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The 7 Deadly Sins Of Almost Being Agile
- 1. The 7 Deadly Sins of Almost Being AgileBob HartmanRichard Lawrencewww.agilecooperative.comPresentation Copyright © 2009, Agile For All, LLC. and Humanizing Work. All rights reserved.
- 2. LogisticsPlease turn cell phones, pagers, PDA’s, etc to the “stun yourself” setting (rather than the “annoy everyone else” setting)We will take a break after about 1.5 hoursPlease ask questions when they come up rather than waitingBe prepared to participate! This presentation requires a lot of work on your part.
- 4. Sally the Project Manager
- 5. Bill the Business Analyst
- 6. Tom the Product Manager
- 7. 4 Developers
- 8. 2 Testers
- 9. The First Agile Project 6 monthsExpected 25 featuresDelivered 10 features3 “most important” cutPrior release 72 defectsAgile release 70 defectsCustomers unhappy
- 10. The Second Agile Project 6 monthsExpected 25 featuresDelivered 8 features5 “most important” cutPrior release 70 defectsThis release 79 defectsCustomers VERY unhappy
- 11. Fixing the W-AgilistsEnter Cindi, director of the company PMO
- 13. Lack of Meaningful Feedback LoopsWe are too busy to stop working!Daily stand-ups are useless, let’s just use a single weekly status meeting.When we ask people for feedback they don’t show up or don’t participate anyway.We aren’t really sure why we would want feedback or how we would use it anyway.
- 14. Undesirable EffectsBuilding wrong productsBuilding the product wrongNo improvementLack of visibilityLack of trustKey people out of the loopWhat are some of the undesirable effects the W-Agilists would see from the lack of feedback loops in their process?
- 15. Phrase to rememberThings can’t be improved without regular feedback
- 16. No incremental deliveries of software
- 17. CausesNot using iterations at allBuilding by architecture instead of valueCan’t make stories smallWe’ve always done it that wayTakes time we don’t haveSometimes need to integrate with other teams that aren’t agileWhat might be some of the main causes of not building software iteratively (remember, this is supposed to be an agile team!)
- 18. Phrase to rememberLate integration will lead to late shipping. Instead deliver completed value every iteration.
- 20. Looking deeper…
- 21. Silo’d TeamsDeep domain knowledge is bestExperts better than generalistsWork will be evenly distributedOrganizational structure cannot be changedWhat assumptions cause many organizations to deliberately use silo’d teams?
- 22. Phrase to rememberWe don’t care what your business card says, we care what you can do for the success of our team!
- 23. Digging deeper in an iteration…
- 24. Too much work in processUsing the evaporating cloud from the Thinking Process
- 25. Phrase to rememberWIP = Waste in Progress!
- 26. Lack of customer voice
- 27. Lack of customer voiceCreate an evaporating cloud in your group
- 28. Phrase to rememberBuild the simplest thing that works – then get real customer feedback!
- 30. Unrealistic deadlinesCreate an evaporating cloud in your group and role-play how you would convince managers to stop using unrealistic deadlines
- 31. Phrase to rememberCustomer/stakeholder needs do not alter the realities of the universe.
- 32. Manual testing doesn’t scale(or happens in overtime)Testing that doesn’t happen, but shouldRegression testingTesting capacityNew feature testingSprint 1Sprint 2Sprint 3Sprint 4Sprint 5
- 33. Automate and get regression tests for freeAutomated tests that are now regression testsTesting capacityNew feature testingSprint 1Sprint 2Sprint 3Sprint 4Sprint 5
- 34. Manual TestingCreate an evaporating cloud in your group. We will role-play with Richard and Bob playing the roles of managers needing to be convinced of the benefits of automated testing.
- 35. Phrase to rememberAutomate any tests that will run more than once. Do you know ahead of time which tests those are???
- 36. Recap of the 7 Deadly SinsMissing feedback loopsNot building in iterations – large scale integrationsSilo’d teamsToo much work-in-progress (WIP)Lack of customer voiceUnrealistic deadlinesManual testing
Editor's Notes
- #33: Moving testing to the front is good. But if our testing is all or mostly manual, we have a problem after just a few iterations.
- #34: If you automate your tests as you build them, this iteration’s new tests become next iteration’s regression tests, but you only need to build them once. Also, you give your devs something they can run to ensure that their code passes all the tests before they call their work done. This reduces the loops we mentioned a moment ago.Note, however, automation can’t be much more expensive than manual testing or the whole thing falls apart. This drives tool choice. So does the need to write automated tests against not-yet-existent features. No time to talk about it here, but there’s a reason certain test tools are more popular in the agile community and others are more popular in the waterfall world: your tool can make or break your success with agile testing.