Agile 2008 Retrospective & Slide Show

September 2008 Agile Change Program

3rd September 2008

- 1 -

1/04/2017Overview

In Toronto, Canada to represent

Suncorp and present two experience

reports

- 2 -

1/04/2017Three Little Pigs

The first paper –Agile Project

Experiences –The Story of the Three Little Pigs

- 3 -

1/04/2017Three Little Pigs

Experiences from EasyDoc,

Guidewire & Promina

Payments projects.

People showed up!

- 4 -

1/04/2017Dials To Eleven

The second paper –Technical Lessons Learnt turning the

agile dials to eleven.

Paul King presented two other talks also

on Groovy & performance tests

- 5 -

1/04/2017Dials To Eleven – Coming Soon to InfoQ

Info Q recorded the session and will be way on their website in November (only

18 out of 400 were recorded).

http://www.infoq.com/agile2008

- 6 -

1/04/2017Chasing Waterfalls

Niagra Falls is 90 minutes down the

road.

Powerful waterfall right next to an

agile conference??

- 7 -

1/04/2017Niagra Falls

- 8 -

1/04/2017AAFTT

Day 1

Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tools Workshop

- 9 -

1/04/2017AAFTT

Lightning Talks

• 5 mins

• Video taped

Open Space Sessions 3x3

• Narrative testing

• Tool selection

• Understandability for users vs the power of

programming

Futurespective

• Positive (green)

• Negative (red)

• Surprises (purple)

- 10 -

1/04/2017So Many Choices...

• 19 stages – developer, testing, process, distributed agile,

leadership,...

• More than 30 choices per session

- 11 -

1/04/2017The Wisdom Of Crowds

Keynote:

“The Wisdom Of Crowds”

James Surowiecki

• The aggregation of information in groups, results in decisions that are often better than could have been made by any single member

of the group

• Large organisations set up obstacles to the flow of information

• Group average is usually very close and usually a large percentage of the group

• Livestock example – crowd average 1197lb and actual weight 1198lb

•At Agile 2008, for Visual Studio LOC –average guess 47 million, real answer 43.2

million, only 2/2000 better thangroup collective guess

- 12 -

1/04/2017Ten Terrific Transition Tips

“Ten Terrific Transition Tips”Joshua Kerievsky

• Don’t sell pair programming – focus on risks of solo programming

• Build community – bigger than you think, retrospectives build community

• Celebrate chaos – you will get there soon

• Empower experimenters – give things a fair shot

• Start sooner!

• Most people who don’t program don’t understand technical debt – demonstrate

• Customers are really happier when focussed on quality and not features

- 13 -

1/04/2017Code Metrics & Analysis For Agile Projects

“Code Metrics & Analysis For Agile Projects”

Neal Ford & Ram Singaram

• Hawthorne Effect – Western Electric measured worker activity based on lighting level

• Use metrics, don’t just collect, apply to codebase

• Byte code analysis - Findbugs – run on Struts, found copy/paste bug 3 times

• Source analysis – PMD, CPD, Simian

• Coverage – Cobertura, Emma, nCover

• Flog – for Ruby, adds up language values as you cannot measure static analysis

• Effrent/Affrent coupling – number of classes used / use this class – Jdepend

• Crap4J – crap threshold

• Information Radiators - Panopticode

- 14 -

1/04/2017Build Your Coaching Skills

“Build Your Coaching Skills”Johanna Rothman

• Don’t confuse coaching with feedback or teaching – feedback is longer term and about behaviour, mentoring is about milestones and

achievements

• Always have an end time for coaching – then re-evaluate

• Coaching under the covers – spouses do it all the time

• Coaches do not have to be a domain expert

• Most organisations have blind leading the nearly blind

• Every problem has 3 possible options – then move to goals

• Exercises in coaching and listening

- 15 -

1/04/2017Prioritizing Your Product Backlog

“Prioritizing Your Product Backlog”

Mike Cohn

• Iceberg- well formed with small number of stories at the top

• Spend 10% of iteration getting ready for the next

• Kano analysis – exciter/delighter, mandatory/baseline, linear

• Theme screening, Theme scoring, Relative weighting – ways to identify important features for next release

• Break big projects into release horizons

- 16 -

1/04/2017New Arrows For The Agile Quiver

“New Arrows For The Agile Quiver”

Jim McCarthy

• Agile is common sense but not very common

• Take the job offer to manage the dumbest group – only way is up

• Shared vision works – 4 people on Excel vs200 on Access!

