Synerzip-Agile2016-Top10 Webinar

Tom Nedwek
Senior Business Architect, Pegasystems
Agile2016 Top 10 Takeaways
Vinayak Joglekar, CTO
@vinayakj
Hemant Elhence, CEO
@HemantElhence

http://synerzip.com
Agile2016 Conference Overview
• July 25-29 in Atlanta
• 2,500 participants from 42 countries
– 19 tracks, 270 sessions
• 4 Special Tracks
– Agile Bootcamp
– Stalwarts
– Experience Reports
– 3-5 min Lightening Talks
• Inspiring Keynotes
– Jurgen Appelo: Managing for Happiness
– Joshua Kerievsky: Modern Agile
– Carrie Kish: Leadership for Genius Tribes

19 Tracks
• Agile Bootcamp
• Audacious Salon (New)
• Coaching and Mentoring
• Collaboration, Culture &
Teams
• Development Practices &
Craftsmanship
• DevOps
• Enterprise Agile
• Experience Reports
• Government
• Leadership
• Learning
• Lightening Talks
• Open Jams
• Project, Program and
Portfolio Management
• Stalwarts
• Testing & Quality
• The Future of Agile
Software Development
• User Experience
• Working with Customers

Top 10 Takeaways from Agile2016
But Really Our
Top 14
Note: We attended 40+ sessions.
Where possible, presenters name & references are
listed.

But Really Our Top 14
1. VJ: Lean UX
2. HE: Modern Agile
3. VJ: Lean UX Toolkit
4. HE: Agile is Mindset
5. VJ: DevOps Antipatterns
6. HE: Lean Startup
Subsumed
7. VJ: Design Thinking
8. HE: #NoEstimates
9. VJ: Roles Not Personas
10. HE: Architecture/ Architect
11. VJ: Visual Test
Automation
12. HE: Scaling Agile
13. VJ: Interesting Soundbites
14. HE: Interesting Soundbites

Standish Group-State of Agile

Challenged projects-focus on UX

Hypothesis driven development

Scrum Team+DevOps+Lean UX
Agile Sprints
Developer TesterProduct Owner
Cross Functional Team -2006
Release to
Production
IT Operations
Big Design
Up Front
UX Designer
Lean UX Developer TesterProduct
Owner
Developer TesterProduct Owner

1. Lean UX
• UX designer is a role not a fixed designation
• UX design was done as a part of the sprint
• Each sprint had a distinct hypothesis to
validate

2. Modern Agile
Keynote by Joshua Kerievsky, www.ModernAgile.org
• “Over the past decade, innovative companies, software industry thought leaders
and lean/agile pioneers have discovered simpler, sturdier, more streamlined
ways to be agile. Today, it makes far more sense to bypass antiquated
agility in favor of modern approaches.”
• Modern agile methods are defined by four guiding principles:
– Make people awesome
– Make safety a prerequisite
– Experiment and learn rapidly
– Deliver value continuously
2001 2016

Values/Principles, Practices
Modern agile consists of four, overlapping values/principles that include a
dozen overlapping practices
www.industriallogic.com/blog/modern-agile/

McKinsey + Harvard Business
• Agile is not just for software
development, but more broadly
applicable for the entire organization
– Steve Denning’s Stalwarts session and
book, The Leaders Guide to Radical
Management (www.stevedenning.com)
– Recent McKinsey research
• Agility Hackathons (http://agilityhackathon.com/)
• McKinsey article
http://www.mckinsey.com/business-
functions/organization/our-insights/agility-it-
rhymes-with-stability
– Recent Harvard Business Review article,
Embracing Agile, May 2016
(hbr.org/2016/05/embracing-agile)
• Agile is not a choice anymore, it is a necessity – Steve Denning

Agility: It rhymes with stability
McKinsey
Quarterly Article -
December 2015

3.Lean UX Toolkit
• Various Tools used by Lean UX
practictioners

3.Empathy Map->Affinity Map
I see people
looking at their
phones & not
noticing my
shop
I see kids & elders
play Pokemon go
I see people
going to my
competitor for
Pokemon lures
I see younger
people
spending more
money
Outside shop
Inside shop
At home

