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Yuval Yeret

Alistair.Cockburn.us | Agile contracts - 1 views

alistair.cockburn.us/Agile+contracts

Agile Contracts agile-contracts-list

shared by Yuval Yeret on 23 Mar 14 - Cached
  • Venture-capital financing model This can be used with any of the above contract forms. In this model, the sponsor gives a round of financing for a certain amount of work, and the contracted company must produce results in order to get more funding. The sponsor can cut their losses at any time if they are not getting the results they need. They can presumably alter the terms of the contract after each work period. The result of a work period need not be working software; it could be a paper study, or a requirements document, or anything the sponsor selects. The venture-capital finance model works well with agile providers, since the agile provider is used to delivering useful, working software early and regularly. I find it an odd irony that the venture capital financiers running start-ups that I have encountered don’t take advantage of their own model to the extent agile teams do. The venture financiers let the evaluation markers occur too far apart in time. If they attached funding to monthly releases, that would oblige the start-up team to think through what it really can accomplish each month. The monthly progress would give the financiers a better sense of the start-up company’s real progress.
  • Venture-capital financing model This can be used with any of the above contract forms. In this model, the sponsor gives a round of financing for a certain amount of work, and the contracted company must produce results in order to get more funding. The sponsor can cut their losses at any time if they are not getting the results they need. They can presumably alter the terms of the contract after each work period. The result of a work period need not be working software; it could be a paper study, or a requirements document, or anything the sponsor selects. The venture-capital finance model works well with agile providers, since the agile provider is used to delivering useful, working software early and regularly. I find it an odd irony that the venture capital financiers running start-ups that I have encountered don’t take advantage of their own model to the extent agile teams do. The venture financiers let the evaluation markers occur too far apart in time. If they attached funding to monthly releases, that would oblige the start-up team to think through what it really can accomplish each month. The monthly progress would give the financiers a better sense of the start-up company’s real progress.
  • Bob Martin’s idea Bob Martin of Object Mentor posted an interesting variant to get around this problem: a base fee per story point, plus a lower-than-usual (close-to or below cost) fee per hour. This biases the contracted company’s to deliver early, but gives them some protection in case work proceeds slower than expected. Bob Martin described it this way:”[A]gree to pay a certain amount for each point completed, plus a certain amount for each hour worked. For example, let’s say you’ve got a project of 1000 points. Let’s also say that a team of four has established an estimated velocity of 50 points per week. This looks like about an 80 man-week job. At $100/hour this would be a $320,000 job. So lets reduce the hourly rate to $30/hour, and ask the customer for $224 per point. This sets up a very interesting dynamic. If the job really does take 80 man-weeks, then it will cost the same. If it takes 100 man-weeks then it will cost $344,000. If it takes 70 man-weeks it will cost $308,000. Notice that this is a small difference for a significant amount of time. Notice also that you, as developer feel strong motivation to be done early, since that increases your true hourly rate.” I have not seen that model in action myself, but several people have written in recommending it.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Bob Martin’s idea Bob Martin of Object Mentor posted an interesting variant to get around this problem: a base fee per story point, plus a lower-than-usual (close-to or below cost) fee per hour. This biases the contracted company’s to deliver early, but gives them some protection in case work proceeds slower than expected. Bob Martin described it this way:”[A]gree to pay a certain amount for each point completed, plus a certain amount for each hour worked. For example, let’s say you’ve got a project of 1000 points. Let’s also say that a team of four has established an estimated velocity of 50 points per week. This looks like about an 80 man-week job. At $100/hour this would be a $320,000 job. So lets reduce the hourly rate to $30/hour, and ask the customer for $224 per point. This sets up a very interesting dynamic. If the job really does take 80 man-weeks, then it will cost the same. If it takes 100 man-weeks then it will cost $344,000. If it takes 70 man-weeks it will cost $308,000. Notice that this is a small difference for a significant amount of time. Notice also that you, as developer feel strong motivation to be done early, since that increases your true hourly rate.” I have not seen that model in action myself, but several people have written in recommending it.
  • Norwegian PS 2000 Standard contract http://dataforeningen.no/?module=Articles;action=ArticleFolder.publicOpenFolder;ID=1044 “The main feature of the contract for software development is that it provides mechanisms for establishing a common understanding between customer and the developer and a flexible iterative model for development suited for an environment of uncertainties and risks.” ...” Stage by stage, iterative development model securing ability to benefit from increasing understanding of the requirements and challenges Close co-operation between supplier and customer Incentives and sanctions in combination with target pricing Procedures for conflict resolution with an expert as a mediator ” You need to order it (it costs several thousand Norwegian kronor):
Yuval Yeret

Kanban development oversimplified: a simple explanation of how Kanban adds to the ever-... - 0 views

