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Scaling Agile Up and Out: A Tale from the Trenches It seems like everyone wants to scale their agile teams. As projects grow in scope, the agile approach to software development needs to scale up to larger team sizes. Agile also needs to scale out to handle geographically distributed teams as businesses expand into new markets and seek the best talent available globally. These are challenging propositions for many teams. Ade Miller talks about his experiences at Microsoft®-scaling agile up on the Visual Studio® Tools for Office team and scaling out on the radically distributed teams within the patterns & practices group. Ade covers the approaches used-some which worked well, some not so well-and shares that the important thing is what was learned and how this new knowledge can be applied successfully to other projects. Ade presents some successful practices when scaling agile projects as well as some key pitfalls to avoid on your projects.
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Ade Miller, Microsoft Corporation
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Agile Growing Pains Often, examples of agile successes are presented in the context of small, software-only development teams. Michael Kirby describes what it took to deploy agile development techniques in a large, embedded software development organization. Michael describes the successes-and some of the failures-of deploying agile development in Xerox's Production Printer Development Team. Learn about the adaptation of Scrum (what happens when the project manager gets voted off the island), agile planning (what's a user story when the only observable behavior is to power up the device), and test-driven development and automated acceptance testing (until a paper jam occurs in the middle of the night). Michael describes the cultural barriers encountered at Xerox in trying to transition a large development team from "traditional" software development to a more agile development approach.
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Michael Kirby, Xerox Corporation
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Mistakes Agile Teams Make The road to hell is paved with good intentions-with a special section reserved for those who have tried to "go agile". Agile adoption can fail because a number of common, large-scale, organizational issues. A lack of executive-level support can squash promising improvements among the day-to-day producers. Sometimes the organization is in such disarray that delivering perfect features perfectly wouldn't keep customers satisfied. While these are real and important, J. B. Rainsberger suggests you'll find it more productive to focus on issues over which you have real influence. J. B. describes a few relatively simple mistakes, the warning signs to look for, and how to solve the problems. Hear useful stories from an experienced agile coach that include, "If I'd only known then what I know now ..." You'll laugh, you'll cry, and with luck, you'll catch a problem or two before it blows up on you.
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JB Rainsberger, Diaspar Software Services
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Agile Project Inception: Escaping the Waterfall Whether you are working on a new development effort or the next release of an existing system, you are probably required to make a compelling business case for the proposed work to clear an approval committee's "go/no-go" process. As an approval prerequisite, many organizations require big up-front planning and estimating resulting in a "complete" project plan including dates, costs, and resources. However, a key aspect of agility is an incremental, just-in-time approach to planning and estimating.
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Kenny Rubin, Innolution
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Maximizing Team Dynamics and Overcoming Dysfunction in Agile Environments Change can be painful, but staying stagnant can hurt even more. Deciding to "go agile" may be the right choice for many companies, but seeing Scrum or XP as the next silver bullet can be a mistake, or perhaps the right medicine at the wrong time. In the rush to be faster, better, cheaper, or super-innovative, it's possible to become trapped in organizational dysfunction, even to the extent whereby good medicine won't work. When companies seek to "become agile," what roadblocks might they hit that could increase risk of failure? Michael Mah presents examples of companies that have overcome problems, plus a few who didn't.
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Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.
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A Lean Approach to Managing the Project Portfolio Whether you've been agile for a while or are thinking about it, you have one thing in common with every other software team I've encountered. You have too much work to do. One way to organize your work is with a project portfolio. But if your portfolio is an "as desired" portfolio, you still haven't solved the problem of too much work. Fortunately, taking a lean approach to managing the portfolio helps make those problems of "desired" and "too much work" transparent. Johanna Rothman discusses the several choices you have in managing the portfolio. She presents a project portfolio plan at the highest level and the lowest level, and describes how to apply rolling wave planning to your project portfolio. Johanna discusses ways you can evaluate the projects in your portfolio, whether it's a kanban board, a fixed queue, a fixed timebox, or other evaluation approach.
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Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.
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"With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility" - Empowering the Agile Team Managers at many levels are often afraid to let go of the reins for fear of losing control of the project (and their position of power). V. Lee Henson explains the benefits of letting go and outlines the expectations of a responsible, empowered agile team. Through presentation of multiple real-world scenarios and years of project management experience, Lee will show that often our own human nature is the greatest impediment to being a better manager. Lee focuses on the attributes of an effective agile manager/leader, the expectations and attributes of an empowered agile team, the pitfalls and warning signs of a "damaged" team, and the rewards an organization can expect from adhering to basic agile principles. You will leave with the tools to help any agile team become more empowered.
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V. Lee Henson, VersionOne, Inc.
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Assessing Your Agility Are you curious how "agile" your organization is? Do you wonder how you compare with other organizations that have been using agile for a similar amount of time? Do you want an authoritative source of information to help guide your successful transition to agile? Mike Cohn and Kenny Rubin present a framework for assessing organizational agility. Specifically, they examine the areas of teamwork, requirements, planning, technical practices, quality, culture, and knowledge creation. Mike and Kenny describe how to use a framework to assess agility at various times during an organization's adoption of agile and how to derive actionable information from each assessment. Mike, Kenny, and their colleagues have collected over 300 assessment surveys from participants working on agile projects around the world. They will present preliminary industry-specific findings derived from analyzing the results of these assessments.
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Mike Cohn, Mountain Goat Software
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Agile Development Practices 2008: When to Step Up, When to Step Back: How to Lead Collaboration Leaders can stifle progress when they interfere with team processes. But as a leader, you don't want an on-track project to go over the cliff and deliver the wrong results either. There are times when leaders should stand back and let the team work and times when they should step up and lead. How do we know which is which? Pollyanna Pixton focuses on collaboration and teaches you how to step back by unleashing the talent in your organization and teams. Learn how to create an open environment that fosters innovation and creativity and how to let your team members take ownership and hold themselves accountable. Equally important, develop the techniques to step up and lead without impeding the flow of ideas, yet keep the project on track. Master this balancing act and come away with tools to both motivate and guide effectively.
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Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova
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Selling Agile: Getting Buy-in from Your Team, Customers, and Managers Are you excited by the potential of agile software development, but find that your colleagues are a bit reticent? Is your whole team ready to dive in, but your business partner is only interested in dipping in their big toe-if that? Or maybe you're wishing you could find a way to convince your clients that there's a better way to contract for a software development job-without having to do a full-blown detailed design upfront? Michele Sliger discusses all of these questions surrounding how to best "sell" agile in your organization. Michele focuses on the general idea of a "sales pitch", including what to say and what not to say. Then she discusses selling agile to the team, to management, to the customer, and to others in your organization. She wraps up with a pointed look at not selling, and instead focusing on finding other ways to promote and share agile.
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Michele Sliger, Sliger Consulting, Inc.
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