Winning Hearts and Minds to Agile

Posted on January 25, 2008 by Ken Judy

My colleague, Wendy, posted a quote from our former CEO describing the benefit she gained from collaborating in an Agile environment.

The way to win over an entrepreneur is to out-perform expectations set from painful, past experience.

Before Scrum/XP

…six months later, they deliver what the assignment was. And you look at it and say, “Oh no, that’s not what I wanted.”

With Scrum/XP

…you work on a two-week cycle… You agree on what the priorities are in the meeting. You review the priorities. You evaluate where you are, and you move to the next step…

—Interview with Geraldine Laybourne, CondÃ© Nast Portfolio

[agile] or Else

Posted on January 19, 2008 by Ken Judy

Jeff Sutherland said he was finding more developers who will only work in agile software development teams.

He also said that to his estimation about 10% of shops that claim to be practicing Scrum pass the Nokia test and have self-organized teams, product backlogs prioritized by a product owner and estimated by developers.

And that doesn’t even speak to refactoring, test driven development, pairing, continuous integration, built in quality, acceptance testing, etc.

And that doesn’t speak to knowledge creation and sharing practices across the entire organization, clarity of vision, understanding competitors, collaborating with customers, continuous improvement, and embrace of change.

I’ve come to understand that agile values place demands on development, management and business practices.

Two questions arise from this:

Would you only work in an [agile] shop?
What do you mean by [agile]?

for [agile] feel free to substitute: Lean, XP, Scrum, XP/Scrum, Crystal, Adaptive, etc. etc.

Great Scrums Need Great Product Owners

Posted on January 16, 2008 by Ken Judy

Ilio and my paper is available on the IEEE library site as part of the proceedings of the 41st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS).

Great Scrums Need Great Product Owners: Unbounded Collaboration and Collective Product Ownership

Abstract

Scrum describes a separation of roles; the product owner is accountable for achieving business objectives and the team for technical execution. A pragmatic and collegial relationship between a product owner and team can satisfy the definition of collaboration and honor roles while barely tapping or actually working against the potential of a project and its participants. This paper surveys literature to describe different forms of collaboration, to establish that deep, unbounded collaboration is at the heart of agile values, and that partnerships of high trust and shared risk lead to value and innovation. Finally, this paper incorporates a real- world example of a product owner who, while remaining accountable to the outcome, shared ownership over vision, priorities and execution with her Scrum/XP development team.

HICSS-41

Posted on January 10, 2008 by Ken Judy

I just presented Ilio Krumins-Beens’ [and my paper] on unbounded collaboration between the product owner and development team at the 41st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. (I’ll link off to the paper when the transaction is published on the IEEE site.)

HICSS is an interesting mix of academics and practitioners. On the list of presenters in the agile mini-track were Jeff Sutherland, Stephen Cohen from Microsoft, and Gabrielle Benefield from Yahoo as well as researchers Ann Fruhling from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Kevin Kwiat from the Air Force Research Laboratory, and David F. Rico.

HICSS is an instance where the academy has invited us developers into their living room to discuss what we do, the way we actually do it.

There’s a huge disconnect between what I practice as a software developer and what many institutions of higher learning teach.

Theoretical exercises in waterfall practices are not helpful precursors to TDD, pairing, continuous integration, refactoring, interdisciplinary collaboration, self-organizing teams, etc. etc.

Arguably, they are not even helpful precursors to waterfall as it’s actually practiced. If you think XP requires experienced developers what the heck do you get when you make someone with little experience architect a market trading system in UML!

We need the academy to understand us. They not only train our workforce, their research informs policies, standards and business management practices that shape government and industry expectations.

We need business schools that train prospective CXO’s to build lean businesses that will in turn build out agile/lean IT and product development organizations.

Another big barrier to agile adoption is lack of empirical support for the benefits of specific Lean, Scrum and XP practices. We need original research that correlates to the obvious things: quality, risk mitigation, market performance, productivity and cost reduction.

I’d also really love to see original research on how agile, highly collaborative practices correlate to ethical behavior on the part of individuals and organizations, gender and ethnic diversity, and sustained innovation.