agileproductdesign.com/...kanban_over_simplified.html

lean kanban

shared by Yuval Yeret on 03 Jun 09 - Cached
  • It’s a lot easier to estimate a story that’s small — which can lead to more accurate estimates, and better predictability.
  • It’s easier to plan with smaller stories. With big stories — stories that might take weeks for a developer to implement — it becomes difficult to plan a development time-box — particularly when the iterations are only a couple of weeks. It seems that only a couple stories fit — and there’s often room for half a story — but how do you build half a story? Splitting them into smaller stories makes it easier to plan those time-boxes.
  • Shrinking stories forces earlier elaboration and decision-making. Where product owners could write their stories fairly generally and consider many of the details later, now breaking them down into smaller stories forces more thinking earlier in a planning lifecycle.
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • Managing little stories forces us to keep better track of how they fit together. Product owners are often asked to break down stories to a level where a single story becomes meaningless. To keep track of what’s meaningful to them and other stakeholders, they often need to keep track of bigger items such as the features of the product and how many stories contribute to building up that feature.
  • The result of these herniated time-box activities is a cycle that’s actually 3-4 times longer than our time-box. To get work done, we’ll use a time-box to elaborate stories, one to develop them, another to more thoroughly test them, and if there are bugs, possibly another to fix them.
  • During an ideal Agile time-box we’ll have frequent discussions between developers, testers, and those on a product owner team — like business analysts, user experience people, and business people. We’ll do this to understand what we need to build and describe what we’ll do to validate the story was really done. When time-boxes are short, there’s less time for this conversation. It’s common to move many of the conversations to detail the story and describe acceptance to the time-box before so we can be ready to really get moving with development when the time-box starts.
  • It’s difficult to fit thorough validation of the story into a short time-box as well. So, often testing slips into the time-box after. Which leaves the nasty problem of what to do with bugs� which often get piped into a subsequent time-box.
  • Anyone who’s attended an Agile planning meeting knows they can often last about an hour longer than you can stand it
  • As time-boxes shrink those on the product owner team and testers find themselves in a constant mode of getting ready for a next time-box and evaluating past time-boxes
  • work long hours, attend lots of meetings, and seem to have less time to be available to help developers with the current time-box. Since their focus is on a future or past time-box, questions about this time-box seem like interruptions. Collaboration decreases and tensions increase. Their work load is heavy, bumpy, not smooth or even.
  • Kanban cards are used to limit the amount of inventory the factory builds. It doesn’t do the Toyota factory any good to build doors faster then they can assemble cars. It just wastes money on excess doors, and parts of doors. Excess work in progress is considered to be waste in Lean manufacturing. (It’s probably waste in non-Lean manufacturing too.) In the above completely made up example, you’ll never have more than 15 finished doors hanging around. (Mudha is Japanese for waste. Learn it to impress your Lean friends.)
  • “Kan” means visual, and “ban” means card or board.
  • Kanban thinking in software development attempts to do a similar thing. We want to limit unnecessary work in progress to be no higher than it needs to be to match the throughput of the team.
  • In Kanban development: time-boxed development is out stories are larger and fewer estimation is optional or out completely velocity is replaced by cycle time
  • Exactly what’s left of Agile if we get rid of time-boxes, change the meaning of stories, and stop measuring velocity. And, exactly what do car doors and Kanban cards have to do with software development? Don’t get hung up on process. Remember, agile development isn’t a process.
  • You might have a column where business analysts spend time tracking down technical details that developers need to understand to write code.
  • These columns aren’t set. You should discuss with your team the phases that stories go through to be completed. Some organization may use columns for writing documentation, or preparing customer service people to support the feature in production.
  • The top is used for stories currently in progress in that phase. The bottom is the buffer. When work for that phase of the story is completed, it moves from “in progress” to the “buffer” where it’ll wait to be pulled into the next phase.
  • When we set limits for work in progress, we’ll set a total number for the process step that includes both “in process” and the “finished buffer” for that process step.
  • Stories must be minimal marketable features
  • To be marketable the feature needs to be large enough to be useful — probably larger than the teeny stories that take a couple days to build and seem to be best practice in Agile development today. A MMF may take weeks to build. But the important thing isn’t how long it takes to build, but that it be understandable and valuable to those who’ll receive it. To identify a MMF some folks ask the question “Would I announce it in my company’s product blog?” If it’s too tiny to mention, then it’s not a MMF.
  • To be lean, we’ll limit the number of stories we allow onto the board. A common formula is to add up all the members of the team in all roles and divide by two. All roles includes developers, analysts, user interfaced designers, testers, deployment people — anyone immediately responsible for getting features to market. For example, if team members total 20, we might limit the number of MMF-style stories on the board to 10.
  • Today developers have finished a story, and s they walk to the Kanban board to move it out of development, they notice their single buffer slot is full — and the “testing in progress” column is filled to its limit. What now? The developers talk to the testers. “We’re really struggling to keep up here. It’ll be till tomorrow morning before we can get some of these stories moved out.” “Hmm�” says a developer “Can we help test?” “Of course you can!” says the tester. “With your help we can get these cleared out by the end of the day.“ The tester grins “I just don’t want you validating a story you implemented.”
  • For the limits of the story process steps, the limit is often half the number of people that can perform the work for that phase of development. For instance if you have 6 developers, you might limit the development in progress column to 3. Now, this will force developers to work together on stories. I do find in practice that this may not work out for all teams — so I often see limits that equal the number of developers (or those that can perform the process step) or often 1.5 * the number of people in a role. Of course if you do this, it’ll raise the overall work in progress — and as you might expect, items will take longer to finish.
  • When a column in a Kanban board is full, we know that group is at capacity. We also know that if this keeps happening that that process step is likely where a bottleneck is.
  • If you’ve ever waited in line for the Pirates of the Caribbean in Disneyland you might remember signs along the way that say “Your wait time from here is 30 minutes” — something like that. Now you can post your own wait times on your Kanban board. At the bottom of your story queue post the average cycle time with wait time. It’ll say something like “Your wait time for a story here is approximately 18 days.” At the top of the queue post the average working cycle time. It might say “your wait time from here is 14 days.”
  • When you place focus on how quickly you can get functionality done, and have the ability to measure just that, then the estimates don’t much matter. In fact, many using a Kanban approach have simply stopped estimating at all. Yes story sizes vary, but being able to give a wait time plus or minus a few days is sufficient for many organizations’ concerns.
  • But, since there’s no development time-box in Kanban development, we’ll measure story-by-story how long they took to complete — the “cycle time” of the story.
  • Some do still estimate stories. Then use those estimates in conjunction with cycle time. Using a spreadsheet we can calculate the average cycle time for stories with a given estimate. If you do this, consider placing a handy chart next to your Kanban board showing estimate in one column, and wait times in adjacent columns. With this you’re answering the real question stakeholders are asking for when they get estimates: “when am I going to see this functionality in the software?”
  • If your stakeholders are like mine, they don’t want to know when they’re going to get this functionality, the want to know when they’re going to get all this functionality. I find that if I place stories into a spreadsheet with start and end dates, and calculate cycle time, if I select an arbitrary time period — say a two or three week time period — I can see how many stories where completed during this time period. For instance I might see the team finished 22 stories in 3 weeks — that’s about 7.3 stories per week. Given a backlog of 100 stories I can reasonably infer that it’ll take between 13 and 14 weeks (100/7.3). That’s yesterday’s weather for Kanban — at least the way I calculate it.
  • If I know that during three week time period there where 15 working days and that 5 developers worked the entire time, that’s 75 developer days. Knowing that lets me calculate the average number of developer days per story: 3.4 (75/22) — Which is darn close to pi — which makes me believe it has to be right. ;-) This number, 3.4, is what XP practitioners referred to as load factor.
  • Evaluation cycles, not development time-boxes
  • The only difference is the cycles aren’t used to plan and commit to stories any longer.
  • The daily standup or daily scrum meeting occurs as normal, but now it occurs in front of the Kanban board. Instead of the regular meeting ritual of checking in with each person to find out what they worked on yesterday and will work on today, the discussion revolves around the Kanban board and what will likely move on and off the board today, where “traffic” seems the heaviest, and what we could do to clear bottlenecks.
  • Reflect every few weeks
  • Lean practices help teams increase throughput. They don’t make developers type faster, rather they draw attention to bottlenecks that slow things down, help you see them and respond to them quicker. Using a Kanban board lets you easily visualize work in progress across different roles and lets you see when someone is taking on too much work simultaneously.
  • Demonstrate every few weeks
  • A task board as it’s commonly used in an agile approach can give you the visualization too. But, widening the task board to separate testing from development from acceptance or other process steps helps me better visualize where things are clogging up — helps me better diagnose problems. And, setting hard limits for process steps and respecting them really makes me deal with the problem in a way that dropping a pile of stories into a sprint or iteration didn’t. But, maybe it’s just me who’s lazy and avoids dealing with tough problems. I’m sure you’d never run into a situation where you and your team let lots of finished development work pile up waiting to be tested.
  • There’s no one as zealous as the newly converted There’s a lot of folks pretty excited about Kanban out there. I am too. Sometimes that zeal takes the form of telling people practicing common agile time-boxed development that they’re wrong. But, I guess I’m crusty enough to know that there’s lots of right ways to succeed and anyone who believes they’ve found the best ways is likely wrong. Don’t let those voicing opinions strongly for, or against, Kanban approaches stop you for digging in deeper and understanding the ideas behind it.
  • Yuval Yeret on 03 Jun 09
     
    one of the best articles about Kanban and its relation to Agile I've encountered so far - focusing on Feature development (not maintenance)
Yuval Yeret

