In 2001, the Agile Manifesto was created with 17 signatories from around the world. Following on the heels of the first XP conference in Sardinia in 2000, the Manifesto fired its shot of agility across the Waterfall bow. A year later, at XP/Agile Universe 2002, I found myself standing at a folding table with Janet Danforth of Facilitator4Hire. We were selling facilitation services to the members of the Agile community gathered at a Courtyard by Marriott in Lincolnshire, Illinois. Approximately 80-100 people had come together in that steamy summer venue to continue Agile discussions and to define ongoing growth of methodologies, practices and frameworks.
Where we were
At the same time I was at my folding table in Lincolnshire in 2002, Ryan Martens was at a whiteboard in Boulder, Colorado. Ryan was brainstorming ideas about how he could use Agile practices to create a Software as a Service platform in the Agile domain. His goal? To provide zero-waste, low-carbon emissions applications and services for this growing, vibrant community.
In 2003, the Agile community gathered in Salt Lake City for the Agile Development Conference. This was my first time presenting at an Agile conference. Janet Danforth and I conducted a workshop: Collaboration 4 Agile Projects. And, unbeknownst to me, Ryan was also in Salt Lake City for his first Agile conference. As Ryan was busy engaging vendors about how they were supporting the adoption of Agile, I was busy networking with Agile thought leaders and helping to found “The Freaking Flock” (you’ll have to ask me about that in person!) Our paths were set and Agile was on the move.
Fast Forward to 2011
Now, in 2011, we are 10 years on from the Manifesto signing, 9 years on from the first sighting of me at the folding table, and 8 years on from Ryan’s first foray into the conference.
The Agile 2011 conference is an exciting one for both Agile and Rally. We are pleased once again to be a Title Sponsor of the conference. This year, August 8-12, Rally has 11 speaking sessions on the wonderfully vast and diverse program.
We’ve also participated behind the scenes in advance of the conference as producers, co-producers and reviewers for various conference stages. And, once again, we’ll have a booth where you can come to meet our Agile coaches, talk with our technical gurus, and see the latest that is happening with Rally’s Agile ALM platform and services. Plus, you won’t want to miss our special commemorative activity at the booth this year. Stay tuned to the blog and follow our Twitter hashtag #roadtoagility for more details on how you can participate with us!
Going back to my history of Agile and Rally and the conferences
Ryan and I never met at the 2003 conference. But in 2004, as the conference moved into the northern Rockies in Calgary, Alberta, 4 of us stood together at a folding table in a small hallway. Rally’s representation at that Agile conference was Ryan as President of the company, Richard Leavitt as our VP of Marketing and Sales, Brad Norris as our sole sales person, and me as the sole Agile Coach. At that point, none of us were speakers. However, Rally has had one or more speakers at each conference since: Denver in 2005, Minneapolis in 2006, Washington DC in 2007, Toronto in 2008, Chicago in 2009, and the 2010 event in Orlando. Additionally, Ryan served on the Agile Alliance board during the years of the Washington D.C. and Toronto conferences.
From the folding table to now
Some things have changed in Rally’s Agile journey. We’ve grown from a 20-person company in 2004 to over 250 people and counting. Ryan is now the head of the office of the CTO. Richard is now the Executive Vice President of Worldwide Marketing. Brad is our Vice President of Field Operations. And I am an Agile Fellow in the Office of the CTO.
From a Manifesto, a whiteboard, folding tables, and a single speaker to title sponsorship with multiple speakers, producers, reviewers, and booth presence in a true exhibit hall at a conference with over 1,600 attendees, we’ve indeed come a long way!
Jean Tabaka is a frequent flyer on no particular airline, an author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. You can follow Jean on Twitter at @jeantabaka
“You learn more quickly under the guidance of experienced teachers. You waste a lot of time going down blind alleys if you have no one to lead you.”-W. Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965)
Filmed at Rally’s Agile Success Tour events, these videos detail the real-life agile implementations of software/IT executives who have taken the enterprise agile journey and are now realizing the benefits of enterprise-scale software Agility.
Our coaching and technical account teams (including Jean and myself) provided guidance to many of these panelists during their initial steps in their journey. It gives me great pleasure to see them now become the teachers and share their expertise with the new generation of practitioners.
Don’t pass up this great opportunity to learn from the experiences of others!
I’m live here at the Denver Agile Success Tour on yet another warm, blue sky day downtown by the Convention Center. I will blog what I pick up as the key takeaways from our speakers and after the event we’ll get them to chime in with their own thoughts.
A Modus of our Time – The industry has “One foot in cold water and one foot in hot water”
Tons of enthusiasm about Agile given years of outsourcing, while also having lots of hard data showing how time-to-market, productivity and quality are improved with Agile.
But, still falling short by not pulling in the customer. We assume we know the customer problem and work hard to develop the solution. The speed and reach of software is immense.
Ray Bagley – Director of Development of 3D Modeling solutions at Spatial
Spatial – 20 year old products with 4 million lines of code. Developers spread across 3 offices (Colorado, UK, Pune). Top-down adoption started with a new VP two years ago.
“Product Owner is not Product Manager” – Read all the books on Agile. Early on divided up the product managers to support multiple scrum teams, but tons of pathology happened. The Product Managers stopped looking outward! Then, a collision of two product managers on one product. Finally, the senior and highly skilled development team felt like they lost all their decision making and influence.
