www.synerzip.com

Agile 2009Texas TourSeptember 2009

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Discussion Topics

1. Introduction

2. Agile 2009 Highlights/Observations

3. Using Agile in Non-ideal Situations

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Synerzip in a Nut-shell1. Software development partner for small/mid-sized

technology companies• Exclusive focus on small/mid-sized technology companies• Deep experience in full SDLC – design, dev, QA/testing, deployment• Technology and industry domain agnostic

2. For each client, we assign a dedicated team of high caliber software professionals

• Seamlessly extends your local team, offering full transparency• NOT just “staff augmentation”, but provide full mgmt oversight

3. We actually reduce your risk of development/delivery• Experienced team - uses appropriate level of engineering discipline• Practices Agile development – responsive, yet disciplined

4. Offer 50% lower cost – dual-shore team (India + US)5. Offer long term flexibility – allows (facilitates) taking

offshore team captive

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Our Clients

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Discussion Topics

1. Introduction

2. Agile 2009 Highlights/Observations• Overall Observations• Reconfirmations/Reminders• New Insights• Counterintuitive Observations

3. Using Agile in Non-ideal Situations

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Overall Observations1. Solid participation, in spite of slow economy

• 1350 attendees this year (vs. 1500 in 2008), from 38 countries• 20 Stages, over 300 sessions, 17 personas

2. Over 70% of organizations have now adopted Agile (IT Union Survey, July09)

3. Top 5 most effective Agile practices - currenti. Continuous integrationii. Daily stand-up meetingsiii. Developer (unit) TDDiv. Iteration planningv. Code refactoring

4. Top 3 Agile practices on wish listi. Acceptance TDDii. Developer TDDiii. Shippable software (every iteration)

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Reconfirmations/Reminders1. “Agile/iterative teams produce higher quality work, are

quicker to deliver, are more likely to deliver right functionality, and more likely to provide greater ROI than traditional teams”

– Research conclusion by Scott Ambler, Chief Methodologist/Agile, IBM.

2. The real benefit of Agile comes from building only what the customer really needs/values. “Agile is the art of maximizing the work NOT done”

• 64% of features are never/rarely used (2007 Study)• Variety of techniques (Innovation Games by Luke Hohmann) for

eliciting and prioritizing requirements• Really understanding real customer/user’s context and frequently

involving them for feedback (The Dawning of the Age of Experience, keynote address by Jared Spool)

• Use low-fidelity tools (pen and paper) to do rapid, frequent, collaborative UI prototyping with users – e.g. the RITE method.

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Reconfirmations/Reminders (cont’d)

3. Be careful in your practice of Agile to not become to “development centric”. Pay adequate attention to upstream (requirements definition and prioritization) part and overall business context.

• Real value of actually writing an “MRD” document to set the overall context for the team.

• This was the first year with a separate track/stage on Product Management

• Recognition of product management issues. Product Managers have their priorities geared towards servicing the customers and marketing executives and top management more than developers. By and large, they are unaware and don’t care much for agile. More evolved thinking on how to sell agile to non-agile mgmt/exec.

• On average, 1 Product Owner for every 5-8 person Dev+QA team

4. Unlike traditional methods, Agile requires a lot more cross-functional collaboration – customer, prod mgmt, dev, architect, QA, support, etc. “Software development is a cooperative game” – Alistair Cockburn

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Reconfirmations/Reminders (cont’d)

5. Only team performance should be measured, NOT individual performance

• There is really no clean way to measure individual contribution in a truly collaborative team. General disenchantment with performance appraisals and formal metrics to measure individual performance

• Motivational Metrics don’t work, use only Informational Metrics (at team/group level only, aggregate and anonymize the data)

• More resources

– www.EsterDerby.com– Book by Rob Austin– Rob Myers, www.agileinstitute.com– James Shore, www.jamesshore.com

6. Majority (59%) of Agile teams are distributed – across continents, time-zones, bldgs, org entities.

• Number of sessions on team collaboration techniques & tools• Great deal of talk on tools for bridging the gap between face-to-face

and offline experience - IM, VOIP, Desktop Sharing, APLM (Agile project lifecycle management), video conferencing, virtual worlds, Web Conferencing etc.