Is Design Dead? - 0 views

www.martinfowler.com/...designDead.html

eng-practices-list

shared by Yuval Yeret on 10 Dec 14 - Cached
  • In its common usage, evolutionary design is a disaster. The design ends up being the aggregation of a bunch of ad-hoc tactical decisions, each of which makes the code harder to alter. In many ways you might argue this is no design, certainly it usually leads to a poor design. As Kent puts it, design is there to enable you to keep changing the software easily in the long term. As design deteriorates, so does your ability to make changes effectively. You have the state of software entropy, over time the design gets worse and worse. Not only does this make the software harder to change, it also makes bugs both easier to breed and harder to find and safely kill. This is the "code and fix" nightmare, where the bugs become exponentially more expensive to fix as the project goes on
  • the planned design approach has been around since the 70s, and lots of people have used it. It is better in many ways than code and fix evolutionary design. But it has some faults. The first fault is that it's impossible to think through all the issues that you need to deal with when you are programming. So it's inevitable that when programming you will find things that question the design. However if the designers are done, moved onto another project, what happens? The programmers start coding around the design and entropy sets in. Even if the designer isn't gone, it takes time to sort out the design issues, change the drawings, and then alter the code. There's usually a quicker fix and time pressure. Hence entropy (again).
  • One way to deal with changing requirements is to build flexibility into the design so that you can easily change it as the requirements change. However this requires insight into what kind of changes you expect. A design can be planned to deal with areas of volatility, but while that will help for foreseen requirements changes, it won't help (and can hurt) for unforeseen changes. So you have to understand the requirements well enough to separate the volatile areas, and my observation is that this is very hard. Now some of these requirements problems are due to not understanding requirements clearly enough. So a lot of people focus on requirements engineering processes to get better requirements in the hope that this will prevent the need to change the design later on. But even this direction is one that may not lead to a cure. Many unforeseen requirements changes occur due to changes in the business. Those can't be prevented, however careful your requirements engineering process.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The fundamental assumption underlying XP is that it is possible to flatten the change curve enough to make evolutionary design work. This flattening is both enabled by XP and exploited by XP. This is part of the coupling of the XP practices: specifically you can't do those parts of XP that exploit the flattened curve without doing those things that enable the flattening. This is a common source of the controversy over XP. Many people criticize the exploitation without understanding the enabling. Often the criticisms stem from critics' own experience where they didn't do the enabling practices that allow the exploiting practices to work. As a result they got burned and when they see XP they remember the fire.
  • XP's advice is that you not build flexible components and frameworks for the first case that needs that functionality. Let these structures grow as they are needed. If I want a Money class today that handles addition but not multiplication then I build only addition into the Money class. Even if I'm sure I'll need multiplication in the next iteration, and understand how to do it easily, and think it'll be really quick to do, I'll still leave it till that next iteration.
  • You don't want to spend effort adding new capability that won't be needed until a future iteration. And even if the cost is zero, you still don't want to add it because it increases the cost of modification even if it costs nothing to put in. However you can only sensibly behave this way when you are using XP, or a similar technique that lowers the cost of change.
  • My advice to XPers using patterns would be Invest time in learning about patterns Concentrate on when to apply the pattern (not too early) Concentrate on how to implement the pattern in its simplest form first, then add complexity later. If you put a pattern in, and later realize that it isn't pulling its weight - don't be afraid to take it out again.
  • begin by assessing what the likely architecture is. If you see a large amount of data with multiple users, go ahead and use a database from day 1. If you see complex business logic, put in a domain model. However in deference to the gods of YAGNI, when in doubt err on the side of simplicity. Also be ready to simplify your architecture as soon as you see that part of the architecture isn't adding anything.
  • XP design looks for the following skills A constant desire to keep code as clear and simple as possible Refactoring skills so you can confidently make improvements whenever you see the need. A good knowledge of patterns: not just the solutions but also appreciating when to use them and how to evolve into them. Designing with an eye to future changes, knowing that decisions taken now will have to be changed in the future. Knowing how to communicate the design to the people who need to understand it, using code, diagrams and above all: conversation.
Yuval Yeret

James Shore: The Art of Agile Development: Incremental Design and Architecture - 1 views

www.jamesshore.com/...incremental_design.html

eng-practices-list james shore evolutionary design agilearchitecture

shared by Yuval Yeret on 10 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • when you first create a design element—whether it's a new method, a new class, or a new architecture—be completely specific. Create a simple design that solves only the problem you face at the moment, no matter how easy it may seem to solve more general problems
  • Waiting to create abstractions will enable you to create designs that are simple and powerful.
  • The second time you work with a design element, modify the design to make it more general—but only general enough to solve the two problems it needs to solve. Next, review the design and make improvements. Simplify and clarify the code. The third time you work with a design element, generalize it further—but again, just enough to solve the three problems at hand. A small tweak to the design is usually enough. It will be pretty general at this point. Again, review the design, simplify, and clarify. Continue this pattern. By the fourth or fifth time you work with a design element—be it a method, a class, or something bigger—you'll typically find that its abstraction is perfect for your needs. Best of all, because you allowed practical needs to drive your design, it will be simple yet powerful.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • This is difficult! Experienced programmers think in abstractions. In fact, the ability to think in abstractions is often a sign of a good programmer. Coding for one specific scenario will seem strange, even unprofessional.
  • Continuous Design Incremental design initially creates every design element—method, class, namespace, or even architecture—to solve a specific problem. Additional customer requests guide the incremental evolution of the design. This requires continuous attention to the design, albeit at different time-scales. Methods evolve in minutes; architectures evolve over months. No matter what level of design you're looking at, the design tends to improve in bursts. Typically, you'll implement code into the existing design for several cycles, making minor changes as you go. Then something will give you an idea for a new design approach, requiring a series of refactorings to support it. [Evans] calls this a breakthrough (see Figure). Breakthroughs happen at all levels of the design, from methods to architectures.
  • Don't let design discussions turn into long, drawn-out disagreements. Follow the ten-minute rule: if you disagree on a design direction for ten minutes, try one and see how it works in practice. If you have a particularly strong disagreement, split up and try both as spike solutions. Nothing clarifies a design issue like working code.
  • Risk-Driven Architecture Architecture may seem too essential not to design up front. Some problems do seem too expensive to solve incrementally, but I've found that nearly everything is easy to change if you eliminate duplication and embrace simplicity. Common thought is that distributed processing, persistence, internationalization, security, and transaction structure are so complex that you must consider them from the start of your project. I disagree; I've dealt with all of them incrementally [Shore 2004a]. Two issues that remain difficult to change are choice of programming language and platform. I wouldn't want to make those decisions incrementally!
    • Yuval Yeret
      Yuval Yeret on 12 Jan 15
       
