awb - 01 - introduction to agile

Agile White Book – AXA Emerging Markets EMEA-LATAM

AXA EMERGING MARKETS

EMEA – LATAM

AGILE WHITE BOOK

V1.0

Agile White Book – AXA Emerging Markets EMEA-LATAM

Thank you very much to the first writer, Erich Bühler,

for make us shine through the whole book and teach us a

lot about Agile!

We also appreciate the co-writer and editor, Xavier

Albaladejo, and the reviewers: Vasyl Netakhata,

Nikos Batsios, Albert Cumplido, Steven Wallace,

Silvia Sistaré, Gabriel Prat and Nino Dafonte for

suggesting improvements.

Finally, thanks to Elie Saeigh and María del

Carmen Pradel for designing the cartoons

and for the book visual identity.

1 Agile White Book – AXA Emerging Markets EMEA-LATAM

Foreword

The Agile White Book shares a vision of Agile in AXA

Emerging Markets EMEA-LATAM region. Since

there are different Agile adoptions and maturity levels

at each country, this book has been written with the

aim of gathering a common terminology and basic

approach for Agile Coaches or future Scrum Masters

that will get into Agile: main concepts and simple

practices & tricks to start, based on the lessons learnt

until now at AXA Emerging Markets EMEA-LATAM.

Enhancements can be done in the future based on the

Agile progress and higher maturity levels achieved.


Introduction to Agile .............. 7

Launching Agile in a Team .............. 27

Agile framework .............. 81

Agile Requirements .............. 123

Agile Estimating .............. 161

Agile Planning (Release and

Sprint) .............. 187

Agile Retrospective .............. 247

Agile Metrics .............. 273

Scrum framework .............. 299

Kanban .............. 337

Extreme Programming .............. 369

Agile Testing .............. 405

Agile Distributed Teams .............. 431


HOW THIS BOOK is organised This book is intended to assist you in the first steps in your journey towards Agile. Even if you used Agile before, we strongly recommend you to read this first chapter in a sequential way in order to make sure that you refresh your knowledge and fully become aligned with terminology. We are sure you will enjoy the reading and learn many techniques that will be useful in your day-to-day and future projects. After this, you can read the book based on your current needs, as every chapter has been written to allow you to read it independently.

This manual is organised in the following chapters:

Chapter Format

1. Introduction to Agile

2. Agile implementation

3. Agile framework

4. Requirements

5. Estimating

6. Planning

7. Retrospectives

8. Metrics

9. Scrum

10. Kanban

11. Extreme programming

12. Agile testing

13. Distributed teams

Booklet Focus on explaining the theory and shows some examples.

How-to

Includes How-To lists to help understand the different stages and steps required to do a practice.

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Hi,

I am Silvia your Agile Coach and will be here to help you

understand concepts and enjoy your journey towards Agile

HOW THIS BOOK is organised

One important thing for you to have in mind is that this first chapter includes a brief introduction to Agile but it is the 3rd chapter which covers it in greater detail. This has been done in this way to allow you interiorise some core concepts and go deeper into the practises later.

ICONS USED IN THIS BOOK

In some cases, information deserves special attention. The icons in this manual identify that

information for you. Here is a brief explanation for each icon so you will recognise them when they

are available.


HOW THIS BOOK is organised

The checklist and how-to icon presents you with practical instructions or a

step–by-step document which will help you do something. Refer this chapter Checklist to

see how a checklist looks like.

The Tip icon reminds you or points to information that describes a special benefit of

working with Agile or a specific practise.


Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION TO AGILE

V1.0


Contents WHAT WILL I GET TO KNOW FROM THE CHAPTER? ........................................................................................................................................................ 10 WHY AGILE ..................................................................................................................................................................................................... 11

COMPETITIVE MARKETS: TIME TO MARKET VALUE ...................................................................................................................... 11

THE BENEFITS SOUGHT ........................................................................................................................................................... 12

WHY AGILE IN AXA EMERGING MARKETS EMEA-LATAM .......................................................................................................... 12

KEY SUCCESS FACTORS ............................................................................................................................................................ 13 GET INTO THE BASICS ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 14

UNDERSTAND AND MANAGE RISKS ........................................................................................................................................... 16

AGILE FOCUS AREAS ............................................................................................................................................................... 17

FOCUS ON THE ORGANISATION ................................................................................................................................................ 18

FULLY SUPPORT PEOPLE .......................................................................................................................................................... 19 WHAT WE EXPECT & WHAT FRAMEWORKS TO IMPLEMENT ........................................................................................................................................ 20

SCRUM AT A GLANCE .............................................................................................................................................................. 21

KANBAN .............................................................................................................................................................................. 24

ENGINEERING PRACTICES (XP) ................................................................................................................................................. 25 TAKE AWAY .................................................................................................................................................................................................... 26


Introduction to Agile

Agile is an adaptative way of developing products

and managing work in companies. Its principles are

collaboration and teamwork (with close integration

between Business & IT) and regular quality time for

introspection.

