Overcoming Three Pitfalls of Transitioning to Agile

Johanna RothmanNew: Hiring Geeks That Fitwww.jrothman.com@johannarothmanjr@jrothman.com

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Three Common Pitfalls to Agile Transition

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1. Stories too big for the iteration

2.“We need an expert!”

3. Implementation across the architecture, not through it

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“The Iteration is Too Short” akaThe Stories are Too Big

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We can’t get anything done in 2 weeks

We can’t get anything done in 3 weeks

We can’t get anything done in 4 weeks

...

Stories are humungous

What do you do?

© 2013 Johanna Rothman

Strategies for “Stories are too Big”

Swarm around stories

What’s the first thing you can do

that adds business value?

Shorten the iterations

Use kanban so you can see the

flow of features through the

teams and see bottlenecks

(visualize where things are)

Stop estimating; Start delivering

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© 2013 Johanna Rothman

Experts are Rampant

“I’ll take this story. John will take that story. Dan takes this

story.”

“We need an expert for that story.”

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© 2013 Johanna Rothman

Strategies for “We Need Experts”

Never let the expert work alone

Pair the expert with another person

Pair other people together

Banish the expert and let the team

manage the problem

Stagger the projects to use the expert

Hire more experts

Understand why you have this problem

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© 2013 Johanna Rothman

Implementation Through the Architecture

An artifact of component-based organization

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© 2013 Johanna Rothman8

What You Want to Implement

© 2013 Johanna Rothman

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