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What have we learned from the last 10 years? What can we expect over the next 10 years?

10-Year Retrospective of Agile

#BCSagile

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Craig Cockburn

•  Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society •  B.Sc. Hons, Computer Science Edinburgh University •  M.Sc. (Medal, Distinction) Large Software Systems Development, Edinburgh

Napier University •  Freelance Agile Consultant, Project and Programme Manager, Agile Facilitator

and ScrumMaster •  Qualified and experienced in both Scrum and DSDM, including DWP £2Bn

Agile programme •  Member of BCS Agile Specialist Group Committee •  No relation to Alistair Cockburn of the Agile Manifesto (however in both cases it

is pronounced 'Coburn')

Full contact details, biography, papers, awards: http://www.CraigCockburn.com [LinkedIn]

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Brief History of BCS

•  1957 - Formed from the London Computer Group •  1966 - Obtains charitable status •  1984 - Granted a Royal Charter •  2004 - Creation of Chartered IT Professional •  2009 - Rebrand as Chartered Institute for IT

BCS Today •  70,000+ members worldwide •  Over 100 regional, international and Special Interest Groups •  BCS Certifications (previously known as ISEB) •  BCS Policy Hub •  BCS SFIA+ (Skills Framework for the Information Age)

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BCS Mission

Enable the information society. Promote wider social and economic progress through the advancement of information technology science and practice.

•  Bring together industry, academics, practitioners and government to share knowledge

•  Promote new thinking •  Influence the development of computing education •  Shape public policy and inform the public.

Further Information: http://www.bcs.org/category/11280

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BCS & the Public Sector

Strategic Objective: Informing public policy on how IT can contribute to society

•  Contribute to government policy consultations •  Conduct research on IT-related topics •  Publish guidance on topics with wide public interest

Further Information: www.bcs.org/category/11281

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BCS Agile Methods Specialist Group

Formed 24 January 2012

Focuses on the implementation and promotion of Agile methods covering all the disciplines in the lifecycle of a project.

The Agile Methods SG is method-agnostic and promotes the values and principles captured in the Agile Manifesto.

17 members in the committee with over 100 years combined Agile experience

Further Information: http://agile.bcs.org

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Strengths & Weaknesses of the Past Opportunities & Threats in the Future

10 Years of Agile

#BCSagile

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10 Years, 10 areas to analyse

AREAS 1.  Agile Manifesto & Principles

2.  Agile Frameworks

3.  Agile Implementation

4.  Enterprise Agile

5.  Business / Corporate Agile

6.  Agile and People

7.  Agile in the Public Sector

8.  Agile in Regulated Environments

9.  Agile Tooling

10.  Agile & the BCS

Further Information: http://bit.ly/BCSAgileRetroPhotos

RETROSPECTIVE PARTICIPANTS •  100 attendees

•  >500 years of Agile expertise available

AGILE METHODS EXPERTISE •  94% Scrum

•  69% XP

•  55% Kanban / Lean

•  50% DSDM / Agile PM

•  45% Behaviour Driven Development (BDD)

•  12% Feature Driven Development (FDD) & Lean StartUp

ROLES PRESENT Senior Managers, Transformation Consultants, Coaches, ScrumMasters, Project Managers, Developers, Testers, Business Analysts, etc.

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The Agile Manifesto

VALUES

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

Over != No

Further Information: www.agilemanifesto.org

PRINCIPLES

1.  Satisfy the customer through valuable delivery

2.  Welcome changing requirements

3.  Deliver working software frequently

4.  Business people and developers must work together daily

5.  Build projects around motivated individuals

6.  Face-to-face communications

7.  Working software is the primary measure of progress

8.  Promote sustainable pace

9.  Technical excellence and good design

10. Simplicity is essential

11.  Self-organizing teams

12.  Inspect and Adapt

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Agile Manifesto & Principles Does this still reflect the agile community? Should it be changed?

•  Provides simple and strong messages around values and principles

•  Recognises the value of teams and humanity

•  Re-focused minds into better ways of working

•  Acknowledge the need for an empirical process in complex IT enviroments

•  Applying the Agile mindset to organisations

•  Emergence of Organisational Agility

•  Focus on the principles in the manifesto

•  Overlap with the principles in Lean

•  Unchanged for 10+ years. Risk of failing to Inspect and Adapt

•  Simplicity leads people to believe they are Agile when they are not

•  Software-centric hindering its adoption in the business domain

•  Method-wars making us forget about the spirit of the Manifesto

•  Mainstream adoption creating rigid practices

•  Losing focus on the principles, mindset & ways of working

•  Commercialisation of Agile into a silver bullet solution

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Agile Frameworks Is there any one ‘single answer’? Do the frameworks integrate?