It emphasis on techniques that help a company

learn and discover the most important areas in a

product to focus. It is based on business value

prioritization with quick loops for getting feedback

from clients on product increments (that implies

flexibility for responding to changes).

It relies far more on face-to-face communication,

facilitation (for creating cross-functional, stable,

motivated, self-organizing teams), simplification and

technical excellence.


What will I get to know from the chapter?

INTRODUCTION TO AGILE

I know Agile and its benefits.

I know the principles of Agile.

WHY

AGILE

LEARN THE

BASICS OF AGILE

- Organisation

- People

- Mindset change

KNOW THE AGILE

ECOSYSTEM

KNOW AGILE

FRAMEWORKS

- Scrum

- Kanban

- XP


Working in an Agile way we’ll be faster … but this is not the

essential point. We don’t want to faster develop “squared

wheels” but to test our value hypotheses as soon as

possible, in order to have time to pivot the solution, which

also implies flexibility for responding to changes.

WHY AGILE

COMPETITIVE MARKETS: TIME TO MARKET VALUE

Highly competitive markets need Time To Market and quick feedback in order to better adapt products to customer needs and early-better monetize. Business value focus, flexibility and high performance are key, considering that Time To Market is more important than only to focus in pure productivity, as product success has far more profit margin than cost reduction.

In order to arrive faster to the market, we need to be very exigent in selecting the first minimum key features of a product and test their usefulness in the market as soon as possible (“test & learn” of Minimum Variable Product, continuous beta versions/high frequency versioning, etc.). This idea also applies for internal product development: we need to be more selective on the management of the demand to make better use of the company resources, focusing on the functionalities really used in the company.

This approach is the opposite of creating the full featured product, that would take a lot of time to be developed without real feedback from clients usage (by the way, people don’t want complex products difficult to understand, and product simplicity is a key factor for productivity).

As we can see from the Standish Group study, focusing in only selecting and developing the

key product features will save time, effort and money (around a 50%).

The Standish Group


These are some of the Agile benefits I see:

WHY AGILE

THE BENEFITS SOUGHT

There are specific benefits that are expected to be achieved with Agile:

WHY AGILE IN AXA EMERGING MARKETS EMEA-LATAM

To address these needs companies look for alternate work approaches with focus in demonstrating business value in shorter periods of time. To make a qualitative change, people need an explicit framework to assist them on regular and disciplined product management and development, as well as reflection on how to continuously improve as a team.

Agile has then been determined as a way to accelerate product development in AXA Group. We believe it is a key facilitator for value creation in the coming years in the company areas where it makes more sense from a business perspective because of Time to Market needs, initially starting in Digital & MultiAccess.


WHY AGILE

KEY SUCCESS FACTORS

Agile is a culture, a set of principles and a discipline for some environments that can support a fast & continuous collaborative lifecycle between Business and IT. Note that Agile principles like these are already used in some projects but being Agile is not so easy.

An Agile transformation is based in experienced coaching more than training, because there is not only a question of incorporating new practices but to foster a cultural change.

Agile is to be introduced in the parts of the organization where it makes more sense from a Business perspective (Time to market, quick market feedback to adjust products, etc.), team by team, in a gradual way.

An appropriate context is needed, but we won’t wait to have the perfect context. We’ll shape it gradually. The test & learn principle will also be key to succeed in the Agile adoption. Below you can find the key success factors to take into account in each area to transform.


GET INTO the basics

The origin of Agile is in the software development industry, where complexity is common

(requirements uncertainty, participation of different people skills, new technologies, etc.). Currently

Agile principles and practices are being adopted in different areas as product

development, complex project management, team growth and environments constituted by

knowledge workers.

You can find the Agile values and principles, the Agile Manifesto, in the following links:

Agile values

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on

the right, we value the items on the left more.

Agile principles

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery

of valuable software.

2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's

competitive advantage.

3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a

preference to the shorter timescale.

4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to

get the job done.

6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-

face conversation.

7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.

8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to

maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.

10. Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.

