Agile software development - Beyond Projects - ULL

Agile Software Development:
Beyond projects
Romén Rodríguez Gil
@romenrg - www.romenrg.com
2019

Who am I?
Agile Software Development, beyond projects Romén Rodríguez Gil (@romenrg)

About: startups, digital products, management, software development, agility...

Where am I currently working?

Professional Groups I co-organize

Agile Software Development:
- First, a few questions….
Romén Rodríguez Gil
@romenrg - www.romenrg.com
2019

1) How many of you have been paid to write software?

2) How many of you have worked in Software Development
Teams of more than 3 people?

3) Can you think of 3 differences between building a house
and building software?

4) What do you know about Agile Software Development?

The problems with the waterfall model
Assuming we can know
everything at the beginning
of the project is a false
premise in software
Sequential stages make
changes hard to
implement

This caused Agile Software Development to emerge

Manifesto for Agile Software Development

And this change is not just for software development

Agile, DevOps and Lean Startup are aligned
Software
Delivery Agility
Software Dev
Agility
Scrum
XP
Business Agility

Is this applicable to all circumstances?

Products vs projects
More on this:
● https://martinfowler.com/articles/products-over-projects.html
● https://martinfowler.com/articles/agile-aus-2018.html
○ Video: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/agile-2018/
● https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2018/08/28/CraftsmanshipMovement.html
Highlights on product-mode:
● Teams are funded, not projects
● Favors in-house development vs outsourcing
● Continuous process
○ Evolution, there is no end
○ Iterative and incremental approach is natural
● Teams stay longer together
● Technical excellence matters
● Products allow scaling sales without scaling costs
proportionally
● Success is deﬁned differently
○ No focus on agreed-upon scope, time and budget
○ Focus: business value, customers, features & quality
○ Adaptability is key, learning as well
○ Working on increments, pivoting, re-prioritizing while
learning from the market; caring about quality

Bringing agility to product development

Agility in product development
● The product owner prioritizes the backlog
○ Based on user feedback, market changes and business strategy
● The team works on cycles
○ Each cycle ends with a new product increment
● Vertical development
○ Always building working software
○ Building across all the stack
○ Not working horizontally
https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2019/05/the-11-secrets-of-iterative-and-incremental-product-development-a-lightining-talk/

What type of companies build products?

What can we apply to “projects”

Agility in projects
● Have a “proxy” product owner
○ Someone from our team prioritizing the backlog and dealing with the customer, mapping our
agile process to the rigid contract
● Use “agile contracts”
○ Such as “rolling contracts”
○ Fix a price per cycle (sprint), always delivering the top-priority features
● Frequent increments
○ Build trust
○ Allow feedback
○ Make contract-related negotiations easier

What type of companies typically work in projects?
● Consulting Company 1

A related (and popular) article on time estimates

Key takeaways

Key takeaways
● Waterfall is the traditional way of managing projects
○ Makes sense in other ﬁelds, where changing things after having built them is very hard
○ Most Government agencies still manage this way (and expect you to do it) nowadays
○ But you can implement agile approaches internally and use a “proxy product owner” to map
external expectations
● Agile embraces change and accepts unknowns
○ That’s why we focus on short cycles and build iterative and incremental products
■ We accept that both, us and the customer, know the least about the project at the beginning
○ We accept we don’t know how long it’s going to take and accept that scope and priorities change
● The Agile approach is easier to embrace when building products in-house
○ But for projects there are alternative “agile contracts”
■ Charge per cycle in a “rolling” contract (small risk)
■ Incremental deliveries of working software build trust and makes negotiations easier

Agile software development - Beyond Projects - ULL

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