Agile
Learn as you go
Mar 2024, by Ulf Schneider
Start with play
The ball point game
Play as a team with a bucket of balls
- Count the number of balls touched by everyone in the team within a single iteration (1 min)
- You cannot pass the ball to your left-hand or right-hand neighbour
- A ball dropped to the floor cannot be counted anymore
- Play five iterations (each: 2 min planning, 1 min play)
How was it for you?
Did you feel save in the group?
Would you have expected the outcome?
If you had the planning time of all iterations combined …
… would you have achieved the same outcome?
Agile is at home where
more is unknown than known
The Stacey matrix
Uncertainty requires learning
Transparency
↓
Inspection
↓
Adaptation
What process model will
help us best in that situation?
Waterfall process
Going through all stages might take a year
In the waterfall process
the redo of a previous step is an accident
The waterfall process
makes learning expensive
Iterative process
A cycle takes 2 to 6 weeks.
The iterative process
is a learning machine
The iterative process
is a vehicle to limit work in progress
The iterative process
makes planning more simple
The iterative process
is a container for self-organization
The iterative process
is a safety net
Within your iteration
give room to understand the problem you are trying to solve
The double diamond
In real life, the double diamond might look like this
Whatever you do,
use short cycles and complete something meaningful in each cycle
Self-organization
Self-organization is a force of life
We want to make use of self-organization by
giving it a direction, and not micro-manage it
Plan
Have an overarching objective and break it down into key results to be achieved within 2 or 3 months
Do
Deliver towards the key results with limited work in progress
Check
Verify your results
Act
Adapt to incorporate your learnings
Then, repeat
PDCA in practice
- Inspect and adapt your product and your process regularly
- In the simplest form, talk to each other as a team and decide about one improvement at a time
- You might want to give retromat.org a try
- Then cut through the noise by taking action
Limit work in progress (WIP)
The WIP game
Write down line by line and measure time
→
multitask
abcdefghi
123456789
Write down column by column and measure time
↓
multitask
abcdefghi
123456789
Which approach is faster?
Which approach reduces errors?
Limiting work in progress will
increase quality and speed up your work
Sprints in Scrum and limits in Kanban are a way of limiting work in progress
In Agile, the process is servant, not leader
Agile is about you – define your world!
The Taylor tub
Work is for humans like what a net is for a spider
—Otl Aicher
Be an artist and challenge the status quo
—Seth Godin
Team
Diversity?
The team decides how much work can be accomplished
Google tech talk with Ken Schwaber: www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyNPeTn8fpo
Keep the team size below 10
Because communication lines grow exponentially:
n(n−1)/2
Use feature self-selection in your team
What if you need more than one team to deliver a thing?
Scaling Agile
Conway´s law
Your system architecture will mirror your organization´s communication structure
Conway´s law in practice
Small and distributes teams lead to a modular service architecture.
Large co-located teams lead to a monolithic architecture.
Seek for loosely coupled teams
Agile will scale itself
You do not need a scaling framework
Teams will spread word about useful practices and listening teams will adapt
Take this with you
Agile means completing meaningful things in short intervals – to foster learning – while collaborating as a team
Enjoy!
Materials
- scrumguides.org, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland
- retromat.org, Corinna Baldauf
- The People´s Scrum, Tobias Mayer
- Denkwerkzeuge der Höchstleister, Wohland und Wiemeyer
- Agile Software Development with Scrum, Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle
- Extreme Programming Explained, Kent Beck
- The Enterprise And Scrum, Ken Schwaber
- Scrum et al., Google tech talk with Ken Schwaber, www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyNPeTn8fpo
- Shape up, Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters, by Ryan Singer
- Double diamond design process model, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Diamond_(design_process_model)
- Saving Your Web Workflows with Prototyping, Matthias Ott
- Creating Great Teams, How Self-Selection Lets People Excel, Sandy Mamoli and David Mole
- Lean from the Trenches, Hendrik Kniberg
- Kanban, David J. Anderson
- User Story Mapping, Jeff Patton
- Turn the Ship Around, David Marquet
- Linchpin, are you indispensible?, Seth Godin
- Measure What Matters, John Doerr
- The balanced organization, Ulf Schneider, ulfschneider.io/2017-02-26-balanced-organization/
- Scrum and architecture, Ulf Schneider, ulfschneider.io/2011-06-27-scrum-and-architecture/
Image sources
- Otl Aicher portrait 1953, by Florian Aicher, HfG-Archiv, Museum Ulm
- Seth Godin portrait, by Brian Bloom
- You are important, by George Pagan III, unsplash.com/de/fotos/2nbIfDeT4t4
- Self-organization, A flock of auklets exhibit swarm behaviour en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_behaviour#/media/File:Auklet_flock_Shumagins_1986.jpg
- Team communication lines, getlighthouse.com/blog/developing-leaders-team-grows-big/
- Book cover of Creating Great Teams by Sandy Mamoli and David Mole
Agile Learn as you go Mar 2024, by Ulf Schneider
