Bringing Agile to Higher Ed Without Scaring Anyone

Working on the Web in higher education has its unique challenges. Regardless of your team setup, getting client feedback at each stage of a project is inefficient; too much time passes between feedback and design next steps. This type of workflow increases the possibility of mistakes and false expectations of deadlines. Nick will talk about creating an agile workflow in your environment to transform clients into partners on a project. This shift in relationship can have a major impact on the speed, accuracy, and level of work produced. Every team is different and introducing agile practices can lead to resistance. Nick will explore techniques to bring an agile workflow to a team for faster feedback loops and to produce better work.

https://github.com/nickdenardis/agile-workflow
http://mi.highedweb.org/conference-schedule/bringing-agile-to-higher-ed-without-scaring-anyone/

Transcript

1. AGILE WORKFLOW BRINGING AGILE TO HIGHER ED WITHOUT SCARING ANYONE / Nick DeNardis @nickdenardis
2. NICK DENARDIS Perpetual minimalist. User experience crafter. Speaker. Realist. Web Director at . Library Scientist. Technical Director for . Organizer for and . teacher. @waynestate @TEDxDetroit @hewebMI @RefreshDetroit @GDIdet
3. AND... NOT A TRAINED AGILIST But I am a practitioner
4. ONCE UPON A TIME... I gave four people six months to reconstruct from the ground up our website 42 individual sites, 4,000+ pages, 250 templates, countless stakeholders
5. THEY DID IT! And thus begins our journey...
6. HIGHERED IS BUILT ON PROCESSES Let's embrace that
7. CONTEXT
8. THIS TALK IS ABOUT TEAMS 2-10 people, local preferred
9. MY TEAM != YOUR TEAM Not a step by step guide
10. THIS TALK IS ABOUT WEB SOFTWARE Anything else you take away from it is a bonus
11. "AGENCY" WITH "CLIENTS" Managing a product could be it's own talk
12. AND YOU.. Using any agile practices? Who is using traditional waterfall? Who oversees a team? Who is on a team? Who is the whole team?
13. agile, not Agile Agile is short for "agility"
14. 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
15. “To heal the divide between business and development” ~ Kent Beck
16. IMPROVE No process or person is perfect
17. WHAT'S WRONG WITH WATERFALL? Semantic Diffusion The original ideas, as they get passed from person to person get more diffused (more and more fuzzy).
19. DO WE HAVE TO GO ALL IN? Nope. But all team buy-in is important Everyone must be willing to try ideas for some time before dismissing them.
20. THE STARTING POINT
21. RETROSPECTIVES Start here if you do anything at all Once a week, or every other week It's about improving slowly over time
22. FOUR QUESTIONS 1. What went well? 2. What didn’t go so well? 3. What have I learned? 4. What still puzzles me?
23. REPEAT.
24. INDIVIDUALS AND INTERACTIONS Projects rarely fail because of technology Communication (or lack of it) is the root cause of disaster projects
25. CLIENT CONTACT Project Manager? Designer? Developer? Writer? ... All of them.
26. CUSTOMER COLLABORATION
27. INITIAL EXPECTATIONS Client: This agency is going to make me more money Agency: This client is going to pay the bills
28. COLLABORATION VS COOPERATION Introduce feedback loops as early as as often as possible.
29. COOPERATION Going along with someone else's idea, they have already figured it out and you're along for the ride.
30. COLLABORATION Build something together, something new happens. Working then handing off and pipelining means there isn’t a collective knowledge unless you document it
31. Dr. Alistair Cockburn, 2002
32. COLLABORATIVE DESIGN Define minimum requirements and constraints 15 mins - Break out individually and create wireframe sketches 5 mins/person - Individual presentation of wireframe to the group Group critique on individual’s wireframe with feedback focused on clarifying the presenter’s design 15 mins - Break out individually for iteration on their own most well-received wireframe 5 mins/person - Presentation/group critique 30 mins - Sketch a single solution based on wireframes and feedback At the end (2 hours) a single wireframe built by the group is complete
36. RESPONDING TO CHANGE
37. SUCCESS What does it look like?
38. PLANNING UP FRONT success == according to plan
39. ADAPTIVE PLANNING Plan and execute many times on a project (every sprint)
40. POINT NORTH http://pointnorth.io/
41. ALIGN AND GUIDE YOUR PROJECT North is a set of standards and best practices for developing modern web based properties. Included are standards and best practices for all aspects of a project, from kick off through development. North encourages an agile, content-first, approach to product development and a mobile-first, in-browser, system based approach to design and development.
43. WORKING SOFTWARE
44. RELEASES, SPRINTS, ITERATIONS Pick a cycle and stick to it If it isn't in the cycle, it isn't important
47. WALKING SKELETON Tiny implementation that performs end-to-end function.
49. THIN VERTICAL SLICE Layer of the implementation that spans every component.
51. created by Daniel Kummer efficient branching using git­flow by Vincent Driessen translations: English ­ Castellano ­ Brazilian Portugues ­ 简 体中文 (Simplified Chinese) ­ 日本語 ­ Türkçe ­ 한국어(Korean) ­ Français ­ Italiano Fork m e on GitHub Tweet 365 About git­flow are a set of git extensions to provide high­level repository operations for Vincent Driessen's branching model. more ★ ★ ★ git-flow cheatsheet
52. CONTINIOUS INTEGRATION/DEPLOYMENT
53. NO ESTIMATES, ONLY BUDGETS Basecamp just posted a good article that sums it up. Drive development with budgets not estimates
55. XP/PAIRING/SWARMING
56. WHY WASTE THE TIME OF MULTIPLE PEOPLE ON A SINGLE TASK?
57. INCLUDE THE CLIENT? As often as possible.
58. HAVE YOUR CLIENTS WRITE/SIGN OFF ON ACCEPTANCE TESTS WAT?!?
59. ACCEPTANCE TESTS A php framework for testing your business expectations. Behat
60. F e a t u r e : N e w s I t e m s I n o r d e r t o a n n o u n c e h i g h l i g h t s w e n e e d a p l a c e o n t h e h o m e p a g e A s a u s e r I s h o u l d b e a b l e t o s e e u p d a t e s f r o m t h e d e p a r t m e n t S c e n a r i o : T h e n e w s a r e a o n t h e h o m e p a g e s h o u l d d i s a p p e a r i f t h e r e a r e n o n e w s G i v e n t h e r e a r e n o a c t i v e n e w s i t e m s A n d I a m o n " / " T h e n I s h o u l d n o t s e e " N e w s & A n n o u n c e m e n t s " S c e n a r i o : T h e n e w s a r e a o n t h e h o m e p a g e s h o u l d s h o w a m a x o f f o u r i t e m s G i v e n t h e r e a r e f i v e n e w s a c t i v e n e w s i t e m s A n d I a m o n " / " T h e n I s h o u l d o n l y s e e f o u r i t e m s T h e n I s h o u l d s e e " M o r e n e w s i t e m s "
65. RECAP agile, not Agile Retrospectives Customer collaboration Working software every release Defined release schedule Budgets, not estimates Pairing/swarming
66. MY HOPE There is always room for improvement in your process.
67. RESOURCES Agile Manifesto Point North Drive development with budgets not estimates Git Flow Cheatsheet Codeship.io - Continious integration and deployment. Target Process Behat - Behavior driven development This talk on GitHub Follow me on Twitter
68. THE END BY NICK DENARDIS / @NICKDENARDIS https://github.com/nickdenardis/agile-workflow