is fantastic. In addition to Project Stratus, I have used it with our large on-premise customers and with TechStars companies in order to keep from leaping to conclusions and trying to by-pass the customer creation stage. I hope many of you can empathize with the discipline required to do both of these things in the world of product development.

Ryan Martens is an Epic Pass holder for 2010, a school board member at Friends’ School Boulder and CTO at Rally Software Development.

Catherine Connor is a Product Manager at Rally Software Development. She focuses on the product manager role in our customers’ agile transformation endeavors.

Our medium fidelity prototype has the bugs shaken out and we’ve ordered 30 T-walls and an overhead power and data grid for our new engineering, operations and support space. To help you and your team down a similar path, I have attached the plans that we had drawn to manufacture our magnetic board walls on wheels. Click on the image for the PDF.

Back in the summer and based my visit to the Standford DSchool, I started talking about the innovations in furniture that I had seen in that space. In Fall, we had a space hackathon with the local team from RightNow and George from the dschool. As a result of that work, we built some T-wall prototypes and started trying different power management strategies.

What was amazing was that the day after we had the T-Walls delivered, a new product development team moved in; as the core engineering teams split from four teams of 9-10 to 7 teams of 3-5 people. It was the perfect validation and a great “earlyvangalist” customer to help us develop our final solution for scale in our new space. (More on “earlyvangalists” on Monday’s blog post – stay tuned.)

Ryan Martens is an epic pass user, CEO of the Entrepreneur’s Foundation of Colorado, and CTO at Rally Software Development.