Agility@Scale: Strategies for Scaling Agile Software Development
Strategies for Distributed Agile Teams Part 1
A common misunderstanding about agile software development is that it’s only for co-located teams. Things are definitely easier for co-located teams, and as I found with both the Dr. Dobb’s 2007 and 2008 Agile Adoption surveys (www.ambysoft.com/surveys/) co-located agile teams appear to have a higher success rate than distributed teams, Having said that, many organizations are in fact succeeding at distributed agile development.
Modified by ScottAmbler
I’d like to share some strategies that I’m seeing work in practice, and in this blog posting summarizes generic strategies for distributed teams whether or not they’re agile. These strategies are:1. Do some up front planning. Distributed development is higher risk than co-located development, and one way to address that risk is to think things through. That doesn’t mean that you need to create a monolithic, 1000+ task Gantt chart, but it does mean that you should identify your major dependencies and milestone dates. Effective teams do this planning with the distributed developers actively involved (they are part of the team after all), they strive to consider all associated costs, and in particular they don’t overlook the low probability/high impact risks which often prove to be project killers. 2. Organize the team effectively. Once of the practices of Lean Development Governance (https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/preLogin.do?lang=en_US&source=swg-ldg) is to organize your team structure around either your architecture or the lines of business (LOB) supported by the programme that you’re working on. Ideally each sub-team should be responsible for one or more subsystems or modules, something that can be difficult if some of your team works alone from home, to reduce the amount of information sharing and collaboration required between disparate teams. In other words, maximize the responsibilities of the “offshore” team(s) as much as possible. A very common mistake is to organize the subteams around job specialties – for example the architects are in Toronto, the developers in Mumbai, and the testers in Singapore – because to support this team structure you have to create a phenomenal amount of documentation to support communication between the teams. 3. Do some up front modeling. The implication of organizing your team around the architecture (or LOB) is that you also need to do a bit of architecture envisioning up front. Your architecture efforts should provide guidance regarding the shared infrastructure as well as critical development conventions such as coding guidelines and data naming conventions. Architecture envisioning is also a good idea for co-located agile teams too. See http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/initialArchitectureModeling.htm for strategies to get the benefits of architecture modeling without the costs of needless documentation. 4. Recognize that communication is critical. GDD puts many barriers to communication in place, increasing overall project risk. To overcome these risks you will first need to be aware of them and act accordingly, and second, you’ll need to write more documentation than you would likely prefer. The risks associated with long-distance communication include cultural differences, time-zone differences, and the challenges with written documentation (which is the least effective way to communicate information). I make it a habit of asking open-ended questions so that I can determine whether or not the other people understand the topic under conversation. Particularly I will never ask a yes/no style of question because the simple answer of yes can mean a range of things depending on the culture. It may mean “Yes, I heard you”, “Yes, I understand what you’re saying”, or “Yes, I understand and agree with you”. When you’re dealing with people at other locations it’s good practice to ask them to summarize the conversation in writing, in particular to identify key action items and ownership of them, to ensure that everyone agrees with what was discussed. A good approach is to have the team lead on other end to do the summary so that they own it going forward. 5. Put a good technical infrastructure in place. Automate, automate, automate. In a GDD environment you need to work with collaborative multi-site tools such as ClearCase, ClearQuest, and Jazz Rational Team Concert (www.jazz.net) which enable you to share and evolve your work products (i.e. test scripts, code, documents) effectively. In my next posting I'll describe a collection of agile-specific strategies for distributed software development teams.[Read More] |
Large Agile Teams
ScottAmbler
Tags: 
discipilnedagiledelivery
product-management
safe
testing
agility-at-scale
scaled-agile
agile
agileexec
agile-exec
architecture
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I recently wrote a detailed article about Large Agile Teams that was a detailed walkthrough of how to structure agile teams of various sizes. I suspect that this is the most comprehensive online discussion of this topic. The article addressed the following topics:
I welcome any feedback that you may have about Large Agile Teams. |
How to Scale Agile Software DevelopmentThe following diagram summarizes a safe and proven strategy for scaling agile delivery strategies at the team level. There are three features of this strategy:
To scale agile successfully you must be able to tailor your approach to reflect the context that you face. To do this you must understand what your process and organizational structure options are and what tradeoffs each of those options has. Unless you’re a process expert, this can be challenging. This is where DAD’s process goal strategy comes in. Instead of prescribing a single way to do things, as we see in methods such as Scrum and SAFe, DAD instead captures your options in terms of process goals and guides you through making the decisions that best address the situation that you find yourself in. An example of a process goal diagram, in this case for the Inception phase goal Explore Initial Scope, is shown below. The critical thing is that with a goal-driven approach it becomes much easier to understand how to scale agile. Depending on the context of the situation that a team finds itself in you will address each goal differently. The strategy for a small, co-located team facing a fairly straightforward situation in a non-regulatory environment works well for that team, the same strategy prescribed to a team in a different situation would put that team at risk of failure. Instead of prescribing a single way of working that is optimized for a specific situation we need to instead allow, and better yet enable, teams to adopt strategies that reflect the context of the situation that they face. We’ve found that four of the twenty-two process goals seem to take about 80% of the tailoring impact. These goals are:
For a more detailed discussion of how these four process goals are the key to scaling your agile software delivery process, please refer to the whitepaper Scaling Agile Software Development: Disciplined Agile Delivery at Scale.