      Possible exercise - Try to come up with various things that are risky to YAGNI. And then order them according to level of risk. Use the examples here to seed the list
  • Limit your efforts to improving your existing design
  • To apply risk-driven architecture, consider what it is about your design that concerns you and eliminate duplication around those concepts
  • Your power lies in your ability to chooose which refactorings to work on. Although it would be inappropriate to implement features your customers haven't asked for, you can direct your refactoring efforts towards reducing risk. Anything that improves the current design is okay—so choose improvements that also reduce future risk.
  • design is so important in XP that we do it all the time
  • Don't try to use incremental design without a commitment to continuous daily improvement (in XP terms, merciless refactoring.) This requires self-discipline and a strong desire for high-quality code from at least one team member. Because nobody can do that all the time, pair programming, collective code ownership, energized work, and slack are important support mechanisms.
  • Test-driven development is also important for incremental design. Its explicit refactoring step, repeated every few minutes, gives pairs continual opportunities to stop and make design improvements. Pair programming helps in this area, too, by making sure that half of the team's programmers—as navigators—always have an opportunity to consider design improvements.
  • Alternatives If you are uncomfortable with XP's approach to incremental design, you can hedge your bets by combining it with up-front design. Start with an up-front design stage and then commit completely to XP-style incremental design. Although it will delay the start of your first iteration (and may require some up-front requirements work, too), this approach has the advantage of providing a safety net without incurring too much risk.
Yuval Yeret

Challenging Why (not if) Scrum Fails | NetObjectives - 0 views

www.netobjectives.com/...questioning-why-scrum-fails

shared by Yuval Yeret on 22 May 09 - Cached
  • I do believe for Scrum to work beyond the team you need more than Scrum
  • what to add to Scrum making it more effective when it won't readily work
  • lack of team agility is not always the major impediment to Enterprise Agility
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • While starting at the team level with Scrum is often good, you often need to start with the product management team - that is, where product enhancements to be worked on are selected
  • Even when Scrum works at the team level, organizations very often report little impact to the bottom line.  While this is better than nothing (if the teams are happier, that's good), it usually doesn't justify a huge investment
  • in many contexts in which Scrum does not work readily, Scrum has no power to improve the context in which it is in.  In other words, the impediments that one must fix are often outside of the scope of what Scrum helps you do.
  • These impediments are often not even seen or if they are, are often viewed as "just the way it is."
  • certain Scrum attitudes often makes things worse
  • Scrum does little to let management to know how the team works or what impact management decisions have on the team
  • There is almost a religious zeal that Scrum tells you little of what to do
  • While SoS works well for certain types of work, it does not work well when the different teams have different motivations. 
  • the high failure rate is due to the fact that Scrum works in certain contexts but has little ability to change the contexts in which it doesn't work wel
  • One needs to pay attention to where to start as well as see how to change the context.  Separating the team from management doesn't help.  Focusing on only the team part of the value stream - giving little guidance both up and downstream of the team also doesn't help.  Lean provides guidance here (meaning Scrum with the aid of Lean could provide insights),
  • look into using Lean as a context for any improvement in your software development organization
  • While Scrum may be an appropriate choice in many circumstances, other methods may be better (e.g., Kanban Software Development).  Scrum's rapid ascension probably has more to do with its success in the places it easily fits.  Now that it is past the early adopter phase, we may see it having even a harder time as people attempt to scale it.
Yuval Yeret

CIO Perspectives: A Conversation on Agile Transformation, Part 2 - 0 views

www.borland.com/...cio-perspectives-part-two.html

agile transformation

shared by Yuval Yeret on 15 May 09 - Cached
  • Part 2
  • The thinking is that IT is mission-critical, so let's not change things without giving it a lot of thought and a lot of consideration
  • The really hard part is around the people transformation - getting developers to work side-by-side with testers and users is a completely foreign concept.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The reason there's been so much turnover of CIOs in the last ten years is because the end users – the CEOs, the CFOs and the division heads – are unhappy with the results. When IT professionals realize this, and realize that something like Agile gives them the opportunity to create better value for their businesses, then they're going to be a lot more willing to adopt it. I hope that development organizations are starting to see around that corner.
  • We WANT to go Agile. How do we overcome the skepticism at the CXO level?"
  • My recommendation would be "try it." Agile doesn't equal risk, but changing development methods does equal some risk
  • t can be a big deal to say: "I'm going to change our development methodology." It makes people sit up and want to dive into deep detail before getting on board. The question comes in the form of the old development methodology: "Let me see the high level plan and what the change will be in the deliverables and methodology over the next two years." This is exactly what you're trying to avoid by going to an Agile method.
  • try Agile on a few small projects, measure the results, talk to users about their satisfaction, and then readdress
  • nitiate the shift in the most change-prone areas first, and then work it backwards through the rest of the organization
  • It doesn't happen everywhere at all times, and it doesn't work in all areas. It's good to recognize that up front – that software development projects adapt to this easily, but an infrastructure project would have challenges with this approach. So, select a few areas that would naturally lend themselves to Agile, such as application development, gradually introduce it to these areas that need it most, and then measure results.
  • Again I'd say: "Try it." Agile transition is absolutely about organizational change. To win executive support we need to speak in terms of risk management, measurement and the bottom line.
Yuval Yeret

