Presented at #BarCampCHS 2012

1. What Do You Do When
Agile Is Too Slow?
{doug.thomas@pokitdok.com} @douglascthomas

2. Doug Thomas
 Software engineer for less than 20 years
 Work Environments:
 Start ups
 Large corporations and financial institutions
 Government contractors
 Certified:
 PSP
 CMMi
 IEEE
 Scrum Master
 Crazy

3. A start up is like jumping out of
a airplane without a
parachute, not knowing what
the parachute is, but figuring it
out and building it on the way
down, and then landing safely.

4. Software Engineering Process In a
Start Up Environment
 You have to know the rules before you can break
them
 Finding the minimal viable process

5. So What Are The Rules?

6. Waterfall
 Pros
 One of the first attempts to bring engineering principles into
software development
 Big Design Up Front
 Cons
 People have no idea what they want
 Implementation limitations affect design

7. Spiral Model
 Pros
 Iterative prototyping
 Brings in Risk Management
 Cost estimation becomes easier
 Cons
 Suited for large projects
 Iterations lasts from 6 months to 2 years

8. Rational Unified Process (RUP)
 Pros
 Iterative
 Combines best practices with a structured method
 Cons
 Overly structured method
 Process heavy

9. Personal Software Process (PSP)
 Pros
 Focuses on removing estimation biases and reducing defects by
applying statistics to your software development method
 Continuous improvement at a personal level
 Cons
 Tedious timekeeping
 Poor tool support
 Geared to mid-range developers (5-10 years experience)

10. Capability Maturity Model (CMMi)
 Pros
 Provides detailed standards and best practices for all Process
Areas in the software development lifecycle
 Very rigorous
 Works well in a government contracting environment
 Cons
 Process heavy? It depends
 Institutionalization

11. Agile Manifesto
 Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
 Working software over comprehensive documentation
 Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
 Responding to change over following a plan

12. Scrum
 Pros
 Quick iteration cycles let you fail early
 Daily standup lets everyone know what’s up
 Developer’s are empowered
 Cons
 Proscribed meetings take up a significant fraction of the overall
lifecycle time
 Tracking stories, tasks and burn down takes time, or why the
Scrum Master should NOT be a developer

13. Cowboy Coding
 Pros
 Free-form working environment encourages
experimentation, learning, and free distribution of results
 Developers are responsible for removing roadblocks
 Small projects may be burdened by heavy software management
methodologies
 Cons
 Lack of release structure
 Inexperienced developers (hackers)
 Uncertain design requirements
 Incompleteness

14. Minimum Viable Process?

15. Requirements
 Communication
 Campfire
 Skype
 Google Hangouts
 Requirements Management
 Trac
 Basecamp
 JIRA

16. Analysis and Design
 Design documentation
 Big ass whiteboards
 Mobile phone camera
 Campfire

17. Implementation
 Code
 Lightweight frameworks
 Everything is a draft
 Ship it
 Code Reviews
 You are not your code
 Pull requests
 Campfire, Skype
 Zero Overhead Principle

18. Verification
 Test Driven Design
 Unit tests
 Nose
 UI tests
 Selenium
 On-demand live testers
 uTest

19. CM
 Code Management
 Git
 Release Management
 Fabric
 Git
 Continuous Integration
 Jenkins

20. Improvement
 Metrics
 Analytics
 A/B tests