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Measuring Benefits of Software Development: Traditional vs. Agile
ScottAmbler
Tags: 
agile
project-management
continuous-delivery
devops
measures
metrics
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I was recently involved in an online discussion about how to calculate the benefits realized by software development teams. As with most online discussions it quickly devolved into camps and the conversation didn’t progress much after that. In this case there was what I would characterize as a traditional project camp and a much smaller agile/lean product camp. Although each camp had interesting points, the important thing for me in the conversation was the wide cultural and experience gap between the people involved in the conversation. The following diagram summarizes the main viewpoints and the differences between them. The traditional project camp promoted a strategy where the potential return on investment (ROI) for a project would be calculated, a decision would be made to finance the project based (partly) on that ROI, the project would run, the solution delivered into production, and then at some point in the future the actual ROI would be calculated. Everyone was a bit vague on how the actual ROI would be calculated, but they agreed that it could be done although would be driven by the context of the situation. Of course several people pointed out that it rarely works that way. Even if the potential ROI was initially calculated it would likely be based on wishful thinking and it would be incredibly unlikely that the actual ROI would be calculated once the solution was in production. This is because few organizations are actually interested in investing the time to do so and some would even be afraid to do so. Hence the planned and actual versions of the traditional strategy in the diagram. The agile/lean camp had a very different vision. Instead of investing in upfront ROI calculation, which would have required a fair bit of upfront requirements modelling and architectural modelling to get the information, the idea was that we should instead focus on a single feature or small change. If this change made sense to the stakeholders then it would be implemented, typically on the order of days or weeks instead of months, and put quickly into production. If your application is properly instrumented, which is becoming more and more common given the growing adoption of DevOps strategies, you can easily determine whether the addition of the new feature/change adds real value. Cultural differences get in your wayThe traditional project camp certainly believed in their process. In theory it sounded good, and I’m sure you could make it work, but in practice it was very fragile. The long feedback cycle, potentially months if not years, pretty much doomed the traditional approach to measuring benefits of software development to failure. The initial ROI guesstimate was often a work of fiction and rarely would it be compared to actuals. The cultural belief in bureaucracy motivated the traditional project camp to ignore the obvious challenges with their chosen approach. The agile/lean camp also believed in their strategy. In theory it works very well, and more and more organizations are clearly pulling this off in practice, but it does require great discipline and investment in your environment. In particular, you need investment in modern development practices such as continuous integration (CI), continuous deployment (CD), and instrumented solutions (all important aspects of a disciplined agile DevOps strategy). These are very good things to do anyway, it just so happens that they have an interesting side effect of making it easy (and inexpensive) to measure the actual benefits of changes to your software-based solutions. The cultural belief in short feedback cycles, in taking a series of smaller steps instead of one large one, and in their ability to automate some potentially complex processes motivated the agile/lean camp to see the traditional camp as hopeless and part of the problem. Several people in the traditional project camp struggled to understand the agile/lean approach, which is certainly understandable given how different that vision is compared with traditional software development environments. Sadly a few of the traditionalists chose to malign the agile/lean strategy instead of respectfully considering it. They missed an excellent opportunity to learn and potentially improve their game. Similarly the agilists started to tune out, dropping out of the conversation and forgoing the opportunity to help others see their point of view. In short, each camp suffered from cultural challenges that prevented them from coherently discussing how to measure the benefits of software development efforts. How Should You Measure the Effectiveness of Software Development?Your measurement strategy should meet the following criteria:
Not surprisingly, I put a lot more faith in the agile/lean approach to measuring value. Having said that, I do respect the traditional strategy as there are some situations where it may in fact work. Just not as many as traditional protagonists may believe. |