James Shore: The Art of Agile Development: Simple Design - 0 views

www.jamesshore.com/...simple_design.html

james shore art development

shared by Yuval Yeret on 13 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Simple Design AudienceProgrammers Our design is easy to modify and maintain
  • Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. —Albert Einstein
  • When writing code, agile developers often stop to ask themselves, "What is the simplest thing that could possibly work?" They seem to be obssessed with simplicity. Rather than anticipating changes and providing extensibility hooks and plug-in points, they create a simple design that anticipates as little as possible, as cleanly as possible. Unintuitively, this results in designs that are ready for any change, anticipated or not.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • I don't think XP and patterns are conflicting. It's how you use patterns. The XP guys have patterns in their toolbox, it's just that they refactor to the patterns once they need the flexibility
  • You Aren't Gonna Need It (YAGNI) This pithy XP saying sums up an important aspect of simple design: avoid speculative coding. Whenever you're tempted to add something to your design, ask yourself if it supports the stories and features you're currently delivering. If not, well... you aren't gonna need it. Your design could change. Your customers' minds could change.
  • We do this because excess code makes change difficult. Speculative design, added to make specific changes easy, often turns out to be wrong in some way, which actually makes changes more difficult. It's usually easier to add to a design than to fix a design that's wrong. The incorrect design has code that depends on it, sometimes locking bad decisions in place.
  • Once and Only Once
  • avoid duplication. "Once and only once" is the Extreme Programming phrase. The authors of The Pragmatic Programmer [Hunt & Thomas] use "don't repeat yourself," or the DRY principle.
  • Self-Documenting Code Simplicity is in the eye of the beholder. It doesn't matter much if you think the design is simple; if the rest of your team or future maintainers of your software find it too complicated, then it is.
  • What if we know we're going to need a feature? Shouldn't we put in a design hook for it? In XP, the plan can change every week. Unless you're implementing the feature that very week, don't put the hook in. The plan could change, leaving you stuck with unneeded code.
  • Results When you create simple designs, you avoid adding support for any features other than the ones you're working on in the current iteration. You finish work more quickly as a result. When you use simple design well, your design supports arbitrary changes easily. Although new features might require a lot of new code, changes to existing code are localized and straightforward.
  • Simple design requires continuous improvement through refactoring and incremental design and architecture. Without it, your design will fail to evolve with your requirements. Don't use simple design as an excuse for poor design. Simplicity requires careful thought. As the Einstein quote at the beginning of this section says, it's a lot easier to create complex designs than simple ones. Don't pretend "simple" means "fastest" or "easiest.
  • Until recently, the accepted best practice in design followed the advice Erich Gamma now disavows: "The key to maximizing reuse lies in anticipating new requirements and changes to existing requirements, and in designing your systems so they can evolve accordingly."
Yuval Yeret

Creating an Agile Culture to Drive Organizational Change - 1 views

www.borland.com/...creating-an-agile-culture.html

agile enterprise adoption culture

shared by Yuval Yeret on 15 May 09 - Cached
  • It is critical that everyone has the same understanding of, and commitment to, the desired outcome: a business that is reliable through predictable technology processes that deliver business agility. To do this, there needs to be a management commitment to develop a focused, on-going practice around the pursuit of organizational maturity. As part of this, gaps in skills and capabilities should be identified and positive action – training, coaching, process improvement and tools deployment – taken in order to close the gap
  • the work force needs to understand the business drivers for Agility. They need to be challenged to improve their quality, improve their cycle times, to improve the frequency of releases and the value they deliver to the customer. They need to know how these things fit within the bigger picture and why improvement is their responsibility.
  • To change a culture it's important to recognize that every knowledge worker makes decisions and takes actions that affect the performance of the business. The culture in the organization is the reflection of those decisions and actions.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • all the people understand and internalize the concepts and ideals behind the Agile movement
  • translated into concepts that can be widely applied to the many day-to-day decisions each of them will make
  • internalize and live three principles: making progress with imperfect information; existing in a high trust, high social capital culture; and shortening cycle times. These ideas need to be infused into the workforce at every opportunity.
  • it should spread virally. It can start with just one manager, who educates his immediate direct reports on the concepts and then takes the time to reflect and show how each decision is aligned the principles
  • work-in-progress as a liability rather than an asset.
  • . Every member of the team should be educated to understand it, and to be capable of demonstrating how their decisions and actions are concomitant with it. The Decision Filter is
  • The Agile Decision Filter
  • Delivering quickly can provide immediate value while delay can result in obviated functionality of little value or missing a more lucrative opportunity while completing existing work-in-progress
  • Are we making progress with imperfect information? Or are we trying to be perfect before we start? Does this decision add or maintain trust in our organization and with our partners? Or does it remove trust and breed fear? Are we treating work-in-progress as it if were a liability? Or are we treating it like an asset?
  • the team can start to modify their practices one decision at a time and drive towards a goal of business agility
  • The "transition" to Agile will happen slowly, and supporting the change will require training, coaching and tools – but change will be real and long-lasting.
  • By changing your culture using the simple principles captured in The Agile Decision Filter, teams will adopt Agile. Give it a little time and magic will happen. They will voluntarily change their behaviors and adopt Agile practices. They will behave in a fashion aligned with the principles and values behind The Agile Manifesto. They will not resist because they had a say in the changes, which are tailored specifically to their environment and their needs.
  • this approach may seem less prescriptive and straightforward than an "Agile Change Initiative" project plan. And yes, taking on a management-led Agile Transition Initiative looks faster and cheaper,
  • However, it is all wishful thinking, and the only way to get the payoff is to invest the time and show the courage to lead true Agile change. True Agile change requires you to change the culture. To change the culture, teach all your people how to use the Agile Decision Filter and hold them accountable for every decision they make.
Yuval Yeret

Original Scrum-ban Article by Corey Ladas | Lean Software Engineering - 1 views

leansoftwareengineering.com/...scrum-ban

kanban SCrum agile ScrumBan

shared by Yuval Yeret on 19 May 09 - Cached
  • A problem with the basic index-card task board is that there is nothing to prevent you from accumulating a big pile of work in process. Time-boxing, by its nature, sets a bound on how much WIP that can be, but it can still allow much more than would be desirable.
  • then you need another mechanism to regulate the “money supply.” In our case, we simply write the quantity of kanban in circulation on the task board, and allocate new cards according to that limit.
  • You might have a simple principle like: prefer completing work to starting new work, or you might express that as a rule that says: try to work on only one item at a time, but if you are blocked, then you can work on a second item, but no more. In our example, that rule gives us an effective WIP limit of 6.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Just because anybody can have more than one item in process doesn’t mean that everybody should have more than one item in process. A problem with our multitasking rule is that it locally optimizes with no consideration of the whole. An implicit total WIP limit of 6 is still more WIP than we should probably tolerate for our three workers. A limit of 4 of 5 total items in process at one time still allows for some multitasking exceptions, but disallows the obviously dysfunctional behavior of everybody carrying two items
  • The ready queue contains items that are pending from the backlog, but have high priority
  • Here we’ve broken down in-process into two states: specify and execute. Specify is about defining whatever criteria are necessary to determine when the work item can be considered complete. Execute is about doing the work necessary to bring that work item into a state which satisfies those criteria. We have split our previous WIP limit of 5 across these two states. Specify is considered to take less time in this case, so it is given a limit of 2. Execute consumes the remaining limit of 3. We might change this ratio as time goes on and our performance changes.
  • Adding the specify-complete column communicates to the team that a work item which was previously in the specify state is now ready to be pulled by anyone who wants to move it to the execute state. Work that is still in the specify state is not eligible to be pulled yet. If the owner of a ticket in the specify state wants to hand it off, he can put it in the complete buffer. If he doesn’t want to hand it off, he can move it directly into the execute state as long as capacity is available.
  • e will also need some agreement about what results to expect at each handoff. We can do that by defining some simple work standards or standard procedures for each state. These do not have to be complicated or exhaustive. Here, they are simple bullets or checklists drawn directly on the task board.
  • The next event we might consider for scheduling planning activities is the concept of an order point. An order point is an inventory level that triggers a process to order new materials. As we pull items from the backlog into the process, the backlog will diminish until the number of items remaining drops below the order point. When this happens, a notice goes out to the responsible parties to organize the next planning meeting. If our current backlog is 10, our throughput is 1/day, and we set an order point at 5, then this planning will happen about once a week.
Yuval Yeret

