Patterns, Anti-patterns and the Next Wave of Enterprise ......1. Lumpy Scrum - many teams still...

© 2008-2009 Leffingwell, LLC.

Patterns, Anti-patterns and the Next Wave of Enterprise

Agile Adoption

By Dean Leffingwell May 2009


The Agile Methods Explosion

  XP   Industrial XP   Scrum   Dynamic System Development Methods   Feature Driven Development   Crystal methods   Test-driven Development   RUP & Agile UP   Open UP   DSDM   Lean   Kanban

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Has Largely Settled for Now

3 Source: Jeff Sutherland, Agilis 2008


Patterns

  Establish Agile Enterprise Transition Team   Comprehensive rollout of Scrum Training

–  Scrum for Teams 70-80-90% coverage –  ScrumMaster Training 20-30-40%

  Organization into agile teams – Start Sprinting   Little or no initial emphasis on technical practices

of agile development (no XP or TDD)   Little initial impact on PMO, Portfolio

Management, Governance Models   Substantial improvement, substantial progress   Impediments to further progress emerge…..

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Six Anti-patterns…

1.  Lumpy Scrum - many teams still struggle with basic agile project management practices

2.  Inadequate code quality – /necessity/proficiency/application of technical practices

3.  Weak product ownership– Insufficient depth/competency in this critical role

4.  Excessive entropy at scale – Harmonizing and coordinating development of large scale systems?

5.  Governance conflict – vs. governance models and agile team practices – “waterscrumming”

6.  Management Exclusion – “if you are the pigs, does that make your boss the chicken?”

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LUMPY SCRUM

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Lumpy Scrum

  Even basic Scrum is quite difficult for software teams (nobody said it would be easy….)

  Degree of agility varies from team to team, location to location, product line to product line, business unit to business unit

  Amount and timing of training   Employee turnover   Complacency with status quo after initial transition

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Which creates problems

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Per

cent

age

of te

ams

Not agile struggling agile very agile expert agile

System of system velocity is constrained by the lowest velocity teams


Lumpy Scrum Challenges

 Whole team?  Agile leadership?  Self organizing?  Effective time

boxing? Done?  Product ownership?  Story writing?  Acceptance testing?   Individual

performance?

 Complacency?  Corp impediments?  Test automation?  Technical practices?  Thrashing/too many

projects?  Tooling and

infrastructure?  Continuous

integration? 9


INADEQUATE CODE QUALITY

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Inadequate Code Quality

  Scrum is an effective software project management framework which focuses on the team

  XP is an effective software development method and small team management framework which focuses on the code

  DSDM is an effective software project management and software development framework which focuses on the team and on the code –  but not enough people appear to care

  Scrum Wins   Now, back to code quality…….

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Inadequate Code Quality

  At scale (and even not at scale) it is possible to implement scrum, increase feature delivery rate, and keep the injected defect rate % constant

– result: more defects per unit time! Uncool!   Scrums Inspect and Adapt is a slow way to

correct basic deficiencies such as poor coding practices –  Example – how long would it take to find “we need

meaningful method names” as root cause to lack of “doneness”’?

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XP Technical Practices

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Whole Team

Planning Game

Small Releases

Customer Tests

Collective Ownership

Coding Standards

Test-Driven Development

Refactoring

Simple Design Continuous

Integration

Metaphor

Sustainable Pace

Pair Programming


WEAK PRODUCT OWNERSHIP

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Weak Product Ownership

• The role of the product owner is well articulated in Scrum

• Critical new role realigns organizational behavior

• Many assume the role will be filled by product managers

•  Experience has shown that this does not always work

•  Many organizations and teams under-staff or under-evolve this role

•  The role is often immature, distributed amongst various team members and/or shared by leads who play too many roles • Net effect: poor agility.

Product Owner •  Assure team is pursuing a common vision •  Establish priorities to track business value •  Act as ‘the customer’ for developer

questions •  Work with product management to plan

releases •  Plan, elaborate and accept user stories

and iterations •  Technical: understand and prioritize

refactors and infrastructure


EXCESSIVE ENTROPY?

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Excessive Entropy?

  Independent scrums teams with independent objectives (see the “12 tribes of Israel” post)

  Differing sprint and release lengths. Maybe no release planning at all.

  Difficulty communicating strategic intent across teams – logistics and practicalities

  Teams coordinating (too many) interdependencies

  Basic information model (user stories) inadequate for challenge of scale

  Localized team tooling not supportive feature program, and portfolio level status

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Needed for enterprise agility

1.  A scalable organizational model to harness all the energy of the newly energized teams to a common strategic intent and product roadmap

2.  A lean and scalable requirements information model to reason about requirements at enterprise scale

3.  An agile, systematic process model to effect the intent

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Fordiscussion,seewww.scalingso2wareagility.wordpress.com

Inspiredbycollabora9onLeffingwell,LLC.&SymbianSo2wareLtd.

©2009 Leffingwell, LLC.


GOVERNANCE CONFLICTS

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Governance Conflicts - waterscrumming   As the teams become more agile, more corporate

impediments arise –  Fixed date, fixed scope programs –  Many many many projects and programs –  Milestones reflect waterfall governance –  Teams being “project and program managed” – not empowered –  Thrashing and milestone/task switching overhead

  Teams become discouraged, complacency sets in, revert to status quo

  And/or “Clash of the titans” - PMO vs. Agile Teams –  Teams: “our management just doesn’t get it” –  Managers: “our teams don’t’ understand that we are held

accountable for fixed external deliverables’

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DOES MANAGEMENT EXIST IN AGILE?

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Management in Agile?   Scrum - You are either a “chicken” or a “pig”

–  Pigs participate –  Chickens watch (who are the chickens?)

  Agile teams are self-managing and self-organizing –  What’s a manager to do?

  From Scrumbutt test: –  “There are no project managers (or anyone else) disrupting the

work of the team”. Who do they mean by ”anybody else”. You?

  Agile is often bottom up – or exec level top down –  But what about middle management?

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Role of Leadership in Lean Thinking

  The role of the leaders within the organization is the fundamental element of sustaining the progress of lean thinking.

  Experienced kaizen members at Toyota, for example, often bring up the concepts of Sensei (Lean master coach) because they feel that transferring culture can only happen when Sensei continuously coach and guide less experienced lean teams

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Womack and Jones, Lean Thinking. 1996,2003.


END

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