Fundamentals of Agile

Fundamentals of Agile
Ceedee Doyle
Agile Consultant
To do: On separate post-its,

write 3 things you want to
know about Agile and put by
“What I want to get out of this
course” on the wall.
Course Objective
To understand the Agile principles, the mindset, and basic

practices, so you can participate in an agile environment.
Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Fundamentals of Agile: Agenda
History & Mindset
Introduction Quality
History & Mindset Customer & User Involvement
Individuals & Interactions Backlog
Value-driven Development Estimation & Velocity
Scrum Planning & Adapting
Immersion Exercise

Origins of Agile
Kanban
Scrum DSDM
FDD
XP
Specification by
Example
Continuous
Delivery

Prevailing management approach
•Plan to execute, execute the plan

•Focus on
• removing variability
• economies of scale
•Result
• Efficient mass production
• Inability to change
• Long lead times
• Business becomes predictable

"Scientific Management”
•Frederick Taylors key beliefs:

• Workers work less than they could
• Management fails to structure work effectively and provide incentives.
•Taylors solution:
• Sub-divide the work into tasks
• Analyse each task & schedule for optimal efficiency
• Assumption: reconstructed tasks = an efficient job.
• Management arrange work & pay for the tasks completed
Taylor promised to reconcile labour and
capital. Shop Management (1903), is
considered the first book on management

Degrees of complexity – the Cynefin Framework
Simple
everything is known
Complicated
More is known than unknown
Complex
More is unknown than known
Chaos
Very little is known

The Iron Triangle
Scope
(Features,
Functionality)
Quality
Resources Schedule
(Cost, budget) (Time)
Variability is inherent in complex work. Choose where you would like to place
variability.

Methods and
Kanban
Tools
Scrum DSDM
XP FDD
Practices
Specification by
Example
Continuous
Delivery
Principles
Values
Mindset
Core set of Values and Principles
People are central
Agile challenges us to think differently

The move to Agile
Planning Analysis Specialists
Design Building Testing Release Individuals
Milestones
Specifications
TIME
? ? ?
✓
✓
✓ Multi-Disciplined
TIME
✓ Teams
Business Value
✓ Working application
✓
✓

Agile Manifesto - 2001
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:
individuals and interactions over processes and tools
working software over comprehensive documentation
customer collaboration over contract negotiation
responding to change over over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right,

we value the items on the left more.

Origins of Agile
Lean has
evolved in
isolation from
Kanban Agile but has
Scrum DSDM had a profound
XP
FDD impact in recent
Specification by years.
Example
Continuous
Delivery

Principles of Lean

• Take an econom
Flow • Actively manag
• Reduce Batch S
• Apply WIP cons
• Cadence and
synchronisation
• Exploit Variabili
• Fast feedback
• Decentralise co

The Rise of the Agile Mindset
Pragmatism
Thirst for knowledge
Quality
Willingness to fail

Experiencing the mindset - Ball Game
• Rules
• You are one team.
• Each ball must pass through each team member’s hands at
least once.
• Dropped balls are not counted.
• Each ball must have air-time and go up before it goes down
• You cannot pass a ball to someone directly to your left or right
• The end point must also be the start point.
• You cannot pass the balls in a container.
• You are welcome to use anything in the room
Ball Game
• Objective = throughput with quality

• Initial one-off planning meeting: 1 minute
• Then 5 Sprints made up of
− Sprint = 2 minutes
− Retrospective = 1 minute
• I will record your progress
Sprint Planned itActual Quality Retrospective
(velocity)
1
2
3
4
5
Agile In Context - phases of learning
Shu Ha Ri
Follow the Break You are

rules the rules the rules

Individuals & Interactions
Immersion Exercise

Shift in Roles – Team

Shift in Roles – Self Organisation

Shift in Roles – Self Organisation

What makes a great team?
•Highly focused
•Shared standards and expectations
•Total appreciation of each individual
•Draw strength from their differences
•Brutally honest
•Always learning

How to interact with the team

Shift in Roles

Tools to help us develop mutual learning mindset
Advocacy Inquiry
State your
Ask open
views with
questions
examples

Open Questions
… you idiot

Examples of open questions
● What’s the benefit of this problem?
● What did you learn?
● What’s the worst that could happen?
● Who else will benefit?
● If you weren’t scared, what would you
● What are you grateful for?
do?
● How would you like it to be?
● What would help look like?
● What’s in the way?
● What will your impact be 100 years from
● What’s stopping you?
now?
● What does this mean to you?
● What assumptions could you have made
● What would you do if you had
here?
unlimited resources?
● How can you learn what you need to
● What’s the best that could happen?
know about this?
● In the bigger scheme of things,
● Where would you like this conversation
how important is this?
to go?
Creating Shared Understanding 20
MIN
Self-organise into 4 groups.