• Core Commitments for teams – doomed to be great if you follow them – a number of

protocol checks – eg. “I propose” or “let’s act” means everybody should listen, promise not

to do anything dumb on purpose, etc...

- 17 -

1/04/2017Guerilla Agile

“Guerilla Agile”Johanna Rothman

• Lots of examples - Bring Me A Rock, Queen Of Denial, We Can’t Say No, etc...

• Want management to think your resources are scarce – how do you free them up?

• Happy Date – MS Project will tell you the first possible date you cannot be done

• Releasable product does not mean walking out of the building

• How little can you do to be successful?

• Measure what is done, not just the milestones

• Normally don’t recommend Monday to Friday iterations – people will use the weekend

• 90% done – use inch pebbles

- 18 -

1/04/2017Quintessence

Keynote:“Quintessence”

Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin

• Political metaphor – Scrum is Obama and XP is McCain

• Agile Manifesto needs a fifth value –“Craftmanship Over Crap”

• Later changed this slightly to “Craftmanship Over Execution” –

because we value craftmanship more than execution – we don’t value crap at

all!

• Jury is in – TDD works

• Manual testing is criminal

• Green Band – Clean Code – sold out!

- 19 -

1/04/2017The Wisdom Of Experience

Keynote:“The Wisdom Of Experience”

Alan Cooper

• The father of Visual Basic

• Agile is a new toy – developers jump on new toys – but agile is unique

• Mixing big ideas, design, engineering and construction is the most common

source of failure

• We can know what users need, interaction designers works with

developers to discover this

• Challenge management

• Demand quality lines not deadlines

• First to market is not betterthan best to market

- 20 -

1/04/2017Dude, Where’s My Release Plan?

“Dude, Where’s My Release Plan?”

David Hussman

• Product owners are usually slapped in the role because they know the system

• Suggests use of big fat stories rather than epics or themes

• Realise that somebody is rolling up your planning to a budget and converting your

points to days

• Release planning – involve all those who want a say, give management/sales a plan

• Recharter when you don’t have a vision

• Have a visible release plan / iteration map

- 21 -

1/04/201710 Ways To Screw Up With Scrum & XP

“10 Ways To Screw Up With Scrum & XP”

Henrik Kniberg

• Don’t throw out stuff that works – don’t need it all at the start, start simple

• Have an agreed definition of done

• Guess velocity to get going

• Do retrospectives well- look for mechanical, use a timeline to get started

• Use a flashlight, make velocity visible

• Deal with technical debt – stop making it happen, slow down, add definition of done

• teamwork – can have specialists, ask team what they need to go faster

• use product backlog

• mergophobia

- 22 -

1/04/2017After Dark

Microsoft Function & Banquet

- 23 -

1/04/2017Vendors a.k.a. Free Stuff

Thoughtworks, GreenPepper, Microsoft, Borland, Version One, Rally, Electric Cloud...

- 24 -

1/04/2017Explore Toronto

- 25 -

1/04/2017Explore Toronto

- 26 -

1/04/2017Key Items of Interest for Agilists

• Strong focus behind quality testing and approaches to making things better

• Clean code and craftmanship

• Technical debt & legacy code

• Agile practices over theory – Pragmatism has replaced religion

• Mixed crowd – new to agile and experienced agile but much less why agile

• Questions about what’s next in agile?

• Enterprise and distributed agile learnings

• Planning, planning poker cards & story points

• Lots of practical learnings from practitioners

• Prioritised backlog

- 27 -

1/04/2017More Information???

• Check out the Agile 2008 website to see if there were items of interest – http://www.agile2008.org

• Watch InfoQ for presentations and commentary-http:///www.infoq.com/agile2008

• Talk to the attendees from Suncorp - Craig Smith, Paul King, Phil Abernathy, Marina Chiovetti

• Email me for access to slides or presentations –craig.smith@suncorp.com.au

• Request brown bags on specific areas of interest from the conference

THANK YOU!