11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior

accordingly.

http://agilemanifesto.org/

http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html


GET INTO the basics

I have grouped some of the Agile principles in three areas that I want you to initially think on:

Product management focus:

o It helps select the more valuable and useful product features to be produced at each moment.

o It develops products in short cycles to give visibility, facilitate rapid and continuous customer reviews on final product, align expectations offering flexibility to changes and warrantee product quality.

o It delivers in a “test and learn” approach in order to early assess real business impact and make quick adjustments.

People and teamwork focus:

o It is based on motivated people who work in a sustainable pace.

o It is all about interactions & collaboration. It is about creating high performance self-organised teams, and because it takes time we need them to be stable.

o Agile cross-functional teams include as much as possible of all the value chain (projects keep self-contained inside a team), and this is why they are constituted by Business & IT people, so we constantly involve the customer.

Continuous improvement focus:

o It is a discipline. Key meetings (as joint planning, team synchronizations, retrospectives) are never cancelled. That not only helps keeping a stable cadence but reinforcing and modelling a positive behaviour.

o It requires regular quality time for reflecting, learning and changing for the better.

One important characteristic of Agile is that recognises that most effective processes cannot be full up front defined and that there is the need of a continuous improvement process that never ends. You will see that almost everything focuses on getting always better and better.


GET INTO the basics

UNDERSTAND AND MANAGE RISKS

Agile is being faster while managing typical project risks and having discipline.

In order to keep the risk under control, I always keep an eye on these factors:

Customer priorities are a key – a project plan should be based on customer priorities. We get first a tangible “core” product “half-way” and add “pieces” incrementally to it in order to complete the whole vision.

Short iterations – we always work with short cycles to limit the complexity of the coming requirements and to get early feedback of customer expectations, on product results and working processes performance.

Incremental – we use incremental iterations to focus on having stable products with excellent quality.

Create synergies to be more productive – we make sure we share, learn and daily synchronise teams to identify impediments and always reflect on past events (retrospectives).


GET INTO the basics

AGILE FOCUS AREAS

Additionally to what we have seen so far, Agile needs you to focus on certain areas, as a previous step for the implementation. Based on the Agile principles we use The Agile Star concept as a visual diagram to refer to these areas that we have identified that are important to discuss before start moving the wheel.

Based in The Agile Star concept, www.proyectosagiles.org

Go to Chapter 3 “Agile Framework” for more details.

http://www.proyectosagiles.org/estrella-agil


You have to consider two main key factors when you want to

start adopting Agile: organisational and people related areas. If

some are not met before the time of Agile implementation, I strongly

believe that you should go ahead anyway and then create the right

conditions. Agile requires the proper context to work but don’t wait to

have the perfect environment and all things in place at once but

“test & learn” what are the more important things to improve at each

moment.

GET INTO the basics

FOCUS ON THE ORGANISATION

These are the keys for a successful Agile organisation:

Customer collaboration - clients have to be truly involved in a project in order for things to work. Customer collaboration is the important factor for successful product development and getting higher levels of satisfaction. This requires not only having customers available on site with the product development team, but also highly motivated and active.

Autonomous teams – in order to be fast in decision time, teams include as much skills needed to be as autonomous as possible, thereby allowing them to take their own decisions.

Team co-location – it is the preferred option that especially technical members should be sitting together. When this is not possible we can work with distributed teams, but tools (as quality videoconfence) should be provided to help the lack of face-to-face communication (read more on Chapter 13).

Corporate Culture - having the right corporate culture is a must and it is a necessary factor determining the introduction of agile methodologies. We need of transparency, continuous improvement and learning culture.

Dynamism and uncertainty - Agile product lifecycle is always ready to respond to changes over following a strict, fixed plan.


GET INTO the basics

FULLY SUPPORT PEOPLE

As people are a key factor, we always encourage placing a strong emphasis on the following “social” areas:

People competences and stable teams– we develop team competences as well as technical people competences. This is why we keep people working together for 1 to 3 years (we foster stable teams), in order to create a real team with people who perfectly integrates. We also make them repeat types of projects in order to increase their performance on a Business domain.

Personal characteristics – selecting the right people for a team is key to success. Team members may not be necessarily extremely experienced skilled people but having honesty, collaborative attitude towards others, sense of responsibility and readiness to learn are considered a key attribute in Agile.

Communication and negotiation - communication and conflict management skills plays an important role during a product lifecycle. One of the important requirements for agility is fast and effective communication between developers, customers, management and business areas. This is best achieved by face-to-face conversations.

Training and learning - continuous learning is the fundamental in Agile’. People should be eager to share information with others and continuously learn/teach.

