Benefits of Agile Adoption – from a manager

To help some peers advocate for agile adoption, I prepared an experience report to demonstrate how my old team benefited from XP and Scrum practices. This is an extension and refinement of an earlier post on the benefits of XP.

Team Cohesion

yellow rope with knot by limonada on flickrBefore and during our agile adoption, I informally administered the Gallup Q12 employee engagement survey. It is composed of twelve simple questions. Agreement correlates to retention, customer loyalty, safety records, productivity, and profitability.

From the beginning to the mid-point of our adoption, staff went from a response rate of 70% agreement 30% disagreement to 80% agreement, 15% neutral and 4% disagreement.

The most improvement was in daily opportunities “to do my best” and daily feedback on performance and expectations.

I’m convinced if I had administered the Q12 late in our adoption, we would have had even better results. The key un-addressed concerns were about having a best friend at work and feeling connected to the mission of the company. By 2007 our team grew to include people brought in by personal recommendation of other members of the team and our portfolio included consumer facing work directly for our CEO.

Rather than re-take the Q12, we undertook a 360° performance review. That we did this on our own initiative shows just how much trust we had built with each other.

Test Coverage/Code Quality

Green Light by wiccked on flickrXP practices enforced methodical unit test coverage, mutually arrived at coding conventions, and real-time code inspection by multiple members of the team. The team went from no unit test practice to comprehensive coverage over the business logic and controller layers. (Unit tests against data access and gui were less comprehensive. I don’t intend to get in the middle of that debate here.)

A user story, test-driven approach to development has been shown to reduce defects in final testing by 40%.

XP and Scrum force conversations between the development team and product owner that incentivize all to build quality into the software rather than allowing technical debt to accumulate and relying on downstream QA process to fix the application.

In 2006-2007 there were no business impacting failures of our internally authored software. We were able to function as a project team with no dedicated developer maintenance staff. Change requests were minimal enough that we were able to prioritize them into our project sprints as overhead.

Reduced Risk

While any team has experts, “Agile” practices reduced our reliance on “specialists”. The entire team was capable of working on and maintaining any aspect of the code base. We passed the “bus test”; despite our small size, no project was at risk if any given member of the team became unavailable.

Leadership

Our team raised our skills and began contributing to our field. We write, present and teach at conferences on topics of scrum, XP and platform as well as contributing to open source projects and developer knowledge bases.

Recruiting and Retention

After establishing “Agile” practices we recruited skilled candidates from higher paying positions who desired to work in our culture and with our practices. We received inquiries from as far away as South America and Europe. Despite the reputation of our team and market demand we retained staff.

An additional benefit is that pairing provided an efficient on-boarding process for new hires. Developers joining the team provided immediate contribution. A metrics-based way to demonstrate this is to show that sprint commitments weren’t affected new hires first weeks. I observed that but mainly base this on comments from the team lead and existing members of the team.

Workplace Diversity

A 2006 paper by McDowell, Werner, Bullock and Fernald found that pair programming practice, “may help increase female representation in the field.”

Agile values and practices support a collaborative, empowering and sustainable work place. Such environments support diversity and take advantage of the breadth of experience each worker represents.

Client Satisfaction

We asked for quotes from our clients, vendors and even competitors which we included in our budget presentations (I’ve pretty aggressively scrubbed them):

“Working with the agile Software Development team has been rewarding on many levels…it’s a team that celebrates creativity, organization, listening, feedback, openness, honesty…and is proof positive that a great process results in great product. I look forward to our very regular meetings (I even readjust my travel schedule as much as possible to not miss anything) and am never disappointed. They are an engaging and engaged group of individuals.” – CEO

“[____ saved] half a head in [another team] and a full head in my team.” – VP

“The _______ written by our development team are the guiding-light to our decisions. [third party solution] has a vast wealth of information but no good reporting and our in-house [solution] enables us to divine meaning from the mountain of data.” – VP Traffic Operations

“We also use [third party solution] for all of our broadcast networks but I have heard about your software technology for ____. We currently do that through manual operators but I’d like to understand how you do that more sometime and how it works…” – Senior Executive, Competitor

“Given the complexities of ____ that includes the combined limitations of automation, graphic and traffic systems I believe [the team] has created a solution that has proven to be much more capable than most systems than I’ve worked with.” – Vendor

Frequent Delivery, Adaptability

Throughout 2006-2007 our team of 3-8 developers balanced two simultaneous lines of work on diverse projects built in Microsoft Windows Forms, ASP.NET to SQL Data Analysis Services Data Warehouses, Vista compatible Windows Presentation Foundation and XAML, open source .NET MVC frameworks and Ruby on Rails including a rich windows application built on beta Microsoft Technology.

