Agile Hacks: Creative Solutions for Common Agile Issues

AT3Session6/9/1610:00AM

AgileHacks:CreativeSolutionsforCommonAgileIssues

Presentedby:

SusanMcNamara

BIOVIA-DassaultSystems

Broughttoyouby:

350CorporateWay,Suite400,OrangePark,FL32073888---268---8770··[email protected]://www.techwell.com/

SusanMcNamaraBIOVIA-DassaultSystemsScrumMasterCertifiedSusanMcNamarahasmorethanthirtyyearsofsoftwaredevelopmentexperience,includingtwelveyearsofagiledevelopment.Susanhasledagileteamsinseveraldifferentsectors,includingGIS,healthcaresupplychain,andpharmaceuticalmanufacturingoperationsintelligence.ShestartedasamemberoftechnicalstaffatBellLaboratoriesbeginningasadeveloperinwaterfalldevelopment,navigatingpagesandpagesofrequirementsfortheAudixvoicemailsystem;transitioningtofeature-drivendevelopment;andfinallytomanagingagile/Scrumandkanbanprojects.

Agile Hacks: Creative

Solutions for Common

Agile Issues Susan McNamara

Dassault Systèmes: BIOVIA

Senior Manager Software Development

June 2016

Topics

What’s a Hack? My Background, My Journey

Stories: Let Them Eat Cake

Release Planning

Trouble with Sprint Planning

Nuts and Bolts of Development

What’s Wrong With our Velocity?

Never Finishing Anything

Teamwork

What’s a Hack?

For Example:

* http://myscienceacademy.org/2013/01/16/50-life-hacks-to-simplify-your-world/

life·hack

/līfˌhak/

Noun informal

noun: life hack

1.a strategy or technique adopted in order to

manage one's time and daily activities in a

more efficient way.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ASmartphone_In_Glass.jpg

Attribution: By Ravithakor23 (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons,

https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode

http://thefunnybeaver.com/life-hacks-for-bachelors/

Attribution: By Josh on November 6, 2014. Life Hacks for Bachelors

Google, labeled for reuse

Life Hacks

Agile Poll

0-1 years

1-3 years

3-5 years

5-10 years

10+ years

Topics

What’s a Hack?

My Background, My Journey Stories: Let Them Eat Cake

Release Planning

Trouble with Sprint Planning

Nuts and Bolts of Development

What’s Wrong With our Velocity?

Never Finishing Anything

Teamwork

My Background

My Journey: From Waterfall to Agile

Member of Technical Staff on the Audix project at Bell

Labs in Colorado

Hart InterCivic - First Brush with Agile

From Aegis Analytical to Dassault Systèmes– Scaling Agile

Topics

What’s a Hack?

My Background, My Journey

Stories: Let Them Eat Cake Release Planning

Trouble with Sprint Planning

Nuts and Bolts of Development

What’s Wrong With our Velocity?

Never Finishing Anything

Teamwork

Stories: Let Them Eat Cake

https://www.flickr.com/search/?l=comm&q=tall%20layer%20cake

Attribution: yosoynuts, July 12, 2008

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/legalcode

Story Issues

Quality of User stories can make or break a sprint

Architectural layers

Too large

Too vague

Story Hacks

The Layer Cake - Develop stories that cut through all architectural layers

Use Splitting Patterns

Reference: http://agileforall.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Story-Splitting-Flowchart-Thumbnail.png

Create stories as a story team

Go through twice

Grooming sessions

Aim for similar sizes – consistent value streams

Use Spikes (judiciously)

Topics

What’s a Hack?

My Background, My Journey

Stories: Let Them Eat Cake

Release Planning Trouble with Sprint Planning

Nuts and Bolts of Development

What’s Wrong With our Velocity?

Never Finishing Anything

Teamwork

Release Planning Issues

Too much to do

It’s all Priority #1

Sizing is hard

Image from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/improveit/1574931134, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode

Release Planning Hacks

Sizing themes is similar, scale is different

Prioritizing tricks

Give the PMs $$ to spend on features

Use formula to calculate business value of Epics

Business Value Calculations

Business Value = (Customer Value + Internal Value) * (Business Risk)

Some Math…

When is 40 != 40 ?

