Future is Agile

David & Oliver

• David: davidtanzer.net, @dtanzer
• Oliver: source-knights.com, @sourceknights
• both independent software consultants
• both striving for simplicity in software development

Copyright © 2010 Source-Knights.com

"Engineers are hired to create
David & Oliver
business value, not to
program things.
Patrick McKenzie


Defining Agile

•
•
•
•
•
•

Responsibility / Trust
Flexibility
People & Interactions
Continuous Delivery / Buildability
Business Value / Quality
Continuous Feature Flow vs. strict dates


Agenda

• Companies
• Teams
• Developers


Voting

39%
“Our company says we are agile but it’s not
really agile”

http://jaxenter.de/polls/Wie-gut-funktioniert-bei-Ihnen-Agile-Softwareentwicklung-167431


Short history

Companies


Time


Cycle Time & Deployment

• Daily Deployment
• possible?
• really needed?



• Long cycle time
•
•
•
•

solve last year’s problems
late ROI
vulnerable to competition
impact/visibility of an issue


Quality



"Worried that TDD will slow down
J. B. Rainsberger


Quality vs. speed

• low quality slows you down
• technical debt

• impact on the future
=> Quality AND speed

The general principle of software quality is:
Improving quality reduces development cost.
You don’t have to choose between quality, cost and timethey all go hand in hand.
Steve McConnell


Maintaining quality

• Manually testing
• Test department
=> not sufficient for short cycles
• Test driven development
• Specification by example
• Pair programming / Code reviews
=> fast feedback


Maintaining quality

• external feedback via early delivery


Short history

Teams


Self organisation
“Hierarchy is great for maintaining predictability and
repeatability. It simplifies planning and makes it easier to
control a large group of people from the top down, which
is why military organizations rely on it so heavily.
But when you’re an entertainment company that’s spent
the last decade going out of its way to recruit the most
intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth, telling
them to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates
99 percent of their value.”
Valve Handbook for new Employees


Responsibility

“Why does your desk have wheels?
Think of those wheels as a symbolic reminder that you
should always be considering where you could move
yourself to be more valuable.”
Valve Handbook for new Employees


Responsibility

Pull


Pull

• let the experts decide
• the team knows what they can do
(at least they should ;))
• better distribution of workload
• less idle time

• helps optimizing the flow
• helps dealing with technical debt by the team


Pull

Own
Quality!


This surgery is hard at the budget.
Can you reduce the costs by
skipping something simple?
We can skip washing hands...
(just list it as technical debt)

Pull

No!


Own Quality

•
•
•
•
•

Refactoring
Test driven development
Pair Programming
Overload of tasks
Bug managing vs fixing


Continuous
improvement

Own Quality


Continuous improvement

•
•
•
•
•

retrospectives
coding dojos
skill meeting
communities of practice
look beyond one’s own nose


business@davidtanzer.net
Continuous improvement
oliver.szymanski@source-knights.com


• (c) 2013 Oliver Szymanski & David Tanzer
• Image credits
•
•
•
•
•

Idea:
Delivery:
Bomb:
Wolf:
Leopards:

• All other photos: David Tanzer


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