Agile, Agile, Agile!

A review of Scrum and Kanban.

Transcript

1. Agile, Agile, Agile! Kevin Lawver :: http://kevinlawver.com
2. What’s Agile?
3. Agile Values • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools • Working software over comprehensive documentation • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation • Responding to change over following a plan
4. Agile Principles • Frequent releases • Welcome changing requirements • All disciplines work together in shorter cycles • Build projects around motivated individuals • Face to face conversation • Sustainable pace and practices • Maximize the amount of work not done. • Regular retrospectives and process changes to improve efficiency
5. Agile Benefits • Turns product development into a sustainable repeatable process. • Achieve constant incremental improvement that’s actually measurable! • Lots of metrics about development progress and lots of participation from stakeholders
6. But how do I do it?
7. Pick a Process: Scrum
8. Scrum Pieces • The Backlog • The Sprint • The Standup Meeting • The Retrospective • The Scrum Master • Business “Owner”
9. How It Fits Together
12. Let’s go through a project...
13. Roles • Whenever I say Scrum Master, think Project Manager. • Whenever I say Business Owner, think, ummm... Business Owner. They could also be the Product Manager.
14. The Backlog
15. The Backlog is owned by the Business Owner & contains the building block...
16. User Stories!
17. User Stories A single requirement, documented thoroughly enough that an “average” person would understand it and be able to implement it in a single sprint.
18. An Example So that users can more easily buy songs, we need to have a buy button on all songs that adds the song to their shopping cart.
19. User Stories Should: • Be simple • Be focused on a single feature • Have a single benefit and action
20. Once a story’s been created: • It’s put in the backlog in priority order (priority is determined by the Business Owner). • Someone goes in and adds tasks to the story and then estimates how long those tasks will take, preferably the person who will be doing those tasks.
21. Related user stories can be bundled into “epics”.
22. Sprint Planning
23. You need... • A prioritized backlog with tasked-out and estimated user stories. • Everyone from the team available for the meeting. • Everyone needs to know how many hours they have available for that sprint.
24. The Meeting • Go through prioritized and estimated user stories and add them to the sprint. • When everyone’s sprint is full, you’re done!
25. The Standup Meeting
26. The Standup • Takes place at the same time every day. • Everyone on the team goes around and answers three questions: • What did I do yesterday? • What will I do today? • Where am I stuck and need help?
27. Classic Rules • Should take no more than 15-20 minutes • Any discussions take place “offline” after the meeting • Everyone stands (keeps the chit-chat down)
28. Standup Benefits • No one’s stuck for very long. • No need for status reports, you get one every day. • Everyone is informed about what’s going. • Projects are usually never late or “in crisis” because problems are caught early.
29. When things go wrong...
30. There’s a process for that! • A user story of equal or greater size gets removed from the sprint and the new “fire drill” gets added. • If the change is too big, the Sprint is “called” and you go through Sprint Planning again.
31. Stakeholder Review
32. At the end of the sprint, sit down with stakeholders and review progress.
33. It’s the final “go/no go” decision for the work in that sprint.
34. Retrospective
35. This is my favorite part!
36. Answer the following: • What went well? • What didn’t go well? • What can we do better next time?
37. Practicalities • We create a document that everyone can fill out beforehand. Works really well for introverts. • Set a time limit (1 hour) • Don’t let it become a bitch session - it should be constructive (responsibility vs. blame).
38. Rinse & Repeat
39. Favorite Things About • Team history • Constant incremental improvement • Sustainable development • Built-in process for handing fire drills • Business owners have frequent check-ins and everyone feels involved and sees progress.
40. Review
42. Questions before we jump into Kanban?
43. Kanban
44. It’s basically Scrum without Sprint Planning
45. It was invented by Toyota for their assembly lines...
46. And is Japanese for “just in time”
47. Kanban Basics • The backlog still exists and is still prioritized. • Everything happens on “the board” • When a resource is available, they take the next task from the backlog that they can perform.
49. Kanban Benefits • Less work for the Scrum Master • More fluid and easier to see where everything is on the board.
50. Kanban Downsides • No beginning or end, just endless tasks. • Fewer artifacts and metrics than Scrum in my experience.
51. Wrapping Up
52. Ideas • Processes are made to be adapted • The most valuable pieces to me are the Daily Standup and Retrospectives • Agile is basically Project Management evolved and can be applied to almost any kind of project!
53. Questions?
54. My Details • kevin@lawver.net • @kplawver • http://lawver.net • http://railsmachine.com
55. Thank You!
56. Credits • Kanban Board photo from Mark Derricutt: http://www.flickr.com/photos/talios/ 3726484920/in/photostream/