•  Adherence to the Agile Manifesto principles

•  Very simple popular frameworks such as Scrum

•  Large robust frameworks such as DSDM

•  Flexibilty to deploy scalable hybrid solutions (eg. AgilePM + Scrum + XP)

•  Framework maturity and evolution

•  Emergence of scalable Hybrid Corporate Agile Solutions

•  Agile penetrating the Programme and Project Management layers

•  Partial adoption of the frameworks

•  Each framework using different terms for the same practice

•  Emergence of rigid use of the frameworks

•  Use of "Ghetto-language" may be a barrier to business buy-in - e.g. pigs and chickens

•  Frameworks sold as a silver bullet solution

•  Scrumdamentalism - Near-religious rigid thinking and implementation of frameworks

•  Client / Supplied interactions still not fully addressed

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Agile Implementations Have the implementations within organisations been agile or ‘fragile’?

•  Large body of successfully implemented projects

•  Incremental delivery of working products

•  Permission to fail (fast) and learn for mistakes

•  The Agile Journey. Actively coached small steps towards the right mindset.

•  Pragmatic Agile with solid foundations moving Agile outside of the software space

•  Emergence of robust and reputable Agile training and qualifications

•  Successful delivery will increase trust

•  Poor training leading to expectation of immediate results

•  Mainstream adoption is "Fragile". Large projects failing

•  Agile Delivery in Waterfall Organisations (Water-Scrum-Fall) producing cultural and language clashes

•  Lack of understanding of the values and principles of Agile

•  Lack of training and certifications. Anyone can claim to be Agile

•  Rigid implementations of Agile (eg. No PMO in Scrum)

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Enterprise Agile Have we seen implementations across portfolio, programme and project management?

•  Changing Organisational mindset

•  Managers becoming leaders of people

•  Delivering quality at the core of the enterprise

•  Quick delivery, less waste and frequent reviews

•  Agile HR - Enterprises rewarding teams and successful delivery

•  Whole company adoption of Agile (e.g. Yahoo!) - Use of Agile at all levels

•  Introducing Enterprise Agility Audits / Assessments

•  Resistance to change at management levels

•  Information silos - Openness and transparency seen as a weakness

•  Multi-site implementations make collaboration difficult

•  Company policies and mindset reward Agile anti-patterns

•  Are the Agile Experts really Agile?

•  Lack of objective measures to claims of Agility

•  Agile is a threat to existing processes, roles and mindsets (vested interests will resist change)

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Business / Corporate Agile Has Agile penetrated the non-IT space? Is it likely to?

•  Lean (since 1940s)

•  Quick way for business to establish competence of IT developers

•  A framework that could be adopted to bring collaboration to business problems

•  Talk about it in "pace setter" words

•  "IT Bods" should also focus on the business change aspects of their agile developments

•  Agile will penetrate the non-IT space in the future

•  Can a business measure value rather than cost?

•  Speed of delivery may not allow business change aspects to keep up - Training & org structure

•  Now aware of this happening

•  Agile is an "IT thing"

•  Agile has been marketed as an "IT thing"

•  Agile is designed for Software development and not for the business

•  Needs a framework. Needs examples

•  Annual budget cycles encourages short-termism

•  Agile should be introduced more to the business

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Agile & People Is enough emphasis placed on the human aspects of Agile?

•  Agile ties into human motivation factors (skills, autonomy, recognition, etc)

•  Agile has already demonstrated its own benefit

•  Proud capable professionals can become better every day

•  The journey is as important as the destination

•  Create Leaders not Managers

•  Change the conversations: People are the core assets of any business

•  Organisational Agile can realign HR departments to reward teams

•  Skilled & motivated people bring significant business benefit

•  More focus on the methods than on people

•  Emerging elitism and zealots amongst Agile teams

•  Agile people seeing non-Agile colleagues as "the enemy”

•  Fear of change

•  Management hostility to collective responsibility and decisions

•  Differences in team skills, culture and location

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Agile in the Public Sector Has Agile in the Public Sector happened previously? Will it succed?

