Presentation in Agiles 2012

Transforming Cultures on Prezi

Agile Collaboration Area

Summary

The Agile Manifesto says "Business people and developers must work together daily through the project". Everyone, within the organization and beyond it (i.e. clients) must work jointly towards a shared objective, help each other, have good intentions, share all the information and ultimately to do what's best for the everyone involved.

Goals

- Collaboration between the organization and its clients is enabled financially. Contracts should enforce collaboration.
- Collaboration among team members in a project and among different departments of the organization should be enforced. 
- All stakeholders should be involved throughout the duration of a project.

Standard Practices

Clients work with team members to specify the requirements and prioritize them in a backlog that will be used continually during the project. Features are presented to these clients early in the life of the project to be able to receive feedback and change according to it. This change should be enabled in the contract (if the contract penalizes delays, the team won't be willing to accept any changes during the life of the project). Everyone in the team should share the same objectives. Therefore, policies and rewards should be devised with this in mind.

Agile Communication Area

Summary

Communication is key in an Agile organization. Developing software is a communication problem. Communication needs to flow as fast and clear as possible among all members of the organization. An environment that enables and enforces communication should be built.

Goals

- There is an environment that allows interactions among all members in the organization freely.
- All members of the organization can easily  communicate with each other.
- There is complete transparency to everyone about the goals, status, direction of the project/organization.

Standard Practices

- The office is an open space, where all members share the same information. There are visual radiators in many places of the office that allow members of a project and all members in the organization to understand the status and direction of the different projects.
- Team members in a project interact as much as possible to synchronize and make sure there is a shared understanding of what needs to be built. In Scrum, there are different meetings that enable and enforce this communication: 1) Planning meeting at the beginning of each iteration 2) Daily Standup every day 3) Demo and Retrospection at the end of the iteration. Besides this, practices like pair program or code review sessions push the members to interact even more. Understanding the effectiveness of the different types of communication types helps devise a communication strategy. When is possible, face to face communication is the most effective type of communication but there are situations when the team is distributed geographically and therefore other communication methods should be used. Increasing the communication to its highest level should be the direction in these cases.

Self Organization Area

Summary

This area's goal is to create an environment where all members feel empowered to contribute all their knowledge and energy for the organization's benefit. Leaders and more experienced individuals should guide less experienced ones and set constraints and directions.

Goals

- Team members are empowered
- The team self organizes to create the best solution to the specified problems.
- Leaders create and maintain an environment where self-organization can thrive

Standard Practices

- Within a project, a cross functional team self organizes to develop the best solution to the problem.
- Managers are servant leader that teach through example and help other members to grow within the organization and to give the best of them.

Agile Process Development Lifecycle Area

Summary

The process should be an enabler of the objectives the organization needs to fulfill. It should allow the organization to deliver value fast and sustainably. It should be revised and improved continually (Kaizen).

Goals

- The process enables incremental delivery of features. In other words, the process should allow to slice the functionality to be delivered in multiple chunks, that when delivered allow the business to receive the most valuable/important functionality sooner.
- Process should be light and empiric. All artifacts in the process should give value to the product creation process.
- Process should be empiric. The team should continually introspect on the process and change it to function better within the specific context.

Standard Practices

- Common methodologies/frameworks like Scrum and Extreme Programming use iterations to deliver features incrementally and iteratively. Features should be potentially shippable at the end of each iteration. This doesn't mean that they could be shipped, as a feature could be part of a larget minimum viable feature.
- At the end of each iteration, the team can show to all business stakeholders the business functionality that was completed. If requirements are sliced vertically and provide business value, they can be shown.  Stakeholders can provide their feedback, which could be incorporated in the product backlog through the product owner.
- The team should inspect the process (among other things) at the end of each iteration. Usually, the team tries to find what is working with the current process and isn't, devising action items that can improve its performance.

Agile Project Monitoring Area

Summary

All members of the organization are in charge of monitoring the progress of the project, suggesting corrective actions and making sure they are completed. There is complete transparency and a lot of communication among everyone, thus ensuring that everyone understand the current status of the project.

Goals

- The team monitors the actual progress of the project at timeboxed intervals. It should be measured the actual completion of requirements, risks tackled and discovered, changes in business requirements (i.e. changes in scope), etc.
- The team monitors the progress daily, trying to discover blockers (things that prevent the team from doing progress) and synchronization points (e.g. among dependent requirements)
- The team and business stakeholders agree on corrective actions or adaptions to the plan and execute them.

Standard Practices

- After each iteration, there is a demo that allows the team to show the business side the actual progress made on requirements. There is a great deal of knowledge won in this meeting as the business people get a feeling of the actual product being constructed. This knowledge gained should be reflected in the plan, as the horizon should be clearer after each iteration. The team should have also gained a clearer understanding of what it takes to develop the requirements and the amount of work remaining.
- Daily, the team introspects on the progress (compared to the expect one) and blockers trying to complete all work they have committed to and remove all impediments as fast as possible. In Scrum, this meeting is called "daily scrum" and it is usually the ScrumMaster who is in charge of removing any impediment that might prevent the team from doing progress.
- Each action item detected during either the daily scrum or the review should be completed to end. It is a good practice for one of the team members to be hold accountable.
- Visual Radiators should be hanged in various places of the open space the team works on. One of the tenets of Agile is transparency, and therefore everyone should be as aware as possible of the actual progress.

Agile Project Planning Area

Summary

Initial planning sets up the initial direction, which is continually updated based on new discoveries (business and technical). Therefore, planning is a continuous work that endures the whole project.

Goals

- A plan is built when the project starts and updated it continually throughout the project.
- Estimations are performed for all requirements. The time invested in estimation should be directly proportional to the level of approval and understanding of the requirement (A greater lever of understanding and approval enables a greater level of detail on the estimation)
- All involved members should be involved in estimations, aware of the plan and committed to the success of the project.

Standard Practices

- In the 'Release Planning' meeting, a backlog that contains all stories known so far is constructed. As there is a great deal of uncertainty and unknowns, stories are estimated roughly, to have a first approximation to the dimension of the project.
- If the project is too big, it is a common practice to slice the project in releases. First release should contain the most important business functionality, what is needed more urgently or what lets the company enter a field.
- During the execution of the project and as more is learned about the project, estimations and forecasts are updated to reflect the gained knowledge in the plan.
- A common technique for doing the estimation is the Poker Planning, where all members of the project contribute their wisdom (this technique relies on the Wisdom of Crowds)
- Involvement and transparency enable full commitment of the team.