Using a Task Board with One Remote Team Member | Mike Cohn's Blog - Succeedin... - 0 views

blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/rd-with-one-remote-team-member

physical taskboard

shared by Yuval Yeret on 01 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Try to get the one person to move to where the rest of the team is.
  • Having one remote is a cost that must be borne by the full team. For the right person, it’s easily worth it. But sometimes, the person who is remote has not special skills, knowledge or experience to justify the added hassle.
  • continue to use the physical task board–it is simply too beneficial to the collocated team members to give it up in favor of a product backlog tool, especially if team members are already used to it and like it.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The remote person in this case could identify during the daily Scrum what he or she will work on and not need further interaction with the task board until selecting the next task. Here, the remote person doesn’t really interact with the task board at all and interacts only with the team. Not ideal as I’d like the person to see the tasks, but this can work in some situations.
  • more common is for the ScrumMaster to take on the responsibility of updating an electronic version that mirrors the physical task board
  • One good way of minimizing the time the ScrumMaster spends doing this is to mark the cards on the physical task board. The mark indicates “I’ve updated this task. Please update it in the online task board.” I like to use Post-It flags for this
Yuval Yeret

http://studios.thoughtworks.com/2007/5/10/continuous-integration-in-the-enterprise-with... - 0 views

studios.thoughtworks.com/...-enterprise-with-cruisecontrol

continuous_integration

shared by Yuval Yeret on 19 Jan 17 - Cached
  • One of the developers had checked in some code that failed the regression tests. The application, on which the company had spent considerable time, money and effort, was now in an uncertain state. It wasn't behaving as expected. In the past, this type of bug usually wasn't discovered for months. Usually, it wasn't discovered until the System Integration Testing cycle got underway. For this project, that wasn't scheduled for another 6 months.
  • In the past, this bug would have lingered in the code for 6 months before anyone even realized it was a problem
  • . The light had gone off only 6 minutes after the code had been committed. Notice: not 6 months...but 6 minutes!
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • I told them I just saved them $12,535! They looked around to figure out how. The reason I was there was simple. Earlier that year, those same IT managers had performed a series of calculations to estimate how much it cost the department each time a bug made its way out of development, into SIT, into User Acceptance Testing, or all the way into production. For this IT shop, one bug into SIT cost them $12,605 (and you can imagine how much a bug into production would cost.)
Yuval Yeret

Alistair.Cockburn.us | Are iterations hazardous to your project? - 0 views

alistair.cockburn.us/s+hazardous+to+your+project%3f

shared by Yuval Yeret on 20 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Simply using iterations, user stories and velocity doesn’t mean your project is agile – or on the way to success.
  • why “iterations” may be hazardous to your project: ‘’Danger grows when the results of the iteration are not directly linked to delivering the product to the end user.’’ Without that linkage, iteration results hang in the air
  • What gets in the way is that the project is set up as a pipeline, with programming put somewhere in the middle of the pipeline. In this project setup, there is really nothing the programmers can do to show how their work connects to deliveries, because there are work stations before and after theirs. All they can report is that “some new code is integrated into the code base.” They are doing incremental development but not agile development.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • magine a project team of between fifteen and four hundred people. There are user representatives, analysts, programmers, database designers, and testers, arranged in a pipeline. The user analysts talk to the users, and then to the analysts, who write down user stories. The analysts write lots of notes on each user story, since it will be a full iteration or two before any programmer will pick up the user story. The notes are between one and ten pages long. Eventually, a programmer picks up a user story along with the supplemental details, code them up in an iteration, integrate them into the growing code base, and mark their velocity. In the same or a later iteration the database designers do the same. Eventually the integration test team comes along, runs tests on the whole thing, and feeds bug reports back into the programmers’ work queues. The users or project sponsors may see the outcome every few months if they are lucky.
  • The repair is simple: connect every activity to a release or delivery to real users (delivering to even one real user makes a difference). Evaluate the team’s work based on how often they deliver to real users and how long it takes a new requirement to reach the users. Replace the fuss around iterations with fuss around deliveries.
  • Break the pipeline, lengthen the iterations, lose the machismo, deliver the project.
  • here is no mechanism in the standard agile language that warns about this loss of touch. The currently standard language consists of ‘’iterations, user stories, ‘’and’’ velocity’’. By a perverse relationship between them, it is possible to equally shrink iteration length and story size, with velocity scaling accordingly. Thus, a team can feel as though it is become more agile, when in reality it is simply becoming more cut off from its user base and the feedback it needs to succeed.
  • Collocate the requirements gatherer, the database designer, the programmer, the tester. Lengthen the iteration period to one month. Give the requirements gatherer a week’s head start on the features coming up, but otherwise arrange that all of them are working on the same feature set in the same month.
  • As an afterthought, if your new iteration length is a month, you can still run one-week planning windows to make sure you don’t get off track during the month.
Yuval Yeret