Eliminating Waste Depends on ContextOn Twitter one of the people that I follow recently tweeted in jest "I am waste". He had been tweeting about the problem that people will often pay consultants for their advice yet will not follow that advice once it's been provided (yet will often still keep paying for more advice). Perhaps in this situation his efforts were a waste, or perhaps the real issue was that the customer had a long learning process and hadn't yet come to the point where they were willing to act on the advice, we may never know. But I have to think that there are other situations where this person isn't a waste, regardless of his claims. This got me thinking that something is a waste in one context yet in another context may be quite valuable. Or, as the old saying goes, one man's trash is another man's treasure. For example, consider the following simple value stream: [Activity A: 10 min] [Wait time: 20 min] [Activity B: 10 min] Without considering the context, the wait time of 20 min represents 50% waste in the overall process that we should try to eliminate. What if that wait time provides people with a much needed rest? With time to contemplate? With time to destress? Eliminating that wait time, or even reducing it, could result a degradation of performance. In this case, one person's waste (the wait time) is another person's treasure (rest time). The implication is that we need to work closely with the people intimately involved in a process if we're to help them to improve it. Context counts. |
Why Time Tracking Might Be the Most Valuable Activity an Agile Developer Performs
ScottAmbler
Tags: 
metrics
enterprise-agile
governance
disciplined-agile-deliver...
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Recently I have been asked by several customer organizations to help them to understand how to account for the expense of agile software development. In particular, incremental delivery of solutions into production or the marketplace seem to be causing confusion with the financial people within these organizations. The details of accounting rules vary between countries, but the fundamentals are common. In order to get properly account for the costs incurred by software development teams you need to keep track of the amount of work performed and the type of work performed to develop a given solution. Time tracking doesn't have to be complex: at one customer developers spend less than five minutes a week capturing such information.
Why is Time Tracking Potentially Valuable?There are several financial issues to be aware of:
The point is that the way that a software developer's work is accounted for can have a non-trivial impact upon your organization's financial position.
What Do Agilists Think of Time Tracking?So, I thought I'd run a simple test. Last week on LinkedIn's Agile and Lean Software Development group I ran a poll to see what people thought about time tracking. The poll provided five options (a limitation of LinkedIn Polls) to choose from:
The poll results reveal that we have a long way to go. Of the people inputting their time more of them believed it was a waste of time than understood it to be a valuable activity. When you stop and think about it, the investment of five minutes a week to track your time could potentially save or even earn your organization many hundreds of dollars. Looking at it from a dollar per minute point of view, it could be the highest value activity that a developer performs in a given week. The discussion that ensued regarding the poll was truly interesting. Although there were several positive postings, and several neutral ones, many more were negative when it came to time tracking. Some comments that stood out for me included:
I think that there are several interesting implications from this discussion:
Parting ThoughtsDisciplined agilists are enterprise aware. This is important for two reasons: First, you want to optimize your organizational whole instead of sub-optimize on project-related efforts; second, you can completely miss opportunities to add real value for your organization. In the anecdote I provided it was clear that many agile developers believe that an activity such as time tracking is a waste when that clearly doesn't have to be the case. Worse yet, although someone brought up the issues around capitalizing software development expenses early in the conversation a group of very smart and very experienced people still missed this easy opportunity to see how they could add value to their organization. Granted, time tracking on an agile project team is nowhere near as sexy as topics such as continuous integration (CI), TDD, the definition of done, continous architecture, or many more. But you know what? Although it's a mind-numbingly mundane issue it is still an important one. 'Nuff said (I hope).
Related Reading
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Are You Ready to be Certified in Disciplined Agile?
