At IBM Rational we define disciplined agile delivery as: Disciplined agile delivery is an evolutionary (iterative and incremental) approach which regularly produces high quality solutions in a cost effective and timely manner via a risk and value driven life cycle. It is performed in a highly collaborative, disciplined, and self-organizing manner within an appropriate governance framework, with active stakeholder participation to ensure that the team understands and addresses the changing needs of its stakeholders to maximize business value provided. Disciplined agile delivery teams provide repeatable results by adopting just the right amount of ceremony for the situation which they face. Let’s explore the key points in this definition: - Full delivery life cycle. Disciplined agile delivery processes have life cycles which are serial in the large and iterative in the small. Minimally they have a release rhythm which recognizes the need for start up/inception activities, construction activities, and deployment/transition activities. Better yet, they include explicit phases as well. It is very important to note that these are not the traditional waterfall phases – requirements, analysis, design, and so on – but instead different “seasons” of a project. The point is that we need to look beyond agile software development and consider the full complexities of solution delivery. Adopting a full delivery life cycle, not just a construction life cycle, is arguably the “zeroth” agile scaling factor.
- Evolutionary. Agile strategies are both iterative and incremental in nature. Iterative means that you are working in a non-serial manner, on any given day you may do some requirements analysis, some testing, some programming, some design, some more testing, and so on. Incremental means that you add new functionality and working code to the most recent build, until such time as the stakeholder determines there is enough value to release the product.
- Regularly produces high quality solutions. Agilists are said to be quality focused. They prefer to test often and early, and the more disciplined ones even take a test-first approach where they will write a single test and the just enough production code to fulfill that test (then they iterate). Many agile developers have adopted the practice of refactoring, which is a technique where you make simple changes to your code or schema which improves its quality without changing its semantics. Adoption of these sorts of quality techniques seems to work – it appears that agile teams are more likely to deliver high quality systems than traditional teams (according to the DDJ 2008 Project Success survey). Within IBM we take it one step further and focus on consumability, which encompasses quality and other features such as ease of deployment and system performance. Furthermore, although some agile methods promote the concept of producing “potentially shippable software” on a regular basis, disciplined agile delivery teams produce solutions: a portion of which may be software, a portion of which may be hardware, and a portion of which will be the manner in which the system is used.
- Cost effective and timely manner. Agile teams prefer to implement functionality in priority order [http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/prioritizedRequirements.htm], with the priority being defined by their stakeholders (or a representative thereof). Working in priority order enables agile teams to maximize the return on investment (ROI) because they are working on the high-value functionality as defined by their stakeholders, thereby increasing cost effectiveness. Agile teams also prefer to produce potentially shippable solutions each iteration (an iteration is a time-box, typically 2-4 weeks in length), enabling their stakeholders to determine when they wish to have a release delivered to them and thereby improving timeliness. Short iterations reduce the feedback cycle, improving the chance that agile teams will discover problems early (they “fail fast”) and thereby enable them to address the problems when they’re still reasonably inexpensive to do so. The DDJ 2008 Project Success survey found that agile teams are in fact more likely to deliver good ROI than traditional teams and more likely to deliver in a timely manner.
- Value driven life cycle. One result of building a potentially shippable solution every iteration is that agile teams produce concrete value in a consistent and visible manner throughout the life cycle.
- Risk and value driven life cycle. Core agile processes are very clear about the need to produce visible value in the form of working software on a regular basis throughout the life cycle. Disciplined agile delivery processes take it one step further and actively mitigate risk early in the life cycle – during project start up you should come to stakeholder concurrence regarding the project’s scope, thereby reducing significant business risk, and prove the architecture by building a working skeleton of your system, thereby significantly reducing technical risk. They also help with transition to agile, allowing traditional funding models to use these milestones before moving to the finer grained iteration based funding that agile allows.
- Highly collaborative. People build systems, and the primary determinant of success on a development project is the individuals and the way that they work together. Agile teams strive to work closely together and effectively as possible. This is a characteristic that applies to both engineers on the team, as well as their leadership.
- Disciplined. Agile software development requires greater discipline on the part of practitioners that what is typically required by traditional approaches.