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Reconfirmations/Reminders (cont’d)

7. Further confirming data on hyper-productive team which are diverse and distributed (Jeff Sutherland)

• Hyperproductive teams by using a shock treatment - no discussion on whether to implement agile practices or not, prove by doing it! Have a 3 month period where the team is forced to follow certain practices. More like a drill or dojo. Members practice agile by repetitively going through the motions. > 240% increase in productivity is achieved.

8. Role of design and development in agile - code is the only design document. All other design documents are to support code. Abstraction should be as late as possible. Early abstraction leads to YAGNI!

9. Lot of stress on visual management - index/ kanban cards, stories on the wall, planning poker, role playing, fish bowl - making requirements, planning and design discussions in a more playful yet effective environment.

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New Insights1. Conventional Iron triangle of Scope X Cost X Schedule

should be replaced by Value X Quality X Constraints SCOPE

COST SCHEDULE

VALUE

QUALITY CONSTRAINTS• Cost• Schedule

2. Agile Contracts - Recognition that conventional business considerations including traditional contracts get in the way of implementing agile. Contracts that get the customer to commit to agile is a win-win situation.

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New Insights (cont’d)

3. (Unit)TDD is now a widely adopted practice• 70%+ of organizations practicing Agile, use TDD• Great deal of discussion on how to make TDD more meaningful as a

mode of requirements capture• Requires a very different developer mindset, akin to moving from

procedural to object-oriented• TDD cycle: write_failing_test, write minimal_code_needed_to_pass,

refactor - results in better, cleaner designs– Unit test is the logical design – “What”– Code is the physical design – ‘How”

4. Acceptance TDD now being adopted• 40% of organizations practicing Agile, use ATDD• FITness less popular – too much work required to write fixtures• Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) practices gaining ground – tools

like JDave, EasyB

5. Interesting new tools• Crucible - code review tool - replaces pair programming with code

review as an asynchronous mode of close collaboration. • BuildBot – CI tool - cloud computing could be used to run long running

build processes in distributed teams.

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Counterintuitive Observations1. Contrary to conventional wisdom, most Agile teams DO

upfront requirements planning and architecture planning before starting development iterations

– On average teams take 3.9 weeks to “warm-up” – doing reqmts modeling, arch planning, env setup, etc. - before starting to code

2. Agile is not just for greenfield development, 78% of Agile projects involve “Legacy Code” in some way.

3. Majority (89%) of Agile teams have to provide upfront cost estimate (Scott Ambler survey)

4. Agilists do write some “interim” and supporting documents.

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Discussion Topics

1. Introduction

2. Agile 2009 Highlights/Observations

3. Using Agile in Non-ideal Situations

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Impact of non ideal conditionsOutside the iterationInside the iteration

Requirements Analysis Porting/rewrite projectDistributed teamShort project – no timeFor requirements discussionRequirements sign off required.

Start up, co-located team Long project – enough time for requirements discussion. More flexible requirements

Prioritization and estimation

Iteration and release planning

New customer- no trustAll req. “must haves”Iteration zero for POC Or requirements are well documentedShort project

On going relationship- trust Prioritized requirementsEvolution of estimatesthrough dialogue Long project

Fixed scope – product owner not available Rapport with customer team Yet to be establishedDistributed teamShort project

Flexible scopeProduct owner available And involvedGood rapport with the customerColocated teamLong project

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What Doesn’t ChangeProject

PrioritizingRequirements

IterationPlan

TDD

Test

Code Development Scrum

Demo

Testing

CI

Requirements Retrospective

User AcceptanceTesting

End

Time

Act

ivit

y

Planning/Re-planningAnd

Estimate/Re-estimation

• Requirements Analyses, Estimation, and Planning can be inside the iteration or outside the iteration.• However, always have short iterations. • Scrum, TDD, CI , Retrospectives stay unchanged. They are some of the best practices that facilitate Agile delivery and short iterations.