Tailor your Message To Gain Support for your Agile Initiative | Enabling Agility - 0 views

www.enagility.com/r-your-message-to-gain-support

tailor agility agile adoption transformation

shared by Yuval Yeret on 21 May 09 - Cached
  • Connect Agile’s Benefits to your Company’s Priorities
  • aying that Agile is “better, faster, cheaper” may not be enough to cause a company to be willing to go through the often-painful process of cultural and process change.  You could implement Agile, but you could also try Six Sigma or Lean.  Saying that Agile is a general get-better remedy puts it in line with many other get-better methods.
  • f they don’t see a meaningful update from us, at least once a quarter, we’re going to get kicked out of the game.  We’ve all acknowledged that as we’ve gotten bigger, our processes have become more cumbersome and now is the time to do something about it.  Agile will give us the ability to regain that rapid pace of delivering innovations to market that we were know for in our early days.”
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • ur last two releases have looked like me-too updates, where we are just barely keeping up with our competitors
  • We’ve been losing market share
  • If you can refer to a specific business issue and show the linkage, you are much more likely to get a receptive audience.  Here’s an example.
  • The CFO, developer and QA manager have different roles in the organization and their needs are different.  If you want to enlist their support, be sure you know who you are talking to and what they value.
  • Use Focused Messages for Key Individuals or Groups
  • certain volume of people who are enrolled in the idea of Agile before you’ll see adoption start to accelerate,
  • People have specific needs in their role and they want to understand how Agile will affect and benefit them directly.  
  • Developers, on the other hand, probably wants to know if they will have interesting work, the opportunity to learn new things and the ability to make an impact on the company’s products.
  • a QA manager is probably interested in hearing how Agile helps enrich the QA profession.
  • The focus isn’t on Agile, its on business, as it should be.
  • The easiest way to find out what interests someone is to ask them.  When you meet, leave plenty of time for talk.  Motoring through a well-rehearsed Agile presentation usually doesn’t work.  A lot of times I’ll have slides with me, but they are a backdrop for the conversation.  I’ll refer to slides when it helps move the conversation along, but otherwise don’t use them.  You might want to forget slides altogether and just draw things on a whiteboard as necessary.  This technique is particularly useful with an individual or a small group.  
  • Take it One Step Further: Collect Data to Gain Insight
  • you’ll be most effective tailoring your message if you invest some time conducting data through a series of structured interviews. 
  • First, you’ll need a small set of questions prepared for the interviews.  Here are some examples. What is working with our current methodology? What’s not working with our current methodology? How do you think Agile would help our organization? What concerns do you have about Agile?
  • Interview a wide range of people: developers, testers, business analysts, managers, product managers, senior management, project managers and someone from finance. 
  • When you conduct the interviews, it is good to have one interviewer who has the primary responsibility for talking and the other person who has the primary job of taking notes.  You can switch off roles each interview so no one person gets stuck in either role.  Here’s how I typically start off.  
  • stories that people tell about the organization and make sure you write them down
  • I put all of the information we’d gathered into a mind-mapping program (Mindjet) and grouped like things together.
  • Make sure you keep interesting stories intact.  Specifics will help you make your cases
  • When there’s numerical data, people engage with a presentation in an entirely different way than they do when there are stories.  I find stories more effective, but do what works for you.
  • As an Agile evangelist, you job is to get Agile deployed effectively.  Along the way there are many people will be willing to go out of their way to help if you effectively speak to their interests and concerns.
Yuval Yeret

The Product Owner in the Agile Enterprise - 0 views

www.agilejournal.com/...-owner-in-the-agile-enterprise

agile product_owner embedded-agile-list

shared by Yuval Yeret on 07 May 09 - Cached
  • Responsibilities Vary by Software Business TypeSince the business mission, organization, operating methods, roles, titles and responsibilities differ dramatically across industry segments, it follows that the patterns of agile adoption vary across these segments as well
  • Information Systems/Information Technology (IS/IT) -teams of teams who develop software to operate the business; accounting, CRM, internal networks, sales force automation and the like. Customers are primarily internal to the enterprise.
  • Embedded Systems (embedded) - teams of teams who develop software that runs on computers embedded in other devices - cell phones, electronic braking systems, industrial controls and the like. Customers may be either internal or external to the enterprise.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Independent Software Vendors (ISV) -teams of teams who develop software for sale, including products like network management, supply chain management, mobile applications, etc. This segment now also includes the rapidly emerging Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors. Customers are external to the enterprise.
  • So far, former developers/tech leads with business sense and good project management skills seem to be the best fit.
  • ultimate user (mobile device user) is fairly far removed from the major technologies
  • Ryan went on to note that the title of "Program Manager" also performed a similar role in some larger scale contexts:
  • Embedded Systems Example - Symbian Software Limited
  • Clearly, the development of a mobile phone operating system is a highly technical endeavor
  • mention this because I suspect that the Technical Marketing Specialist role, where it exists in the ISV today, could make a good role model for the Agile Product Owner in today's larger ISV
  • the development process does not lend itself quite so easily to the traditional, customer/user facing, agile Product Manager/Product Owner roles. However, the Product Owner role must still be successfully addressed in this highly technical context.
  • All our POs come from engineering teams and are senior engineers with product or customer experience.
  • one PO to two team mapping typically, rarely 3 teams, sometimes 1
  • IS/IT Examples
  • role/title of the Business Systems Analyst
  • is often a reasonably good fit for the Product Owner role.
  • In the larger IT shop, I have also seen the role filled by Project Managers
  • In many cases, the self-managing and team-based planning lightens the workload for the project manager in the agile enterprise, and they often have the domain knowledge, inclination and insights necessary to fulfill the Product Owner role. Therefore, many have the time, skills and inclination to fill this role.
  • In our case, our product owners are in IT. They are the liaison to the business and in many cases speak for the business
  • Our Business Systems Analysts in IT are filling the role of Product Owner. Their previous responsibility of documenting detailed business requirements and rules now falls to the entire team in the form of user stories and acceptance tests
Yuval Yeret

Do It Yourself Agile: Scrum and Kanban - Like Chocolate and Peanutbutter - 0 views

damonpoole.blogspot.com/...kanban-like-chocolate-and.html

agile kanban retrospective scrum

shared by Yuval Yeret on 18 Sep 09 - Cached
  • When doing Kanban, you still need to do the equivalent of planning, assignment, estimation, retrospectives, delivery, etc. In Kanban, all of these activities are decoupled from each other whereas in Scrum they are all coupled to the iteration boundary. How can this be applied to Scrum? Consider retrospectives. If you are just starting with Scrum, you probably have an iteration length of 1 month (or four weeks). From that it follows that you will have a retrospective once per month. If you eventually end up with an iteration length of 1 week, then it follows that you will have a retrospective every week. But this actually seems like the wrong way to set the cadence of retrospectives. Wouldn’t it be better to have the cadence of retrospectives meet the need for them? If it eventually makes sense to do a retrospective every week, doesn’t it make sense to get the benefit of them on a weekly basis when you are just starting Scrum?
Yuval Yeret

