Beyond the Scrum - I

Beyond the ScrumImplementing Lean Software Practices in Your Organization

Adam Monago, [email protected]

Better Software Conference

June 11, 2009, Las Vegas, Nevada

1Saturday, June 13, 2009

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Agenda• About ThoughtWorks

• Why IT Projects Fail

• Failures with Agile; Why Scrum is not sufficient on its own

• Elements of Successful Approaches

• What is Lean and How do I do it?

• What are the real benefits and how to ThoughtWorks Studios tools support

these objectives?


About• Founded in 1993

• Global Delivery from US, UK, Canada, Australia, India and China

• 1000+ employees

• $132M+ in revenue (2008)

• High End IT Consulting. Ideation to Production

• Application Development, Support & Evolution

• Build and Deploy: Enterprise Class, Business Critical Software

• ThoughtWorks Studios: Focused on creating Products for Agile practitioners

• World Leaders in use of Agile Software Development techniques

• Expertise: Java, .NET, SOA, Ruby, Open Source

We literally write the books on Agile and technology innovation


What we want you to walk away withThe right combination of practices can help you...

...maximize your team’s throughput by monitoring your team’s limits and focusing on bottlenecks.

...reduce cycle time in your release management process through parallelization and immediate notifications of build and deployment failures.

...improve product quality and reduce churn by implementing acceptance test driven development practices


Top 10 Reasons IT Projects Fail

Source: Standish Group

Hard-Working, Focused Staff

Clear Vision & Objectives

Ownership

Competent Staff

Smaller Project Milestones

Realistic Expectations

Proper PlanningClear Statement of Requirements

Executive Management

Support

User Involvement


issues

long delivery cycles

requirements expired

time-to-market

scope dysfunction

estimation pain

scope bloat

lack of tool& resources

in QA

roles & responsibilitiesconfusion

increased time-slicing

reactive tasking

PMOchallenges

limited purview

reduced value

higher testing costs

reduced test coverage

internal disconnect

lack of communication

silo-integration pain

lost know-how

higherproject risk

must reinvest in intellectual capital


Agile: Flipping the Axes


Agile: Flipping the Axes


Many flavors of Agile• None offer a complete solution

• XP, Scrum, DSDM, Crystal, and Lean (among others) all offered valuable

methods that contribute to a more effective way of running projects

• In the market, Scrum has clearly been the most successful in terms of adoption


Why has Scrum been adopted by so many?• Easy to learn

• Many parallels to existing organizational concepts*

• Does not address the technology issues

* Bowley, Rob “Lean is the new Scrum, and it will fail for the same reasons “ http://blog.robbowley.net/2008/11/15/lean-scrum/


http://blog.robbowley.net/2008/11/15/lean-scrum/

http://blog.robbowley.net/2008/11/15/lean-scrum/

Agile Failures: What’s going wrong?"Agile is hard, and you can't master it by sitting through a two-day course.

... if you don't use agile engineering practices, if you don't have high-bandwidth communication, and if you don't include a strong customer voice,

you're not going to succeed...

Scrum is popular because it's easy--and that's part of the problem.

James Shore, “The Decline and Fall of Agile”, 14, Nov, 2008


What are the essential Agile Engineering Practices?• Continuous Integration

• Test Driven Development

• Refactoring

• Pair Programming

When they are not applied, you run the risk of undermining all of your other process and

management efforts!


Components of a successful agile implementation

Disciplined

Engineering Practices (XP)

Adaptive

Management Philosophy

(SCRUM)

Lean

Principles


So....what exactly is Lean all about?• In a nutshell...

•Managing how much you are doing at all times to make sure your team is working optimally as a whole system

•Making sure every single item you are working on is uniquely valuable; If it is not completed, it is money down the drain


Philosophical parallels between “Lean” and “Agile”


Elimination of Waste is Key


This is getting attention!

McKinsey “Applying Lean to Application Development and Maintenance”, 2007

Companies can reduce application development and maintenance costs by up to 40%


Why ThoughtWorks Studios?Metrics and Visibility

Collaboration

Business Agility

!!Real time status of Programs, Project, and Initiatives

!!Adhere to Approval and Governance Requirements !!Requirement to Code Traceability

!!Next Floor or Bangalore

!!Frequent Business & IT Stakeholder Interaction !!Leverage Right People, Right Place, Right Time

!!Adapt to Local Conditions

!!Support Various Implementation Approaches !!Reduce Feedback Cycles to Shorten -> Time to Live


Why ThoughtWorks Studios?

Mingle, Cruise and Twist have all been designed to provide visibility to teams so that they can resolve impediments in their process and improve flow and

communication.

They support whatever process decisions you make, and ENCOURAGE you to adapt.


“The ideal work planning process should always provide the development

team with best thing to work on next, no more and no less.” -Corey Ladas, “Scrum-ban”

Pull systems and Kanban


Use metrics to measure flow and to detect where bottlenecks occur


Parallelize what you can


Tests should be easily maintained by the entire team as they adapt


Reinforce good practices and people with the right tools

•! One source of project data across teams

•! Reducing cycle time and getting fast feedback should be the number one priority

•! Tools should be used by everyone on the team to be effective

•! Management driven metrics


Thank You!


Documents

Beyond the Scrum - I