Epic size of 40 does not mean child story points add up to 40!

Topics

What’s a Hack?

My Background, My Journey

Stories: Let Them Eat Cake

Release Planning

Trouble with Sprint Planning Nuts and Bolts of Development

What’s Wrong With our Velocity?

Never Finishing Anything

Teamwork

Sprint Planning Issues

Stories are a mess

Sprint planning sessions are not efficient

Overcommitting

Plans fall apart again and again

Trouble with Sprint Planning

Sprint Planning Hacks

Practice makes (nearly) perfect

Inspect and Adapt – vary the inputs to see what helps

Story Grooming Sessions

Working with PM and other Stakeholders

Use your Velocity

Identify Capacity each time

Heed your Retrospective findings

Book: Agile Retrospectives by Esther Derby and Diane Larson

Topics

What’s a Hack?

My Background, My Journey

Stories: Let Them Eat Cake

Release Planning

Trouble with Sprint Planning

Nuts and Bolts of Development What’s Wrong With our Velocity?

Never Finishing Anything

Teamwork

Nuts and Bolts of Development

• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ANuts_and_Bolts_sequence.jpg

• Attribution: © Tomas Castelazo, www.tomascastelazo.com / Wikimedia Commons, via Wikimedia Commons

• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode

Development issues

Problems with Quality?

Legacy Code Challenges

Integration Issues

Development Hacks

Unit Testing

Test Driven Development

Functional tests

Continuous integration!

Automate, Automate, Automate

Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration

Use Case Tests

UI TestsSmoke TestsAutomated Deployment

Functional Tests

Unit TestsStatic Code

Analysis

Topics

What’s a Hack?

My Background, My Journey

Stories: Let Them Eat Cake

Release Planning

Trouble with Sprint Planning

Nuts and Bolts of Development

What’s Wrong With our Velocity? Never Finishing Anything

Teamwork

What’s Wrong With Our Velocity?

• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peking_To_Paris_Autorace_(1907)_Attribution_Unk_(RESTORED)_(4074429874).jpg

• Attribution: By ralph repo [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode

Common Velocity issues

Can be constrained by QA or Dev or PM

Ignoring Past Performance

Velocity Hacks

Account for Capacity

Share Duties

Educate

Annotate Sprint during Retrospective

Identify Pain Points

Gather Metrics and Make Visible

Topics

What’s a Hack?

My Background, My Journey

Stories: Let Them Eat Cake

Release Planning

Trouble with Sprint Planning

Nuts and Bolts of Development

What’s Wrong With our Velocity?

Never Finishing Anything Teamwork

Never Finishing Anything

• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thai_House_Under_Construction_Trat.JPG

• Attribution: By Khaosaming (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)

or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode

Stories not getting finished

Bugs found late in cycle

Late Stakeholder feedback

Not having a Done-Done agreement

Getting to Done Hacks

Define your Done-Done agreement

Revisit often

User Story Acceptance Criteria

Stakeholder acceptance techniques

User Story Done-Done example

A Test Case for each Acceptance Criteria

Code is checked in and tested in a build

Code Review has been completed and addressed

Unit tests have been completed

Exploratory testing has been completed

No Known Bugs

Sponsor has reviewed and accepted the story

If required, an upgrade path has been defined and documented

User Documentation is completed and reviewed

……

Topics

What’s a Hack?

My Background, My Journey

Stories: Let Them Eat Cake

Release Planning

Trouble with Sprint Planning

Nuts and Bolts of Development

What’s Wrong With our Velocity?

Never Finishing Anything

Teamwork

Teamwork

Is everyone a Specialist?

Do people just care about

“their work”?

Teamwork Hacks

More pairing

Trade off jobs

Story Teams

Innovation Sprints

Celebrate your accomplishments

Summary

Review Pain Points

Any Hacks you want to share?