- Self organizing. This means that the people who do the work also plan and estimate the work.
- Self-organization within an appropriate governance framework. Self-organization leads to more realistic plans and estimates which are more acceptable to the people implementing them. At the same time these self-organizing teams must work within an appropriate governance framework which reflects the needs of their overall organizational environment. An “appropriate governance framework” explicitly enables disciplined agile delivery teams to effectively leverage a common infrastructure, to follow organizational conventions, and to work towards organizational goals. The point is that project teams, regardless of the delivery paradigm they are following, need to work within the governance framework of their organization. More importantly, effective governance programs should make it desirable to do so. Our experience is that traditional, command-and-control approaches to governance where senior management explicitly tells teams what to do and how to do it don’t work very well with agile delivery teams. We’ve also found that lean development governance, an approach which is based on collaboration and enablement, is far more effective in practice. Good governance increases the chance that agile delivery teams will build systems which fit into your overall organizational environment, instead of yet another stand-alone system which increases your overall maintenance burden and data quality problems.
- Active stakeholder participation. Agile teams work closely with their stakeholders, who include end users, managers of end users, the people paying for the project, enterprise architects, support staff, operations stuff, and many more. Within IBM we distinguish between four categories of stakeholder: principles/sponsors, partners (business partners and others), end users, and insiders These stakeholders, or their representatives (product owners in Scrum, or on-site customers in Extreme Programming, or a resident stakeholder in scaling situations), are expected to provide information and make decisions in a timely manner.
- Changing needs of stakeholders. As a project progresses your stakeholders will gain a better understanding of what they want, particularly if you’re showing them working software on a regular basis, and will change their “requirements” as a result. Changes in the business environment, or changes in organization priority, will also motivate changes to the requirements. There is a clear need for agile requirements change management [http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/changeManagement.htm] on modern IT projects.
- Repeatable results. Stakeholders are rarely interested in how you delivered a solution but instead in what you delivered. In particular, they are often interested in having a solution which meets their actual needs, in spending their money wisely, in a high-quality solution, and in something which is delivered in a timely manner. In other words, they’re interested in repeatable results, not repeatable processes.
- Right amount of ceremony for the situation. Agile approaches minimize ceremony in favor of delivering concrete value in the form of working software, but that doesn’t mean they do away with ceremony completely. Agile teams will still hold reviews, when it makes sense to do so. DDJ’s 2008 Modeling and Documentation Survey found that agile teams will still produce deliverable documentation, such as operations manuals and user manuals, and furthermore are just as likely to do so as traditional teams. The DDJ September 2009 State of the IT Union survey found that the quality of the documentation delivered by agile teams was just as good as that delivered by traditional teams, although iterative teams (e.g. RUP teams) did better than both agile and traditional.
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There is a fair bit of rhetoric surrounding agile methods, some of which we subscribe to and some of which we don’t. We’d like to briefly examine the rhetoric which we’ve found to be the most misleading for people trying to be effective at adopting agile techniques. The following list is in the format X but Y, where X is the rhetoric and Y is the strategy promoted by the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework. This includes: - Requirements evolve throughout the lifecycle BUT the scope should still be agreed to at the beginning of the project. There has to be an initial vision for a project, a vision which your stakeholders should help define and then agree to, and to come to that vision you will need to perform some initial requirements envisioning. A list of high level features is part of this initial vision. Yes, the details are very likely to evolve over time but the fundamental goals of your project and scope of your effort needs to be defined early in your project. In a very small minority of situations you may not be able to get the right people together, either physically or virtually, to define the initial vision – this should be seen as a significant project risk.
- Simple designs are best BUT the architecture should be thought out early in the lifecycle. Too many developers interpret the advice to focus on simple designs to mean that they should build everything from scratch. Yet more often than not the simplest design is to take advantage of what is already there, and the best way to do that is to work closely with people who understand your existing technical infrastructure. Investing in a little bit of architectural envisioning early in the lifecycle enables your team to identify existing enterprise assets that you can leverage, to identify your architectural options, and to select what appears to be the best option available to you. The details will still emerge over time, and some decisions will be deferred until a later date when it’s more appropriate to make them, but the bottom line is that disciplined agilists think before they act.