The Disciplined Agile Consortium recently launched a certification programme for practitioners of Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). There are three practitioner certifications:
Differentiate yourself in the marketplace. Certification in Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) means something to clients and employers because it needs to be earned. Certification in DAD tells the marketplace you understand how to deliver an agile solution from end-to-end with experience in enterprise-class development. As an aside, the Disciplined Agile Consortium is proud to have IBM Rational's Richard Knaster and Carson Holmes the president of the Global Rational User Group (GRUG) on our board of advisors. For more information about DAD, see the IBM Press book Disciplined Agile Delivery for more details as well as numerous postings on this blog.
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What does "Disciplined Agile" actually mean?A recurring discussion that I have with experienced agile developers is what it means to take a disciplined agile approach. The conversation usually starts off by some saying "but it already requires discipline to do agile", something that I fully agree with, followed by "therefore 'disciplined agile' is merely a marketing term", something which I don't agree with. The challenge with the "standard" agile discipline is that it is often focused on construction activities within a single project team, clearly important but also clearly not the full picture. There's more to an agile project than construction, and there's more to most IT departments than a single development project. In short, there are many opportunities for IT professionals to up their discipline, and thereby up their effectiveness, opportunities which we make explicit in the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) framework. Let's explore the many aspects to taking a disciplined agile approach:
Material for this blog posting was adapted from Chapter 21 of Disciplined Agile Delivery: A Practitioner's Guide to Agile Software Delivery in the Enterprise, published by IBM Press in June 2012. |
Restarting this blogIt's been awhile since I've posted anything here, but that will soon change. I'm excited about some ideas that I have for upcoming blog postings around disciplined agile architecture and what it means to take a disciplined approach to agile solution delivery. Organizations around the world are finding that Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) provides a solid foundation from which to scale agile, and I'm going to continue sharing my observations and experiences about scaling DAD here in this blog. As many of you may know I left IBM in June 2012, after a six-year stint as Chief Methodologist for IT within IBM Rational, to form Scott Ambler + Associates with Mark Lines. Mark is my co-author on the IBM Press book Disciplined Agile Delivery, a topic I've written about extensively in this blog over the years. Since I left IBM I've remained in contact with several key people within Rational and have started working with them on several fronts. For example Walker Royce, Alan Brown, and myself are co-authoring a paper about scaling agile which we hope will be accepted at a prestigious academic conference in 2013. I'm also working with IBM Rational at the upcoming Agile Development Conference East in Orlando, November 4-9. Both Mark and I will be presenting on DAD and Rational will have a booth and be throwing a party on Wednesday night which I'm looking forward to. Rational has thrown some pretty good conference parties in the past and I'm guessing that they will do so this time too. Hope to see you there. In short, stay tuned as there's some exciting stuff coming your way soon.
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Disciplined Agile Delivery and DevOps
The basic idea behind DevOps is that your development strategy and operations strategy should reflect one another, that you should strive to optimize the whole IT process. This implies that development teams should work closely with your operations staff to deliver new releases smoothly into production and that your operations staff should work closely with development teams to streamline critical production issues.
DevOps has its source in agile software development, and it is an explicit aspect of the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework. As a result there is a collection of agile development strategies which enable effective DevOps throughout the agile delivery lifecycle. These strategies include:
There’s more to it though than simply adopting some good practices. Your process must also embrace several supporting philosophies. The Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework not only adopts the practices listed above, and more, but it also promotes several philosophies which enable DevOps:
For more detail about this topic, I think that you will find the article I wrote for the December 2011 issue of Cutter IT Journal entitled “Disciplined Agile Delivery and Collaborative DevOps” to be of value. |
Agile Adoption Success FactorsIn November 2011 Paul Gorans, the Accelerated Solution Delivery (ASD) practice lead in IBM GBS, and I ran an agile adoption survey. The survey explored a range of issue, including the factors that appear to be associated with the success and failure of agile project teams. Paul wrote up his thoughts in his Agile State of the Art Survey article on ibm.com and I did the same for Dr Dobb's Journal in Agile Success Factors. This blog posting summarizes the results of the survey. Factors which appear to accelerate agile adoption include:
Factors which appear to decelerate agile adoption include:
The survey also explored whether organizations were succeeding at large team agile and geographically distributed agile teams (yes, they are).