Select reading material in workbook:
1. Physical work environments 1. Reading (5 mins)
2. Preparing (10 mins)
2. Sharing Knowledge
3. Presentation/poster
3. Techniques for shared understanding
(2-3mins)
4. Understanding communication barriers

Section wrapup

Value Driven Development
Immersion Exercise

Understanding and Measuring Value
“
”
Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Copyright 2016

Value is…
Noun
• Relative worth, merit, or importance
Verb
• To consider with respect to worth, excellence, usefulness, or
importance

View of a Scrum Project
Sprint review
• Are we still building the right
thing?
Business Value
• Is ROI still valid?

• Has market changed?
• Is this project still justified?
• Is margin cost of next feature
> marginal benefit?
Spend ($)
80% of features delivered
for 20% budget – release
now
Business Value Game
Vera Peeters
Pascal Van Cauwenberghe
Portia Tung
© Vera Peeters and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe

Download from http://www.xp.be
Scrum
Immersion Exercise

Fill in the blanks Increment - actual MIN
Product Owner - the working stuff

person who is responsible produced during Team – the people doing
‘Scrum’ is used in two ways: for the outcome of the the sprint the work
• a framework to be agile work the team produces.
• a daily stand-up meeting
Review/Show&Tell - meeting
Sprint - a timebox during which where the team show what
Release planning - the team do work usually they’ve completed to anyone
meeting where the team between 1-4 weeks who has an interest
works out the big picture
for the next few sprints Scrum Master - the person who keeps
an eye on the agile process and makes Product Backlog - the
sure it’s working list of work to be done
Sprint Backlog - the list of work the
team commits to doing this sprint
Retrospective - a meeting at the end of Sprint planning - meeting at the
a sprint where the team thinks about start of a sprint where the team
Stand-up - a daily time where the what’s working and what isn’t and adapt works out what they will do
team coordinates their work their process to suit themselves

Scrum Review
Stakeholders
Scrum
Master
Product Sprint Daily

Owner Backlog Scrum
< 1 month
Fixed duration
Ordered & Refined
Scope negotiable
Sprint
Increment
Planning DONE
READY
Sprint
Retrospective Sprint
Development Review
Product Team
Backlog X-functional &
self-organising

Day 2
Fundamentals of Agile
Ceedee Doyle
Agile Consultant
Immersion Exercise

How agile is your organisation?
Business Delivery Operations Customer

Waterfall Scrum Waterfall
Large, up front plan batch Minimise change
Fixed requirements Break-fix culture
Fixed project budgets Cost centre culture
Change discouraged ITIL
“No stuff-ups” culture Process in batches
“Don’t challenge” culture

How agile is this organisation?
Experiment
Business to validate Delivery Operations Customer
assumptions &
Lean Planning test market Scrum Continuous Delivery
Concept/Vision Quality infrastructure

Accept ambiguity Automation
Strong customer focus Value centre
Incremental budget Flow driven delivery
Safe-to-fail culture Customer focus
empirical business decisions measure

Validated learning: reduced business risk, stronger customer focus

Iterative & Incremental
1 2 3
© Jeff Patton, all rights reserved, www.AgileProductDesign.com

Iterative & Incremental
1 2 3 4 5
© Jeff Patton, all rights reserved, www.AgileProductDesign.com

Minimum Viable Product
Figure 4.5 ,Lean Enterprise; Humble, Molesky and O’Reilly; , 2014

Sound familiar?

How does it work?
Kanban = Signal Card
Kanban
Kanban
Kanban
Kanban
Kanban Kanban
Rate of inflow always equals rate of outflow in this system

Work In Progress
34 11 42

Kanban Board

Flow

Batch Size - cost of stored up releases
Waiting for release
Team
Production batch size Transfer batch size

Section wrapup – Value-driven development

Customer & User Involvement
Immersion Exercise

Feedback
• Bad feedback is not useful

• Good or bad feedback at any stage can be useful.
• You don’t have to act on all feedback.
• Without feedback you can’t act on it.
• Collecting feedback will have a cost to it.
• Users are more than just end-users and include service /
support, administrators and integrators.

Defining the Customer
● Internal User $$$

● Buyer
● Business Owner/ Sponsor
● External User
Who pays the bill?

What do they need?

User Involvement

Backlog
Immersion Exercise

3 simple truths
1. You can’t gather all the requirements up front

2. The requirements you do gather will change
3. There is always more to do than time and money will allow
- Agile Samurai, Jonathan Rasmusson

Planning – From Vision to story
Vision
Roadmap
Release
Vision
Sprint
Roadmap
Release
Daily
Iteration
Daily
(15 min
Standup)

Vision - Lean Canvas

The big picture - Story Mapping/MVP
By arranging story cards spatially, we can tell bigger stories
Add task-centric stories in under each activity in chronological order left to

right.
time

By arranging story cards spatially, we can tell bigger stories
Overlap user tasks vertically if a user may do one of several tasks at

approximately the same time
time
© 2006-2008 Jeff Patton, All rights reserved, www.agileproductdesign.com

Identify releases in a Story Map by slicing horizontally
time
necessary
less first release
optionality
optional second release
more third release

optional
© 2006-2008 Jeff Patton, All rights reserved, www.agileproductdesign.com

*
What is a Product Backlog?
 A prioritised features list

 Contains short descriptions of all desired functionality
• Can be a User Story, use case, feature, function, requirement,
enhancement, or fix
first release
 Single source of requirements
 Evolves and changes over time as more is learnt
 Is a vehicle for starting conversations
first release

Who can add items to the backlog?
? ? ?

