Agile is really growing up - I think that is one of the conclusions of what I have experienced the last two days.
Tuesday
Dave Thomas from Objectmentor gave a paper on Lean and Agile in the Large, where he told about his long time experience with large scale development - e.g. the Eclipse Project. To my pleasure I saw, that he actually found there was a set of distinct phases in (at least large scale) software development. Not phases like in a waterfall approach but still phases. He expressed it as: Build it 3 times. First time to understand it, second to get it right, and finally to produce it. This contrasts the more naive implementations of agile I've seen, where it appears that as long as we have a product backlog, we are ready to go, and can produce quality software in each iteration. This is the "Do it right first time" thinking that somehow slipped into some agile practices.
Mark Striebeck told about agile in Google, how challenging it can be to add process and standards, in a company that is completely bottom-up and has a dislike of process and structure. Clearly testing is an issue also at Google, and the Agile Grouplet and the Testing Grouplet (voluntary group of people that want to focus on a specific topic) has done a lot to motivate to better testing practices - for example the
"Testing on the toilet"initiative. Google seems to be a very special, and highly motivating place to work - much like Microsoft and Sun at their peak - the question is whether there will be a bill to pay one day for the lack of structure - or they will keep up and add just enough structure as they need it.
Wednesday had two interesting Experience reports:
Jay Packlick from Sabre Airline Solutions, told about an initiative to revive a tired XP-culture (we are now in a phase where XP teams can be a little old and run out of steam). To work with this problem they had created a Agile Maturity Roadmap, that they used to motivate and make teams more aware of potential for process improvement. It made a lot of sense and seemed to have been done in way that allowed teams to improve by themselves and not by a top-down approach. I belive this kind of model, can also be used by teams starting to adopt agile to guide their gradual improvement. The presentation can be found
here. Maybe it will be a serious competitor to CMMI ?
The next presentation was about CMMI and Scrum. Carsten Ruseng Jacobsen from Systematic, a Danish CMMI level 5 certified organization, had last year run a number of experiments with Lean Software Development, and had implemented Scrum and Early Automated Testing. Since CMMI level 5 requires a high number of measurements, they could provide data (audited naturally) that showed pretty Dramatic improvements in productivity. Overall they were able to reduce costs on projects with 50% with this initiative - and this was only to be considered the beginning or their lean journey.
Finally Mary Poppendieck spoke about Lean Leadership for a large crowd of people. It was a highly inspiring event, where Mary took the audience on a tour in History, from Frederick Winslow Taylors worker hostile approach to efficiency, over Charles Allen who introduced a programme for training on the job, that then was the foundation for the Training Within Industry programme that made US industry produce quality and high-volume during WW2, where a large amount of the workforce was abroad - to post World War Toyota. She showed how the concept of standard work is often misunderstood. At toyota Standardization is a means to change and improve, where other standardization programmes, seem to be focused on documentation and preventing change (e.g. ISO 9000). All in all a tour-de-force, that also provoked som agile dogmas about leadership and what kind of managers/leaders an organization really need to be successful. The Slides can be found
here.
By Bent Jensen