In summary:


Any process or technique to be used has to be compatible with

Agile values and principles to promote the right mindset. For

example, we promote Scrum (a time-boxed iterative approach) for

project and team management because of its adaptive planning,

evolutionary development & delivery and it encourages a rapid and

flexible response to change.

WHAT WE EXPECT & what frameworks to implement

Agile is a way to work that has emerged to provide more flexibility to customers and meet their expectations in less time, with less risk and more creativity. For achieving this, more collaboration is needed, people enjoying the work they do and quality time for improvement.

Remember that one of the primary objectives is to grow motivated “real” teams that constantly look for high performance while keeping a fluent communication between the parts.

So far we have seen that Agile is about values and practices. This is certainly true but this is also about a number of practises, frameworks, and techniques.

Agile uses techniques that the industry has been learning for years and has helped shaping the adaptive, iterative and evolutionary development. Scrum and Kanban are usually used with XP practices and Lean Principles. We can use the diagram below as a reference of this combination (notice that the diagram circles do not represent containers).



SCRUM AT A GLANCE

Let’s learn now about Scrum, one of the frameworks that are part of Agile and is widely used in this book and popular in the Agile World.

Scrum main advantage is that it offers a group of practises and tools that allow early feedback, flexibility and time to market while supporting people.

Scrum is based on experience and learning rather than theory. Let’s see their basic components:

Product Backlog - List of prioritised requirements that define a product.

Small cycles with complete functionality - usable product that meets the clients’ business goals (working software/product)

Regular team planning and synchronization.

Regular interaction between business & IT.

Quality time for reflection.

There are mandatory meetings such as the Sprint Plan, Daily Scrum, Product Backlog Refinement, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective; most of them are time-boxed (with a fixed time) and all have a clear objective.


Product Owner

Unique representative of all stakeholders and users.

Facilitates priorities agreement in the Business side based on Biz strategy and ROI.

Regularly accepts the completed product.

Collaborates with the Development team in requirement analysis and detailing.

Cross-functional and self-organized.

Estimates requirements and provides a solution.

Presents the results to the Product Owner.

Scrum Master

Development Team


Scrum defines the following 3 roles:

Develops a high performance, motivated and self-organized team, including Bz and IT, that collaborates and improves continuously.

Process responsible, transmits the Agile values and principles.

Facilitates meetings, makes the team flow and creates synergies.

Removes impediments that the team cannot solve by itself.


Extended Team Project Manager

This is role is still needed due to the

complex environment and that the

organization is on its way to agilization.

Coordinates relationships with third parties

and other plans (Communication,

trainings, HW & SW provisioning, etc.)

Removes impediments that are out of the

scope of the SM (mainly organizational).

Financial, terms and scope control.

Project reporting.


We may also consider some extra roles in order to make it more functional to a large corporation reality.

Go to Chapter 9 “Scrum” for more details.

Experts that collaborate on a part-time basis and communicate directly with the Development Team. They are permanent team

members.



KANBAN

Kanban is a technique for visualising the flow of creation of products through its different stages. It

is oriented to continuous delivery and Just-In-Time by working in small batches. Kanban

implements a “pull” system based on each stage capacity and it increases flow by limiting work in

progress. Kanban 6 core practices are:

1. Visualize the workflow

2. Limit WIP

3. Manage Flow

4. Make Process Policies Explicit

Implement feedback loops

Improve Collaboratively

Go to Chapter 10 “Kanban Techniques” for more details.



ENGINEERING PRACTICES (XP)

Agile software development practices are based on having quick feedback, an always stable and

tested product and team knowledge spreading in order to achieve fast speed to requirements

changes in a controlled way, productivity and quality.

Go to Chapter 11 “eXtreme Programming” for more details.


TAKE AWAY

REMEMBER

Business heavily involved and working with IT

Fast and collaborative short lifecycles and feedback loops are a characteristic.

Business value is the trading currency.

Stable teams are needed.

Agile values and practises are needed in order to implement it.

DEEPEN YOUR KNOWLEDGE

Agile Manifesto

Agile Alliance

Agile Atlas Agile methodology

BENEFITS

Business & IT are aligned to achieve a shared goal.

Working software / product is the primary measure of progress and features are created incrementally.

Encourage deep involvement throughout the product’s development and a very cooperative

collaborative approach.

Change is broadly accepted even in late phases of development.

Small incremental releases make the product visible and help to identify any issues/risks early.

http://agilemanifesto.org/

http://www.agilealliance.org/

http://agileatlas.org/

http://agilemethodology.org/

awb - 01 - introduction to agile

Leadership & Management