tips on reviving retrospectives from the retrospectives yahoo group - 0 views

finance.groups.yahoo.com/...1575

agile retrospectives agilesparksblog

shared by Yuval Yeret on 08 Jul 09 - No Cached
  • Has the team made changes that make a difference to them as a result of the retrospective?
  • Has the team explored a variety of different topics/areas, or do they stick to pretty much the same agenda around continuous improvement? What is the balance of change/improvement work vs. working on the product?
  • For example, try looking at technical practices, teamwork, or customer relationships... choose what ever seems most relevant to bound the discussion. That might help the team dig deeper and find issues that have more significance for them (now...I'm sure the other changes were significant at the time).
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Try a 'speed retrospective'. How quickly can the team get together and find one good, solid improvement to make? Make it exciting and use a stopwatch. I wouldn't do this all the time, but again, what harm to try it once?
  • How about one retrospective where you set yourselves the challenge of generating actions from the "What did we do well" column? In other words, find an action designed to magnify an existing positive rather than remedy an existing negative.
  • How about a 'Show and Tell' retrospective where every team member comes to the meeting with an action item and its explanation already prepared? The retrospective would really be each person presenting their idea in turn.
  • How about a retrospective wherein you challenge yourselves to come with a new approach to retrospectives that is so exciting that people would skip other work activities to attend?
  • I find it very important to revisit the outcome of the past retrospective and celebrate the things the team had been able to do differently.
  • The major thing is to make the changes visible and memorizable for everyone and not assuming that people remember what they decided on in the last retro.
  • Another thing is that I would invite team members to take turns in facilitating the retro. So not always the same person runs the retro (this typically also changes the format and techniques a bit).
  • - Heartbeat Retrospective (google for Boris Gloger)
  • - Temperature Reading
  • - Team Radar Chart
  • - Our project / team / product ship - draw a ship on a flip chart, ask the team what moved the ship forward, what blocked it
  • Just to add a totally different direction: I've made good experiences with having a *long* retrospective every few months. The short retrospectives are great to see the trees and optimize the daily work. A two or even three day retrospective helps the team to step back and watch the forrest instead.
  • It is important to get at least one item done every sprint. If you do the retro, but don't implement any of the actions, this is a tremendous demotivator. Better one thing finished that you can celebrate than 5 unfinished things in the queue.
  • Variety is the spice of life, so some variation is essential to keep the freshnees. Change the moderator, do technical focus once, then organisational, then "improving the fun factor", then go back to a general retro.
Yuval Yeret

EE Times - Using agile methods in medical device development - 0 views

www.eetimes.com/document.asp

medical agile case study

shared by Yuval Yeret on 08 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • FDA and other regulatory agencies fundamentally want to see that your product has safety in mind. To do so, they require complete traceability through the hardware and software. There is even a fairly new standard, IEC 62304, adopted worldwide that is wholly focused on software traceability from requirements through architecture to tests.
  • Medical devices companies are going primarily agile to respond to change and effectively manage technical complexity by collaboratively building solutions with their partners and customers to ultimately deliver what the customer wants before the competition does.
  • demo the new functionality created after each iteration to your customers, using web-based meets. Using these tools enables you to get immediate feedback from your customers throughout the project. Continuous customer feedback reduces the risk of building the wrong solution. The fact is in most cases you can’t make the release cycle more frequent since it includes giving tests to regulatory agencies. This is a tedious process that makes sure the device is safe. Doing the whole release cycle more frequently can be way too time consuming.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • ou could also give a version to select customers as long as it will not be directly used for care or diagnosis on current patients. The idea there is the customer gets the current iteration in house for say a blood analyzer. They could load it with real patient data and test out the new functionality as long as it is not used to diagnose an existing patient, since it has not gone through regulatory
  • agile development has gotten so popular in medical device companies that the AAMI (Association of Medical Instrumentation) is currently working on new guidance for mapping agile to a medical standard called IEC 62304.
  • In conclusion, agile development works and is being used in medical device development. The issue is you need to have a good toolchain that allows for complete traceability across the entire lifecycle in order to comply with standards. It is also very important to integrate and test frequently. This, in turn, leads to the need for build automation. With all of this in place, agile development for medical devices becomes much easier to make work.
Yuval Yeret

How Is Kanban Different From Other Approaches? « AvailAgility - 1 views

availagility.wordpress.com/...ifferent-from-other-approaches

kanban

shared by Yuval Yeret on 17 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Scrum places more emphasis on the project management practices. Kanban, places its emphasis on business and value flow practices.
  • its all the same elephant, but each approach has a different view of it. At the end of the day, its having the most appropriate elephant for any given context that is most important.
  • Kanban can be differentiated by identifying its Primary and Corollary Practices.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Map the Value Stream
  • Visualise the Work.
  • Limit Work in Progress.
  • A Kanban approach will explicitly limit work in progress. This is distinct from managing work in progress through the use if time-boxes
  • Establish a Cadence.
  • A Kanban team will almost certainly use Corollary Practices which may be considered Primary in another process. For example, a high performance Kanban team will inevitably use technical practices from XP, such as TDD and Continuous Integration.
Yuval Yeret

Agile Product Manager in the Enterprise (5): Responsibility 3 - Maintain the ... - 0 views

scalingsoftwareagility.wordpress.com/...3-maintain-the-product-roadmap

agile product_owner product_management

shared by Yuval Yeret on 18 Jun 09 - Cached
  • The Roadmap consists of a series of planned release dates, each of which has a theme and a prioritized feature set.
  • While it is a simple thing mechanically to represent the Roadmap, figuring out the content for anything beyond the next release is another matter entirely. The topic of what else the team plans to ship and when can be a fascinating and contentious topic in agile
  • the easiest way to think about the Roadmap is that it is an output, rather than an input to the Release Planning process.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The dates and themes for the next release are fixed. The features are prioritized and variable.
  • The teams can commit only to the features in the next upcoming release. Releases beyond the next, represent only a best estimate.
  • The Roadmap, then, is a “plan of intent” and is subject to change as development facts, business context and customer needs change. With respect to the upcoming release, perhaps the most important guidance is this:
  • Even though the team has committed to the objectives and we have agreed that the feature set cannot be guaranteed, it is a reasonable expectation that the agile teams will: 1) meet the date 2) accomplish the theme 3) deliver most of the features, and certainly the highest priority ones, with the requisite quality.
  • Anything less would be unprofessional and belie the power, discipline and accountability of our agile enterprise model. Moreover, it will eventually threaten our own empowerment, as failure to deliver will inevitably cause the implementation of various controls to “help us”!
Yuval Yeret

InfoQ article: "Pulling Power: A New Software Lifespan" - 0 views

www.infoq.com/...pulling-power

BDD injection feature injection chrismatts product-ownership-101-list

shared by Yuval Yeret on 03 Jun 09 - Cached
  • how Kanban metaphor from Lean manufacturing and the Feature Injection template play into Behaviour Driven Development, working together to help us identify the most important software, reduce unnecessary artifacts at each stage of development, and produce the minimum necessary to achieve a vision
  • The artifacts signal each role to create further artifacts until the vision is implemented and the business value is earned
  • "Generating reports," he says, "is like lead. It's easy to work with, and it's cheap. It's also heavy, worthless, and drags you down. Developers sink a lot of time into writing report software. Why? Buy it, install it, hack it so it works. Use Excel. Don't spend money writing report software, unless you're the kind of company that sells them to other companies.
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