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Agile Adoption Within IBM Software Group (SWG)Recently Gina Poole blogged about IBM saved $300 million by going agile. That's not too bad when you think about it. A few days later someone asked a series of questions that I thought would make an interesting blog posting, so here goes:
How much of IBM's projects (in percentage) are agile at the moment? I don’t have exact numbers, but I believe that 90%+ of our teams in SWG are applying agile techniques in practical ways that make sense for their projects. The primary goal is to be effective – in frequent releases, higher quality, and happy customers – not just agile. By the way, there is roughly 30,000 developers in SWG. Can all of IBM's projects work with an agile methodology? It’s certainly possible, but it may not always make sense. Products that are in maintenance mode with few bugs or feature requirements may not benefit as much from agile practices -- those teams will likely continue to do whatever it is that they have been doing. Having said that, it's still highly desirable to apply agile techniques on maintenance projects. Also, agile methods can be harder to use on some projects than others, for example, around hardware development. As a general rule, I believe that the majority of software projects can benefit from agile techniques. The primary determinant of whether a team can adopt agile techniques is culture and skill – not team size, the domain, or the degree of geographic distribution. That notion surprises many people who think that large agile teams or geographically distributed agile teams can’t succeed in adopting agile practices. Are agile projects sub-parts of large waterfall projects? In some cases, that may happen. I’m sure it’s also true in reverse. We see many customers who are migrating from waterfall projects to a more agile way of doing things, and they often start this migration with smaller sub-projects. At IBM, we have tens of thousands of developers worldwide on hundreds of teams, so we have examples of pretty much any combination of agile, iterative, and traditional practices that you can imagine. There’s definitely not one size that fits all, which is a key aspect of the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework. What do you think the impact of these numbers will be on the PM community? The IBM PM community is embracing agile. And the reality is that a majority of development organizations around the world are moving to agile now as well (as much as 80% in some of the recent studies I’ve seen). I look forward to the increased adoption of agile methods by the PM community in general. The fact that PMI now offers an Agile Certified Practitioner training program certainly underscores the fact that agile practices are being adopted widely in the mainstream which is a great thing to see. |
Webcast - Agile in a regulatory environment
On Nov 16 2011, Kim Werner, Agile Coach from ATSC and Liz Parnell, Solution Design Manager from Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina (BCBSNC), gave a webcast sharing their experiences regarding how BCBSNC adopted a few Agile techniques, with the help of some good coaching, and adopted some IBM Rational Jazz tools (Rational Team Concert and Rational Requirements Composer) to reduce time to market and lower development costs. BCBCNC works in the highly-regulated healthcare industry, so faced a few interesting constraints when adopting agile.
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Thoughts about the Agile 2011 ConferenceDuring the second week of August the Agile 2011 conference was held in Salt Lake City (SLC). As you likely know the Agile Manifesto was formulated 10 years ago in SLC so it was apropos to hold it there. There was some excitement around the 10 year anniversary of the manifesto, with a panel session with the 17 authors of it. Sadly there seemed to be little excitement around the efforts of the 10th anniversay agile workshop in February which proposed a potential path forward for the agile community. I found the conference to be an evolutionary improvement over the conferences of the past few years, which is a very good thing because the focus since 2008 has moved beyond the "cool" new programming techniques to include the issues that enterprises face. Starting at the Agile 2008 conference I've seen an uptick in interest in what I would consider some of the more mature topics in agile development, although I'm unfortunately still seeing significant confusion out there too, in part due to over-exuberence of people new to agile. For example, there's people still asking about basic issues about agile architecture and agile database techniques, although I was really happy to see more coherent discussions around scaling agile. My own presentation about the Agile Scaling Model was well attended and I suspect I opened a few people's eyes regarding the realities that we face (yes, there's a lot more to it than holding a "scrum of scrums", yeesh). We have a long way to go until people really start to understand scaling issues, but we're clearly on the path to getting there. The conference show floor was interesting, with a wide range of vendors offering services and products focused on agile and lean. One thing that I noticed was many vendors had large monitors showing off their ability to support lean task boards, which for the most part they all looked the same. At the IBM booth we were showing off some of the Jazz tools, in particular Rational Team Concert (RTC). For a long time now we've been giving away fully functional, with no time limit, licenses of RTC for teams of up to 10 people. Something worth checking out. The Agile 201x conferences hosted by the Agile Alliance are always a good investment of your time and money, and Agile 2011 was no exception. See you at Agile 2012 in the great state of Texas!
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Collaborative DevOps
I recently recorded an audio podcast about Collaborative Development and Operations (DevOps) and how it relates to Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). The podcast is 17 minutes long and covers a range of topics including:
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