XPDays Benelux 2015 - 3M EUR later: Moving a team to become Agile in a Company with Too Much Money

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3M EUR later Moving a team to become Agile in a Company with Too Much Money XPDays 2015 Thierry de Pauw, @tdpauw

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Setting the Scene ! New Team ! 8 employees ! New Manager ! and a highly profitable company

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! Lots of software products ! Lots of programming languages ! No Collective Ownership ! No process for software delivery ! 70% operational work ! Very little communication ! which was visible in the design => Conway's Law

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"Any organisation that designs a system will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organisation's communication structure." Conway's Law

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2 contractors as technical coaches

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How did this team transform itself into an Agile software development team ?

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The easy part - Throw tools at it and Enforce Version Control => Collective Ownership Testing Continuous Integration Code Reviews => Quality Work Coding Standards => Communication

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2 parallel projects with some business value without real deadline Code Retreat Lots of book reading

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Mixed results: one project took 3 months the other 1 year

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Why ? ! involved the customer early ! good backlog preparation => defined release date ! empowered dev team (lots of innovation: CI => CD, automated acc tests) ! released every 2 weeks ! missing deadline

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"Yes, deadlines are wonderful! They’re the tie-breaker on feature debates. They suck all the excess heat out of the prioritization joust: “Hey, I’d love to get your additional pet feature into the first release, but, you know: THE DEADLINE” " David Heinemeier Hansson, Signal vs Noise blog

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Still no Collective Ownership

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How did they improve Collective Ownership ?

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Manager wants to execute too much projects in parallel

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“The fastest way to complete two projects that use the same resources is to do them one at a time” Mary and Tom Poppendieck, Lean Software Development

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Create one Scrum team execute projects one after the other 2 week sprints, Monday: demo, retrospective, planning and design

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How has this team handled its Technical Debt ?

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"Technical Debt ensures that the only work that gets done is unplanned work." The Phoenix Project

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Automate the operational work

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How did this team improve the flow of work from backlog to production ?

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! Visualise work: planned and unplanned

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! Internalise Testing ! Internalise Operations => you build it, you run it ! Continuous Delivery

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How did this team improve ?

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By keep doing Retrospectives (which can be difficult at times)

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Too much change ?

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"If a system is not improving, the result is not steady state. Instead, because of entropy, organisational performance declines" Mike Rother, Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results

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The case of the Product Owner

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Tried 2 configurations: ! the customer is the PO ✕ ! PO is a team member ✓

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What is the current situation ?

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A Team of Software Engineers ! communicating with each other ! defining its own planning ! with a software delivery process ! using Continuous Delivery ! doing small experiments ! allocating 20% to improvements ! having REST-full applications and "micro services" => Other teams are now knocking on the door to learn

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What made it difficult ? ! the team is isolated in the company in regard to Agility ! demotivated team members ! customers were used to long running projects ! highly profitable company ! heavy process for introducing new tools

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What made it work ? ! active support of the manager and his manager ! motivation of some team members ! no customer facing applications ! customers saw the difference ! discard some team members that did not fit anymore

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Hello, I am Thierry de Pauw Software Engineer, Jack of All Trades Agile Technical Coach http://thinkinglabs.io @tdpauw