Minimal Viable Agile
- 1. Minimum Viable Agile 2015.leanagilekc.com KC’s First 100% Lean / Agile Conference! Troy Tuttle Lean Agile Coach KanFlow.com troy@kanflow.com @troytuttle KCDC 2015
- 2. Titanium Sponsors Platinum Sponsors Gold Sponsors
- 3. Minimum Viable Agile Borrowing from the Product Development concept of MVP or Minimum Viable Product. "The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort." What is it?
- 4. Minimum Viable Agile Minimum Viable Agile is a collection of Agile practices and ceremonies, informed by Lean and Agile theory, that produces the maximum amount of customer value, with the least amount of effort. (Or Just Enough practices and ceremonies to be effective). What is it?
- 5. Agile Is…? Burn Down Charts Sticky Notes Card Walls Kanban Boards Standup Meetings Retrospectives Pair Programming TDD Sprint Planning Planning PokerVelocity Story Points User Stories Release Planning Estimation Team Room Definition of Done WIP Limits
- 6. Agile Is… (Actual Google Search, BTW)
- 7. The Agile Dysfunction Spiral Detailed sprint planning Formal sprint commitment Work the sprintUnfinished work We need to get better at planning sprints Coaching to help improve sprint planning Sprint planning takes longer Management Applies pressure Culture of Blame creeps back in… Team works overtime Are we really just after better sprints?
- 8. Cargo Cult (Agile) Many early Agile attempts simply installed practices (recipes). Warning! Following recipes leads to Cargo Cult Agile
- 10. Mob Programming: The original MVA? Reduces or Eliminates: 1. Standup meetings 2. Detailed planning sessions 3. The need for estimates 4. Team alignment activities 5. Context Switching 6. Individual status updates 7. Burn-down charts for performance tracking 8. Code Reviews All the Brilliant People Working on the same problem At the same time On the same computer - mobprogramming.org
- 11. What if we delivered customer value faster than we could generate, revise, massage, and distribute… status updates?
- 12. Story Points: The sacred cow of Agile Sometimes this causes unnecessary confusion and drama! Story points are designed to be abstract. Velocity is an attempt to plan work based on an abstraction, based on an estimate.
- 13. Story point myopia -- Jim Benson, moduscooperandi.com 16 72 21 19 37 Velocity in Story Points 7 9 9 9 7 Throughput in Card Count
- 14. Velocity is not Minimal Viable Agile Velocity (based on story points) has become a social and business currency.
- 15. What about Story Point predictability? Courtesy of Bennet Vallet Director of Development Siemens Health Services Expected Distribution Actual Distribution
- 16. Story Point Predictability? A product team from Microsoft shared their story point estimates. They performed three release forecasts: 1. Story Points 1,2,3 for small medium and large 2. Story Points 1, 3, 5 for small medium and large 3. All stories are 1 point (just count # of stories)
- 17. Story Point Predictability? All dates within 3 weeks of each other in a 38 to 42 week project!
- 18. Data used with permission from Bill Hanlon at Microsoft ”At that point, I stopped thinking that estimating was important.” Bill Hanlon: http://bit.ly/BHanlon Data Visualizations courtesy of Vasco Duarte http://bit.ly/vasco_blog @duarte_vasco
- 19. Planning in the world of MVA Option #1 Hours-long traditional sprint planning meetings spent playing planning poker and a team arguing about the difference between 2’s and 3’s. Option #2 Short story slicing meeting where the focus is on understanding and slicing large stories. “Do we understand this story? If not, let’s keep slicing.” 1 2 3 5 8 13 20 40 100 Right-sizing the work
- 20. Planning in the world of MVA Input Q Design Develop Test Done1 2 1 3 12 9 7 8 6 4 5 Lead Time Throughput 10 14 days from this point 5 stories per week Upstream Planning 1. Prioritize 2. Analyze S S S S SS S S S S
- 21. Planning in the world of MVA Probabilistic Forecasting <= 4 days (50th percentile) <= 9 days (85th percentile) <= 13 days (95th percentile) 2 2 3 3 3 4 4 5 6 8 9 10 13 16 Lead times in days for 14 User stories: Find the 50th, 85th, and 95th percentiles… (Rank = Percentage * Count) 50th 85th 95th
- 22. The Essence of Agile Focus Learning Simplicity (The art of the work not done.) (Collaboration is an outcome.) (Feedback loops enable improvements) Insist your practices and ceremonies support the “Why” behind Agile! Customer Value (We wouldn’t be here otherwise.)
- 23. Coaching Minimum Viable Agile • Train teams on estimation techniques or schemes. • Focus on making fixed scope, fixed time, commitment-based sprints work. • Teach teams how to use burn-down charts. • Teach teams to use Velocity to plan releases. I Don’t:
- 24. Coaching Minimum Viable Agile • Coach teams to Limit their WIP to achieve better focus. • Use simple and pragmatic time-boxes for better risk management. • Teach teams how to visualize their work. • Coach teams to conduct retrospectives and adopt continuous improvement. • Plan releases based on historical measurements. I Do:
- 25. Where does Agile go from here? The first 15 years of Agile prompted us to ask: “What are all the practices we need to adopt to be successful?” Minimum Viable Agile prompts us to ask: “Now, what practices do we change or discard to be successful?”
- 26. Minimum Viable Agile 2015.leanagilekc.com KC’s First 100% Lean / Agile Conference! Troy Tuttle Lean Agile Coach KanFlow.com troy@kanflow.com @troytuttle KCDC 2015
Editor's Notes
- #2: Speaker eval forms Agilehood open space! LWS KC
- #6: Write down the first few things that come to mind when you Complete the sentence…
- #8: Amortized death marches
- #9: Practices divorced (mostly) from principles Let’s install this process, or follow this recipe!
- #14: Them: We can’t get our velocity to stabilize. Our story points are all over the map. Sixteen, Seventy Two, Twenty One? What’s wrong with us? Why can’t we estimate?
- #15: Anyone heard the comment: We need to increase this team’s velocity. Or Team A has a higher velocity than Team B At Best: Velocity helps us predict. At worst: Velocity can mislead and distract!
- #23: Building the “right thing”
- #27: Speaker eval forms Agilehood open space! LWS KC