Agile Development

Agile has not only gone mainstream, it’s gone global. Data on agile team performance, time-to-market, and quality have emerged in the past decade. In 2012, a group of Columbus, Ohio, companies—business, IT, and financial services firms—participated in the first ever “Columbus Agile vs. the World” study. They collected velocity, schedule, effort, staffing, and quality data which were compared against QSM’s Software Lifecycle Management (SLIM) database. Analysis revealed delivery was 31 percent faster with 75 percent fewer defects than industry norms. Enter Munich, Germany.

Are you sure you are building the right product? Although agile methods help teams build products faster, many teams struggle to validate customer direction or product features. Some teams talk about “grooming the backlog” but still find their stories are not strong. If you’re struggling with bad backlogs or weak stories, this session is for you.

According to recent studies, CEOs want more open and collaborative organizational cultures in which employees are empowered, connected, and learning. However this remains out of reach for most. Cultural inertia—in the form of policies, procedures, and hierarchical reporting structures—is the most significant barrier to increased agile adoption. More than 50 percent of organizations are unsuccessful in embedding, growing, and sustaining real agility. Pete Behrens explains how identifying organizational values and classifying organizational cultures can guide leaders in becoming more agile.

About half of all agile projects either have team members who are dispersed or are part of large programs where the teams are remote from each other. That makes agile, with its real-time communications rituals, quite difficult. How do you build effective collaborative and autonomous feature teams when they are geographically separated and have different cultural beliefs? Johanna Rothman shares tips on building respect across time zones, how project charters can help create team norms, when to have—and not have—real-time rituals, and how to share data across time zones.

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a popular process for enterprise-wide agile adoption. It is a pre-built framework that describes the individual roles, teams, activities, and artifacts necessary to scale agile from team to enterprise level while providing a cadence for teams to follow. Jared Richardson, an agile coach at a large insurance company in the midst of a SAFe adoption, brings practical lessons from that work to this session.

IT and software engineering organizations are embracing agile methods to take advantage of the benefits of incremental and iterative delivery. While more software developers are living in an agile world, many businesses continue to live under the waterfall. Large corporations and the Federal Government are increasingly directing software developers to “be agile,” but their business practices related to marketing, procurement, project management, and systems definition are anything but. Jeff Dalton shares how agile resiliency can make the critical difference.

Many agile teams focus solely on velocity as their measure of progress. They draw burn-up charts to track it over time and make it the focus of much of their discussion during sprint planning and retrospectives. Is the strong focus on this metric truly in line with the principles of agile software development? Cheezy and Ardita Karaj lead a workshop to explore this question. Discover how focusing first on value, rather than velocity, changes the team approach to the work.

Financial services are not about high fives, flashy suits, and Maseratis. Behind the scenes, the technology that powers these companies walks a delicate line, balancing regulatory risk and the need for rapid technology response to continually changing market conditions. DevOps is the perfect fit, a natural for these organizations. Getting it right, however, is quite another story. Mike Baukes describes two recent experiences of wide-scale organizational change in establishing DevOps capabilities in a trading firm and a commercial banking operation.

One of the most exciting aspects of agile development is the emphasis on creating and delivering business value. But someone has to figure out what that value is—and that someone might be you. What is business value? It turns out that it is a complex concept that includes not only revenue but also risk mitigation, knowledge acquisition, alignment with long-term strategy, and more. It’s multidimensional! Chris Sims provides a hands-on experience using surprisingly simple techniques to create meaningful business value estimates.

The success of agile development methods has had a detrimental effect on product management. Agile methods’ intense focus on product development has ignored the business and marketing roles of product management. Product management activities extend beyond development to shepherding the product through the entire process—from idea to creation to delivery to customers. Furthermore, many product managers are overwhelmed—with too many responsibilities that require too many areas of expertise.

Adopting continuous delivery can yield a substantial competitive advantage. However, if we turn off our brains and just perform the process without thinking, we won’t realize all of its benefits. Continuous delivery creates challenges―What to automate and how to deliver safely without risking breaks across teams, operations, and customers? How fast can we deliver versus how fast should we deliver? Joel Tosi describes how to investigate your current delivery process by asking: Are we doing the right thing? How do we know?