Empathy/Affinity Map -> A3
Outside shop
Inside shop
At home
Title ____ Owner____Date Started____
Date Finished____
Background
Current Situation
Analysis
Hypothesis
Experiment
Measurement
Outcome
Next Steps

PDSA in A3 Map
Title ____ Owner____Date Started____
Date Finished____
Background
Current Situation
Analysis
Hypothesis
Experiment
Measurement
Outcome
Next Steps
Plan
Do
Study
Act

Three types of assumptions
It is
technically
feasible to
build this
Customers
will
accept
this
It will
be
financially
viable

Feasibility Desirability
Viability
Business Model Canvas
Key Partners Key Activities
Key Resources
Value
Proposition
Customer
Relationships
Customer
Segments
Channels
Revenue StreamsCost Structure

Order of assumption validation
Known Unknown
Important
Unimportant
Validate important
and unknown
assumptions first

4: Agile is Mindset
• Tools & processes drowning out the core Agile
mindset - “DeJirafication” needed
• “It is not enough to change strategies, structures,
and systems, unless the thinking that produced
those strategies, structures, and systems also
changes.” Peter Senge, The Dance of Change
• Think of scrum ceremonies as the training wheels
for learning Agile, evolve to Kanban flow
– Don’t need to constrain to 7+2 team size. Make teams larger (even
to 30) to reduce inter team dependencies
– Give each team autonomy to define their flow, their Kanban board
– Do away with iteration planning, just pick up the next highest
priority story and start working on it

5.DevOps Antipatterns
● It works on my PC - give me access to prod
● We built 200 microservices and forgot to set
up Jenkins
● We’ve got fully automated deployment
pipeline but release twice a year
● We crammed this monolith in a container
and called it a microservice
● I used the latest version and it crashed
● I deploy from separate images of dev, test
and prod env
● Rollback is a separate process than rollfwd

DevOps wall of confusion

Solutions
• Automate deployment from day 1
• Choose well - some S/W resists portability,
resilience & automated deployment
• Decoupled components with clearly defined
responsibilities & network isolation
• Immutable containers/n/work isolation in dev
• Don’t treat your containers like VMs
• No config.yml in filesystem-> Env variables
• Use one codebase for all deployments

Microservices are at the end

Follow the 12 factor app

6. Lean Startup Subsumed
• Lean Startup ideas now
completely integrated into Agile
– Minimum Viable Product
– Experiments
– Hypothesis testing 2011

7.Design thinking
● There are 2 types of problems: mysteries or
puzzles. Or wicked or tame problems.
Design thinking applies to the 1st type.
● Four stages: empathize, ideate, prototype
and learning launch.

What is design thinking?

Design Thinking Toolbox

8. #NoEstimates
• For schedule or cost predictability, there is no
information value in story points (or detailed bottom
up estimates)
– Just count stories completed per sprint (thruput), and use
burn-up chart to forecast schedule/cost completion
– Error range is more predictable, than the effort value
• Use statistical techniques to forecast date/cost
– Use historical data (stories done/time)
– P90/P10 = approx 4
• There may be learning value for team to go thru
bottom-up estimation exercise
Todd Little’s Open Space session, http://toddlittleweb.com/Estimation.html

Predicting Completion Date
P10=10% confidence
P90=90% confidence
Example
P10 = 6 months
P90 =12 months
P90/P10 = 2
toddlittleweb.com/Estimation.html

Estimate for Budget?
• For capital budgeting (Go/NoGo) decision,
use the same fidelity of “cost estimate” as
the fidelity of “value estimate”
• “#NoEstimates is a hashtag for the topic of
exploring alternatives to estimates [of time,
effort, cost] for making decisions in software
development. That is, ways to make
decisions with ‘No Estimates’.” - Woody Zuill
http://zuill.us/WoodyZuill/links-to-simple-noestimates-examples/

9.Roles not Personas
• Limiting the number of personas benefits the
product owner not the customer.
• Role cards work better with story-mapping as the
customer journey is role driven.
• Personas suffer confirmation bias. Data=Noise
• Use active voice while writing user stories e.g. As a
guest when I am checked in.