- Teams should be self organizing BUT they are still constrained (and enhanced) by your organizational ecosystem. Intellectual workers, including IT professionals, are most effective when they have a say in what work they do and how they do it. IT professionals can improve their productivity by following common conventions, leveraging and building out a common “dev-ops” infrastructure, building towards a common vision, and by working to common business and technical visions. In short, disciplined agile professionals are "enterprise aware".
- Delivery teams don’t need prescriptive process definitions BUT they do need some high-level guidance to help organize their work. Individual IT professionals are typically highly-skilled and highly-educated people often with years of experience, and teams of such people clearly have a wide range of knowledge. As a result of this knowledge it is incredibly rare for such people to read detailed procedures for how to do their work. However, they often still require some high-level advice to help them to organize their work effectively. Teams can often benefit from techniques and patterns used by other teams and this knowledge sharing should be encouraged.
- IT professionals know what to do BUT they’re still not process experts. A decade ago the strategy was to provide detailed process advice to teams, but recently the pendulum has swung the other way to provide little or no defined process at all. Over the last few years there’s been a trend within the agile community to advise teams to define their own process so that it’s tailored to their own unique situation. While this clearly strokes people’s egos, it’s relatively poor advice for several reasons. First, although every team is in a unique situation there is significant commonality so having at least a high-level process framework from which to start makes sense. Second, although these teams have a wide range of knowledge it might not be complete, nor consistent, nor is it clear what the trade-offs are of combining all the really good techniques that people know about. There is significant benefit in having a flexible process framework such as DAD which shows how everything fits together.
- IT professionals should validate their own work to the best of their ability BUT they likely aren’t testing experts so therefore need help picking up the appropriate skills. The mantra in the agile community is to test often and test early, and better yet to test first. As a result agile teams have adopted a “whole team” approach where the development team does its own testing. This works when there are people on the team with sufficient testing skills and more importantly can transfer those skills to others. Minimally you will need to embed testers into your delivery teams, but you should also consider explicit training and mentoring of everyone on the team in testing and quality skills. You may find my agile testing and quality strategies article to be an interesting read.
- Disciplined agile teams work in an iterative manner BUT still follow a lifecycle which is serial over time. On any given day people on a DAD project team may be performing analysis, testing, design, programming, deployment, or a myriad of other activities and iterating back and forth between them. But, the DAD lifecycle includes three distinct phases which are performed in order. So, DAD is both iterative in the small but serial in the large.
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In previous blog postings I've defined Discipline Agile Delivery (DAD) but I haven't shared the lifecycle (although I have done so in a couple of white papers, most recently Scaling Agile: An Executive Guide) in this blog. Until now. The DAD method combines strategies and practices from several software methods, including Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), Agile Modeling, Agile Data, and the Open Unified Process (OpenUP). One aspect of this "process idea reuse" is that the DAD extends the Scrum lifecycle to be a full-fledged delivery lifecycle. Figure 1 overviews the Scrum lifecycle, which addresses the construction aspects of agile delivery quite well. It depicts the product backlog which is a basic prioritized requirements stack; the concept of delivering incrementally in consistent time boxes (what Scrum calls sprints and other methods such as DAD call iterations); holding a daily coordination meeting; and demoing your work at the end of the sprint/iteration/timebox to get feedback from key stakeholders. These are all great ideas, which is why the DAD method adopts and enhances them. Figure 1: The Scrum lifecycle. The focus is on the construction part of the lifecycle (click on the diagram for details).  Several years ago I wrote about the Agile lifecycle and the need to extend it beyond construction, and this thinking is reflected in the DAD lifecycle of Figure 2. The DAD lifecycle extends the Scrum lifecycle in several important ways: - It includes explicit phases. Sacrilege! Rhetoric aside, there are in fact serial aspects to agile software development. Project teams go through an initiation effort - called "warm up" in Eclipse Way, Inception in Unified Process, Sprint 0 in Scrum, and Iteration 0 in other methods - at the beginning of a project. Eventually the team will go through a release phase - called the "end game" in Eclipse Way
- It includes project initiation. During the Inception phase you perform basic project initiation activities such as requirements envisioning, architecture envisioning, initial release planning, getting funding for the project, and starting to build the team (among other tasks). In the summer of 2009 I ran the 2009 Agile Project Initiation survey which revealed that the average agile team spent 4 week on initiation activities such as this, that 89% did some sort of up-front requirements work, and that 85% did some sort of up-front architecture work.