The Product Backlog Iceberg
Fine-grained, detailed requirements

Sprints ready for consumption in the next High priority
iteration e.g. small user stories
Medium-grained requirements
Release e.g. larger user stories
Coarse-grained requirements
e.g. epics Low priority
Future Release
Original content copyright (c) Kane Mar and used with permission.
Invisible backlog

Visible backlog

Breakdown work
Feature
Feature
Epic Feature
Feature
Feature

What are User Stories?
The three C ’s of User Stories:
•C ard
•C ondition(s) of satisfaction
•C onversation

Story Anatomy - Description
As a [role]
I want to [goal]
So that [benefit]

Example

Breakdown work
Id: 1
Title: Search courses
As a potential student
I want to search for courses
So that I can find courses that interest me
Acceptance Criteria:
1. When searching by topic, I am shown all courses with a topic containing the search text.
2. My Search test may contain multiple words
3. I am shown a helpful message if the search test is too short
Scenario: Search by topic

Given there are 240 courses which do not have the topic "biology"
And there are 2 courses A001, B205 that each have "biology" as one of the topics
When I search for "biology"
Then I should see the following courses:
| Course code |
| A001 |
| B205 |

Estimation & Velocity
Immersion Exercise

Agile Estimation
• Human are not good at “out of thin air” estimating

• Human brain better suited to comparative techniques
• Many perspectives useful
• Common Story Point scales:

− Dogs (Chihuahua, Fox Terrier, Lab, St Bernard…)
− Tee‐Shirt Sizes: S, M, L, and XL
− Fibonacci sequence: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21
Original content copyright (c) Kane Mar and used with permission.
Affinity Estimating
• Used to estimate large number of user stories
• How
− Arrange the stories in order of size, without
talking.
− Then place some “number categories”
around the list of stories
• Benefits
− Quick and easy
− Feels very natural
− The entire decision making process is very
visible
− Positive experience rather than a
confrontational one
Story Points

Planning & Adapting
Immersion Exercise

What is Velocity?
• Measure of Team’s progress per iteration

• Number of “Done” Story Points per Sprint
• Used ONLY for

− Capacity Planning
− Deriving possible project duration and extrapolating schedule
• Estimating Velocity:
− Use historical values – we prefer empirical methods!
− Make a forecast then run an iteration (last resort)
The Burndown Chart
• Daily summation of work remaining (not work completed) in Sprint

• Post for high visibility

The Burndown Chart
Planned
time per
day
Time on
outside
tasks
Planned
time on
project
Actual
time
on project

Enhanced Product/Release Burndown
Effort in story points
Sprint – Average velocity 40 story points/sprint

Section wrapup – Planning & Adapting

Immersion Exercise
Immersion Exercise

Reality Check
“The problem we face has nothing to do with process and technology, but
with people
Scrum and Agile are based on the hypothesis that there is no meta-solution
for software development, just a framework within which we will be empirical
– inspect and adapt
This is very frustrating to those looking for procedures and final answers”
- Ken Schwaber

Fosbury Flop, 1968 Olympics
• In 1968, Dick Fosbury came out of obscurity

in Oregon to win the high jump by 3.5 inches.
Jumpers now needed the Fosbury Flop to
win.
• Changing from the old style was so hard that

even by 1980, there were only a handful of
people who had perfected the technique,
despite the reward of winning.

Resources
• Scrum.org - the home of Scrum and the Scrum Guide – www.scrum.org

• Jeff Sutherland - http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com
• Mountain Goat Software - http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com
• Networks - Agile Professionals Network

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Fundamentals of Agile

To do: On separate post-its,

To understand the Agile principles, the mindset, and basic

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2016

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

•Plan to execute, execute the plan

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

•Frederick Taylors key beliefs:

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

People are central

Agile challenges us to think differently

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

individuals and interactions over processes and tools

working software over comprehensive documentation

customer collaboration over contract negotiation

responding to change over over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right,

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2016

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Thirst for knowledge

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

• Objective = throughput with quality

Follow the Break You are

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2016

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Self-organise into 4 groups.

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2016

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Copyright 2016

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

• Is ROI still valid?

© Vera Peeters and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2016

Product Owner - the working stuff

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Product Sprint Daily

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2016

Business Delivery Operations Customer

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Concept/Vision Quality infrastructure

empirical business decisions measure

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

© Jeff Patton, all rights reserved, www.AgileProductDesign.com

© Jeff Patton, all rights reserved, www.AgileProductDesign.com

Figure 4.5 ,Lean Enterprise; Humble, Molesky and O’Reilly; , 2014

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Assurity Consulting Limited • Commercial in Confidence • Company Presentation Nov 2014

Kanban = Signal Card