10: Architecture/ Architect Role
• What is architecture?
So, What Is Architecture?
Shared
design
under-
standing
Decisions
about
things that
are hard to
change
The
important
stuff.
Whatever
that is.
Architecture: Shared Design Understanding
Architecture is the understanding of a system’s design shared
by its expert practitioners
For software architecture, this includes only those components
and interfaces that are understood by all expert developers
• Irreversibility is a core driver of complexity
– Poorly architected software becomes more difficult to
change over time
– Architects find ways to make hard-to-change things
easier to change
– To help scale, architects should only worry about the
important stuff
Tom Nedwek’s session on Architects in an Agile World
Michael Vincent’s session on Emergent Architecture

Emergent Architecture
• Some architecture decisions will need to be made before
you write your first line of code
• “Don’t over design, but don’t under architect” - do one-day
architecture session, invite everyone who has something to
contribute
• No “Architecture Sprint” or “Sprint #0”

Architect Role – Spotify Guilds
• Secret sauce: architects are hands-on developers,
core part of the (dev) team, not a separate team
• Architect’s job
1. Serve the business, i.e. “economics over craftsmanship”
2. Help IT serve the business
3. Educate, inspire, teach others, i.e. create more
architects, “Teach your team to fish”
• Modes of architectural leadership: Observer, Scout,
Coach, Team-member
• “Stop moving information to those with authority,
start moving authority to those with information”

11.Visual Test Automation
● Not just pixel to pixel comparison as image
scaling resizes images resulting in false
positives.
● Applitools claims to be a better tool than
Imagemagik or Sikuli
● Applitools maintains version control of images.
Large binary image files can’t be checked into
Github or SVN

Branching and merging images

12. Scaling Agile – Update
• New scaling framework, Nexus, by Scrum.org
• SAFe most common, v4.0
• General consensus – pick & choose components
from each scaling framework and tailor for your own
organization
– Jeff Sutherland’s Scrum at Scale/Scrum of Scrum
– Craig Larman’s Large Scale Scrum (LeSS)
– Scott Ambler’s Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)
– Dean Leffingwell’s SAFe
– Spotify model
– Scrum.org’s Nexus

Scaling Agile w/ Nexus
• Nexus is a framework that drives to the heart of scaling: cross-team
dependencies and integration issues
• It is an exoskeleton that rests on top of multiple Scrum Teams

13. Interesting Soundbites - VJ
● Triads focus on building other’s relationship
● Accountability structures to value driven culture –
Carrie Kish
● If you can’t build a well structured monolith what
makes you think you can build well structured
microservices? – Mike Gehard
● If you have a culture of fear, none of the fancy
tools or practices can help you – J Kerievsky
● Xamarin TC can test on 90 devices having 17 OS
vers in 19 mins; Android fragmentation from 11k to
25 K in 2012-15 – Dan Waters

14. Interesting Soundbites - HE
• Zero tolerance - have no bug tracking system! Just
keep fixing bugs as they surface
• A-TDD works – use it
• TDD is like dual-entry accounting system – robust.
• “Stop moving information to those with authority,
start moving authority to those with information”
• Organization’s objective is to deliver most value to
customers NOT to extract most value for the
shareholders
• DevOps will be gone in 3yrs

Questions?
Please enter your
questions into the Chat
box of your GoToWebinar
session.

Synerzip
 Accelerate the delivery of your product roadmap
 Address technology skill gaps
 Save at least 50% with offshore software
development
 Augment your team with optional on-site
professionals
Your trusted outsourcing partner for
Agile software product development.

Synerzip Clients

Next Webinar
The 3Ds of Scaling: Do you need to do it?
Decision making and Dependencies
Coming in September
Webinar Presenter:
Kent McDonald, Author,
Beyond Requirements: Analysis
with an Agile Mindset
and
Stand Back and Deliver:
Accelerating Business Agility

Connect with Synerzip
@Synerzip
linkedin.com/company/synerzip
facebook.com/Synerzip
Hemant Elhence
hemant@synerzip.com
+1 469.374.0500
Vinayak Joglekar
vinayak@synerzip.com

www.synerzip.com

Synerzip-Agile2016-Top10 Webinar

More Related Content

What's hot (20)

Similar to Synerzip-Agile2016-Top10 Webinar (20)

Synerzip-Agile2016-Top10 Webinar