The team completed eight IT and three consumer projects while doubling head count from 5 to 10 (+2 contractors). We initiated our consumer product initiative and achieved our first release of a rich windows application with a six month allocation of effectively 1.5 – 2.5 developers.

Invention/Innovation

Agile practices evolved from Lean management and associated knowledge creation theory. In this, it shares ancestry with Six Sigma.

Agile is based on empirical not plan-driven process control. It is closer to lean product development than lean industrial manufacturing.

Lean product development models sustained innovation as a process of knowledge creation and conversion within an organization that acquires and shares learning in an cycles within and across teams and up and down from leadership.

Agile fosters true joint work which is the only form of workplace collegiality that advances organizational change and innovation.

Our consumer product was recognized for its design and implementation by Microsoft’s platform and developer evangelist team as well as by the WPF team. It achieved high ratings in usability testing with end users (avg rating 8 of 10) and showed potential to deliver on its revenue targets.

You’re an Experiment

I’m on the management side of the labor divide and yet I’ve never held a position my parents would consider a permanent job. To work these days is effectively to be employed at will.

I once had a senior executive tell me that my team was an experiment. To prove the value of development staff, we had to replace an outsource, maintain their legacy applications, and deliver a challenging new project. If we failed, next year’s budget would go to re-establishing the outsource.

We faced a hard date, skeptical clients and a steep learning curve but we had an honest leader, the means to succeed and a way of measuring it. All we had to do was execute.

I never felt more control over my fate.

Just Enough: Tools for Creating Success in Your Work and LifeA family friend works for Doctors Without Borders. His labor benefits society in ways that will outlive him. In the balancing act that is my life — privileged by world if not New York standards — I’ve deferred, if not entirely foregone legacy. My job is about significance and achievement. Significance comes in providing for my family, not only a biological imperative but a profound joy.

Achievement rests in approaching each year as if it were an experiment. What accomplishment justifies my continued employment? What one thing should I do to materially advance the interests of my employer, our customers and/or my team? It’s the chart of that course that makes me show up in the morning and it’s sightings along the way that allow me to sleep at night.

Product Owner Change – Stop the Line!

What do you do when the fundamental assumptions behind a software project change mid-stream?

My experience before adopting agile practices was people often plugged away at the original plan drifting farther and farther off course.

I’ve been on projects that failed simply because no one had an honest conversation about who had authority to drive changes. How many of us have built something only to have the launch postponed because a senior executive got their first look and over-ruled their under-powered product manager? How many of us have had a project declared failure as a result? How many have seen work shelved? Me. Me. Me.

I’ve found Scrum does a great job of surfacing these issues and forcing the team to deal with them. Product owner is being over-ruled? Sprint integrity not being honored because interruptions and changes? Believe me, a performing scrum team will raise the alarm as quickly as this occurs and force a conversation about who is the product owner and what are the criteria for success.

One possible result? “Stop the line” interrupting the current sprint. Meet with the relevant managers and make the person setting feature priorities accountable for the backlog and the business outcome of the project. Plan a new sprint and re-commence work. The cost of mid-sprint changes is made explicit and responsibility is aligned with authority.

This can benefit everyone. First, the hidden product owner now has the regular feedback and control that reduces the urge for mid-sprint intervention. Second, the team knows who to rally around and why. Third, difficult conversations about what is driving changes and what defines success for the project happen earlier rather than later.

I’m not saying that these changes ensure success. Honestly, a project with mushy business ownership and vision is troubled. What I am saying is that with frequent inspections and a culture of honesty these seeds of failure become very clear to everyone much earlier.

I’ve found that once a team becomes used to satisfying the customer with early and continuous delivery of valuable software. They fight like hell rather than get caught in a familiar pattern of failure.