•  Agile becoming mainstream across government http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/content/government-ict-strategy-strategic-implementation-plan

•  Agile techniques to be used in 50% of major ICT-enabled programmes by April 2013

•  It is now Government Policy that all application development projects must be split up into 4 month chunks of work (Liam Maxwell, Deputy government CIO)

•  Great opportunity for Agile to really prove itself in a more regulated setting

•  Huge opportunity for Agile to scale to projects much larger than previously (e.g. £2Bn Universal Credit programme)

•  APM Group promoting AgilePM certification

•  DSDM not widely seen as the closest Agile equivalent to PRINCE2

•  Much less experience with Agile than PRINCE2, may take a while to embed cultural change

•  Fewer in-house experts

•  No clear audit strategy or gate equivalent

•  Not clear where Agile fits in with MSP

•  Procurement and legal processes

•  Adverse press comments

•  May be seen as risky or lightweight

•  Change programme needed and training as part of any initial rollout - may take a while before people become fully effective

•  3rd parties may be physically remote,

•  Security issues around some collaboration tools and technology issues for cloud tools (IE6)

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Agile in Regulated Environments Agile & fixed price contracts. Agile where things must be legally implemented

•  Agile embraces change and helps cope when regulations change

•  FDA guidelines explicitly allow iterative/incremental life cycles

•  Success in medical software and local government

•  Some charities using Agile internally

•  Introduce "Fixed Monthly Rate" contracts that share interests, risks, costs and benefits between partner organisations

•  Publish "Agile Adoption Patterns" guide organisations to adopt Agile

•  Work with Regulatory Authorities to meet regulations while working in Agile

•  Regulatory environments perceived not to offer flexibility in scope

•  Agile needs significant investment of time from the business

•  Current Regulation requires documented waterfall step

•  Auditing of Agile is not well defined

•  Poorly implemented Agile could create a bad reputation

•  Existing providers make money from change control & resist robust Agile

•  Legal teams need time to do a detailed analysis threat

•  Current ways of working have rigid processes in place

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Agile Tooling Do we have a good portfolio of Agile planning & delivery tools?

•  Low-Tech for new teams

•  Great tools for mature teams

•  Tools demonstrate control and instill pride

•  Evolving tools to mimic the visibility and customisation of low-tech alternatives

•  Tablet-based applications for mobile teams

•  Tools that fully scale to corporate environments with many products and teams

•  Formal high level management reporting

•  Teams start using tools before they are comfortable using Agile

•  Companies can be fixated on the tool and not on what Agile means

•  Most tools do not scale well

•  Tools can become information black holes

•  Tool vendors creating the need for tools

•  Tools linked to specific methods and not supporting hybrid models

•  Lack of a scalable tool may block agile adoption in very big companies

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Agile and BCS Has BCS done any work on Agile before? What should we do next?

•  BCS Software Practice Advancement group (Development), SIGIST (Testing) and PROMS-G (Project) SGs already shown interest in Agile

•  BCS Agile Methods SG focuses on method neutral Agile values and principles

•  BCS has strong reputation and connections as a professional body

•  Leading Agile professionals already members of BCS

•  Provide a method-neutral expert voice in the Agile market

•  Establish BCS (Generic) Agile Certifications and Agile Implementation Audits

•  BCS backing can help influence non-IT functions (e.g. HR, Finance)

•  Draw on wide experience and be a single point of reference for government

•  BCS lags behind other Agile groups

•  No specific focus on Agile until now

•  No BCS Certification (ISEB) on Agile

•  Agile will become institutionalised and lose its power to challenge and adapt

•  Become too focused on specific methods or products (sales pitches not practice)

•  Agile falls out of favour

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Actions from the Retrospective

COMPLETED STORIES •  Upload the raw retrospective materials online •  Present the main retrospective findings back to the Agile community

WORK IN PROGRESS •  Publish article(s) based on the retrospective findings •  Organise event on "Scaling Scrum" (event with Craig Larman on 22 May)

BACKLOG STORIES •  Other follow-up events on specific retrospective areas •  Establish partnerships with reputable training partners •  Introduce BCS Agile Certifications

OUR COMMUNITY. ADD YOUR STORIES!

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Keep in Touch

CRAIG COCKBURN

Web www.craigcockburn.com

Email craig@siliconglen.com

Twitter @siliconglen

BCS AGILE METHODS SG

Web agile.bcs.org

Email agile.sg@bcs.org

Twitter @BCS_Agile

LinkedIn BCS Agile Methods SG

NEXT EVENTS

Software Craftmanship (sold out) 23 April 2012, London

Large-Scale Scrum with Craig Larman 22 May 2012, London

Next Generation Testing Conference 23 May 2012, London

Complexity, Governance and the Agile Team 7 June 2012, London

Kanban the hard way with Mike Burrows 13 June 2012, Manchester