Iteration 2 – Created Meta Scrums that met every two development iterations and life got much better. Added more product owners. Life is much better thanks to Rally and Enthiosys content - I wish we had found that material two years ago!
“There is a difference between a real customer and a virtual customer on two different products” – “Real customers engage on day 1, not with a beta!” The case of these two products was night and day – night (solved the wrong problem after 8 months) and day (driving revenue from the first release).
“Humble lessons learn the hard way!”
Lloyd Star – VP Development at Beatport – Digital download network like iTunes but specifically for DJ’s. Several internal teams and two offshore teams in India with stakeholders in Denver, Berlin and London.
20 months into adoption – “Many great changes, but far from complete with our adoption.”
There have been four clear “states” of our Agile adoption so far. (Cool state transition diagram of these states – If you read this blog often, you know how much I love state transition diagrams for Agile adoption. It is really about taking incremental moves to change the engines while the airplane is in air!)
State 1 – Iterations and weak backlog. Just jumped in, but we did not whip our quality issues and 3 week release process.
State 2 – Discovered the Product Owner role and the value of meetings when way up (CEO and CTO are both DJ’s and act as customers). “We understood the need for well elaborated stories and acceptance criteria.”
State 3 – Got the stakeholder more involved and made the backlog more clear and stopped over-elaborating far off stories. “The best part is the collaboration and negotiation went way up!” The art of software was starting to appear and drive trust across the company.
First two states were focused on the software team, but now states 3 and 4 are focused on the larger team and company.
State 4 – Integrating vision and release planning to drive enterprise architecture. Moved Research into Development and got IT/Operations team in synchronization with the development release cycles. Huge increase in throughput of new working code to market.
See what State 5 of the transition is but have not started this. All focused on enterprise architecture in state 4 to manage all these moving pieces and keeping them aligned with the business. Don’t confuse the Agile development process with the architectural process.
Clear call to actions:
Keep your release small and focused
Hired a very experienced Agile product owner
Have your architecture “live with your team”
Planning takes time, but it critical for alignment
Peggy Reed – Director of Performance Solutions at Avaya – 30 years of experience in software started in 1979 in writing Motorola code
Beautiful Software – Readability, Simplicity, Functional Locality, Single Function, System Minimality, Appropriate Form, Cooperative
NOT DOES IT WORK! – Is it pleasant, comfortable, seductive? It has to be something a customer wants to use!
Beautiful teams make beautiful software – Needs shared vision, deep understanding, harmony in the Scrum, empathy of the customer perspective.
Beautiful teams must – Keep the base stable through Agile development of frequent public builds that integrate across the whole. Have to always be testing with an equal balance. Completion is a measured by ALL parts of the team. Sometimes this is hard for existing teams to break the old habits.
Beautiful software teams talk a ton about their failures. What we wished we had done. Talk about dependencies on each other. Talk about feature-itis and which features really drive revenue. Talk about teamwork and team awareness. No longer software development by solos and prayer.
Value of us comes from creating beautiful teams that create beautiful software in a creative way – a way that can not be outsourced or automated!
Peter Fisher – MIS Product Manager at eCollege – Working on Scrum for the last two years Pearson eCollege online learning with teams in Denver and Sri Lanka
Were a very large waterfall team with huge business requirements document – Informal adoption started in 2007 and formal training started in mid 2008. Four releases since mid-2008 versus 1 and no more “bug builds.” Have been able to build the quality in from day 1.
Now developers are focused on building what they need to meet the tests and not their own vision. Key to this was delivering to the integration server continuously. As a result, the “come backs” of release went way down. Only released to staging and production once.
This dramatically increased the speed of the team and clear visibility has allowed us to react at each two week iteration with strict prioritization. As a result, were not delivering the wrong or unwanted features. Throughput is going up.
Israel Gat – on his adoption experience at BMC Software
Four simple principles make the secret sauce of enterprise scale adoption at BMC. It is all about mindset and not the practices.
In year 1 from zero to 350 scrumers in Rally at BMC. He now showed the Cutter Consortium / QSMA slide of BMC Productivity Index of 27 versus an average of 6 to 16 in other software types.
“How many of your teams come to work on Monday determined to produce poor quality software?” Agile teams do not have this mindset.
Principle 1 – Leadership and social contract with the team.
Principle 2 – Know How – I used Rally with a 50/50 spend on professional services and coaching while the other 50% was used for Rally’s application – this combination was critical to go as fast as we did.
Principle 3 – Flexibility - You have to take the adoption incrementally and iteratively.
Principle 4 – Patience - You can not Agile the Agile – you are changing the software, the process and the organizational structure.
RallyDev.com
Now, in 2011, we are 10 years on from the Manifesto signing, 9 years on from the first sighting of me at the folding table, and 8 years on from Ryan’s first foray into the conference.
Ryan and I never met at the 2003 conference. But in 2004, as the conference moved into the northern Rockies in Calgary, Alberta, 4 of us stood together at a folding table in a small hallway. Rally’s representation at that Agile conference was Ryan as President of the company, Richard Leavitt as our VP of Marketing and Sales, Brad Norris as our sole sales person, and me as the sole Agile Coach. At that point, none of us were speakers. However, Rally has had one or more speakers at each conference since: Denver in 2005, Minneapolis in 2006, Washington DC in 2007, Toronto in 2008, Chicago in 2009, and the 2010 event in Orlando. Additionally, Ryan served on the Agile Alliance board during the years of the Washington D.C. and Toronto conferences.