PrioritizingRequirements

IterationPlan

Requirements

Time

Act

ivit

y

Planning/Re-planningAnd

Estimate/Re-estimation

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Selecting the Right Approach1. How tight is time duration?

2. How well elaborated are the business reqmts?

3. Access/availability of customer/end-user?

4. Scope X Resource flexibility?

5. Is the product manager with business or development team?

6. Is QA located with development team or with the customer?

White-board, no real docs

Use Cases w/ Wireframes

Not available, use doc only

Fully available, any time

No flex – fixed resource, scope

Highly flexible

Numbered list of reqmts

Available at start and end of iterationLimited flex

PM with development team

Full time with business users

Part time on both sides

QA entirely with customer

All QA with development team

QA on both sides

Small: < 2 months

Ongoing, > 6 months

Medium: 2 to 6 months

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Case #1: Short, Fixed-Budget Project(s)

1. How tight is time duration?

2. How well elaborated are the business reqmts?

3. Access/availability of customer/end-user?

4. Scope X Resource flexibility?

5. Is the product manager with business or development team?

6. Are QA resources located with development team or with the customer ?

White-board, no real docs

Use Cases w/ Wireframes

Not available, use doc only

Fully available, any time

No flex – fixed resource, scope

Highly flexible

Numbered list of reqmts

Available at start and end of iterationLimited flex

PM with development team

Full time with business users

Part time on both sides

QA entirely with customer

All QA with development team

QA on both sides

Small: < 2 months

Ongoing, > 6 months

Medium: 2 to 6 months

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Project 3

Project 2

Project 1Start

Fixed Bid

Agile Iterations

Assured QualityDesired FunctionalityReturn On InvestmentTimely Delivery

Start

S

RO

I

1

2

3

Requirements

PlanningAnd

Estimate

Time

Act

ivit

y

PrioritizingRequirements

Approved

Re-estimation

Retrospective

Demo

TDD

Test

Code

Development

Scrum

CI

User AcceptanceTesting

End

Successful Project ?

Team ?Cost ?

Quality ? Yes !

Not-Approved

Testing

•Series of fixed budget projects•Requirements, estimation and planning done only in iteration zero•Short iterations with TDD, CI•ROI improves with every project

Case #1: Short, Fixed-Budget Project(s)

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Case #2: Well Defined, Long Project

1. How tight is time duration?

2. How well elaborated are the business reqmts?

3. Access/availability of customer/end-user?

4. Scope X Resource flexibility?

5. Is the product manager with business or development team?

6. Are QA resources located with development team or with the customer?

White-board, no real docs

Use Cases w/ Wireframes

Not available, use doc only

Fully available, any time

No flex – fixed resource, scope

Highly flexible

Numbered list of reqmts

Available at start and end of iterationLimited flex

PM with development team

Full time with business users

Part time on both sides

QA entirely with customer

All QA with development team

QA on both sides

Small: < 2 months

Ongoing, > 6 months

Medium: 2 to 6 months

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Project

Start

PrioritizingRequirements

IterationPlan

TDD

Test

Code

Development

Scrum

Demo

Testing CI

Requirements

Retrospective

User AcceptanceTesting

End

Time

Act

ivit

y

Planning/Re-planningAnd

Estimate/Re-estimation

• Requirements are fixed as this is a porting/rewrite project.• However we continue to re-plan and re-estimate as changing priorities result in requirements being shifted between iterations.

Case #2: Well Defined, Long Project

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Contact Information

• Hemant Elhence (Dallas based)

– hemant@synerzip.com– Cell Phone: 214.762.4873

• www.synerzip.com (HQ in Dallas, TX)– 14228 Midway Rd, #130, Dallas, TX 75244– Office Tel: 469.322.0349– Office Fax: 469.322.0490