- It includes release activities. The DAD lifecycle also includes a Transition phase where you release your solution into production or the marketplace. These activities typically include final testing and hardening of your solution, training end users, pilot/beta testing, finalizing documentation, running the solution in parallel with the system(s) being replaced, and so on.
- It explicitly indicates production activities. Many agile delivery teams are responsible for supporting the existing version(s) of their system which are currently running in production. Because there are existing versions, the team will be getting enhancement requests and defect reports from their operations and support people. Many of these requests can simply be treated as new requirements to be prioritized and put on the work item stack. Some need to be addressed right away, particularly "severity 1" defects, which requires the delivery team to "stop the line", address the problem, release a patch or hot fix, then reintegrate the changes into the version they're currently working on. My experience is that it's critical to include a production phase in your delivery lifecycle to make it explicit to the team that they need to take operations and support concerns into account.
- It explicitly enhances the product backlog. The product backlog has evolved into a work item list (or work item stack if you prefer). Disciplined agile teams put more than just requirements on the stack, as you read above it is common to treat defect reports as you do requirements.
- It explicitly includes critical milestone points. An important aspect of the DAD method is that not only does it support self organization such as Scrum but it does so within an appropriate governance framework. Disciplined agile teams recognize that they exist within a larger organization, that they should follow common development guidelines, that they should strive to leverage and build out the shared enterprise infrastructure, that they must report common metrics to senior management (hopefully automatically via the use of instrumented tooling such as we see on the Jazz platform).
One of the advantages of the DAD method over Scrum is that it doesn't require you to figure these common things out for yourself. Figure 2. The Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) lifecycle (basic). The focus is on the delivery portion of the system lifecycle, from starting a project to releasing the solution into production (click on the diagram for details). Figure 3 depicts the advanced form of the DAD lifecycle. This form of the lifecycle occurs on experienced teams that have originally adopted the basic, Scrum-based lifecycle of Figure 2 and evolved it over time to be leaner. One of the implications of continuous improvement and continuous learning, key recommendations of the DAD process framework, is that your lifecycle will evolve. Primary changes that you see between Figure 2 and Figure 3 are the adoption of a work item pool instead of a work item stack and the abandonment of iterations (the critical observation is that practices such as detailed planning, demos, retrospectives and so on do not need to be on the same cadence, hence iterations disappear). Figure 3. The Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) lifecycle (advanced). Over time you will improve your strategy towards a leaner approach (click on the diagram for details).
 One of the differences that you may have noticed between the Scrum lifecycle of Figure 1 and the DAD lifecycle of Figure 2 is different terminology is used. For example, iteration is used instead of sprint. Work item list is used instead of product backlog. Although I believe that the terminology used in Figure 2 is more accurate, it really doesn't matter because it's easy to use Scrum terminology with DAD if you like. You can see this clearly in Figure 4. What is important is that you choose the terminology which you are most comfortable with, and be prepared to translate back and forth between terms as there are no standards and there never will be. As an aside, you might find Translating Scrum Terminology to be of interest. 
DAD is still a process framework that you'll need to tailor to meet your unique needs. More on this in future blog postings.
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I just wanted to share with you the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship which extends the Agile Manifesto. The Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship states:As aspiring Software Craftsmen we are raising the bar of professional software development by practicing it and helping others learn the craft. Through this work we have come to value: - Not only working software, but also well-crafted software
- Not only responding to change, but also steadily adding value
- Not only individuals and interactions, but also a community of professionals
- Not only customer collaboration, but also productive partnerships
That is, in pursuit of the items on the left we have found the items on the right to be indispensable. I view this manifesto as an important step in the maturation of software development. More on this in a future blog posting.[ Read More]
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