A Macro View of Agile

Despite the fact that the agile manifesto was signed over ten years ago agile adoption remains uneven.

One manifestation of this is how often I have clients ask me for even a simple overview of what I mean by agile.

I decided to put together this simple map that shows how the pieces fit together.






IMHO lean thinking and tools like A3 and Kanban tie all of the agile pieces together, and help organizations think and behave with agile principles in mind.


Supplementary agile practices like BDD and DDD integrate modeling with agile practices to help core agile team based approaches.

Core agile methods like XP are just that, and create the foundation for delivery excellence.

Technology focused movements like DevOps focus on upping the quality of from a technical perspective.

And while some will groan, RUP or UP provides some good lifecycle stages, roles etc,etc that can help scale agile.

How-to Conduct a Remote Agile Daily Stand-up

Physical objects tend to help teams perform, communicate and operate more effectively. We've seen this trend with iteration planning boards, kanbans, continuous integration orbs etc. So, we thought how we can make daily stand-ups with a distributed team more effective? Here's our answer.

It's time for Scrum to evolve

This week has seen a flurry of activity online concerning the current state of scrum, it's flaws, and if it should be changed.

While criticism online of a particular method is nothing new, more attention has been paid this week when Uncle Bob listed 8 issues that he had with scrum...

1. No technical practices. Scrum is great at giving project management advice,
but provides no technical help for the developer. Any good implementation of
Scrum needs to borrow technical practices from some other method like XP. The
suite of technical practices that should be added probably include: TDD,
Continuous Integration, Acceptance Testing, Pair Programming, Refactoring.

2. 30 day sprints are too long. Most scrum teams have either shrunk them to 2
weeks or perform some kind of midpoint check at the two week mark. I know of
some teams that have two 2-week "iterations" inside a single 4-week "sprint".
The difference being that they use the sprint for reporting upwards, but use the
iterations for internal feedback and control.

3. The tendency of the scrum master to arrogate project management powers. This
is not a problem with Scrum out of the box so much as it is a problem with the
way scrum sometimes evolves. Perhaps it is related to the unfortunate use of
the word "master". Perhaps the XP term "Coach" might be a better word to use.
In any case, good implementation of scrum do not necessarily correlate scrum
masters and project managers.

4. The C in CSM is unfortunate. Again, this is not so much about scrum out of
the box as it is about the scrum community. That letter C has gotten far too
significant for it's intention. It is true that the people in a scrum team need
to be trained. One of the things they should be trained about is the role of
the scrum master. The problem with the C is that it changes the notion of scrum
master from a role into a person. It is the person who has the C. In an ideal
case, the members of the scrum team will rotate through the scrum master role
the same way the members of an XP team rotate through the coach role. This
rotation is never perfect, and sometimes the role sticks to one or two people
more than others. But the idea was never to raise up a particular person with a
rank. We never wanted that C emblazoned on their chests.

5. Scrum provides insufficient guidance regarding the structure of the backlog.
We've learned, over the years, that backlogs are hierarchical entities
consisting of epics, themes, stories, etc. We've learned how to estimate them
statistically. We've learned how and when to break the higher level entities
down into lower level entities. Epics->Themes->Stories->Tasks.

6. Scrum carries an anti-management undercurrent that is counter-productive.
Scrum over-emphasizes the role of the team as self-managing. Self-organizing
and self-managing teams are a good thing. But there is a limit to how much a
team can self-X. Teams still need to be managed by someone who is responsible
to the business. Scrum does not describe this with enough balance.

7. Automated Testing. Although this could be considered a derivative of point
1, I thought it worth calling out as a separate point because it is so
fundamental. Scrum doesn't mention this, yet it is the foundation of every
agile effort. Agile teams work in short cycles because feedback only works well
in short cycles. But short cycles aren't enough. You also need objective
measurement of progress. The most reliable way to know how much a team has
gotten done is to run automated tests and count the tests that pass.

8. Multiple teams. Scrum has little to say about the coordination of multiple
teams. This is not a failing unique to scrum. Agile itself is virtually silent
on this issue. Scrum talked about the vague notion of a "Scrum of Scrums" but
that idea really hasn't played out all that well. Scrum-in-the-large remains in
the domain of certain consultants who claim to have an answer. There is no real
consensus on the issue.

Agile blogger Mike Cottemeyer have waded in stating that the concept of an Agile PO needs to be significantly rethought, and Alan Shalloway of Net Objectives has long maintained that Scrum (and other agile approaches) have long suffered from it's overty developer focus, and anti management bias. Alan has stated that extending scrum with lean/kanban can go a long way to make scrum significantly mire successful.

Jurgen Appelo has come in swingng to the defense of scrum, saying that a lack of technical practices is a strength, not a weakness as it allows scrum to be applied to other professions beside development.

For my part I am firmly with the critics on this one. Let me start by saying that I think scrum has some great things in it. The management practices are a good way for teams to get started down the road to becoming more agile. Simple things line retrospectives and standups reallly help noobs understand what agile is.

But that's is where it ends. Scrum is so simple and incomplete that it does not adequately serve it's target audience appropriately. It's fine to say that scrum is meant to serve multiple audiences, which is great in theory, but let's look at reality, the vast majority of scrum users are developing software. They are not graphic designers or painters or management consultants. I've seen teams get into serious trouble with flaccid scrum, ie no technical practices, because they thought they had what they needed. In reality they were worse off than the previous waterfall state. No documentation, external qa, but no CI or TDD, what a mess.

Scrum practices also come off as being a little naive and almost condecending to teams with even a little emotional intelligence. Rules like chickens can't speak (ie managers) at certain meetings and the notion that developers only have to deal with product owners seem like an extension of many of the spoilt developer attitudes that came out of the dot com era.

I actually think for agile to be successful teams need to take scrum practices and mature towards Lean an kanban. The language is more mature, and you can use more sophisticated but still simple tools to better model and manage more complex situations than one team serving one product owner.

Finally I think for such a simple approach scrum is a little dogmatic about what you have to do. Again this has to do with maturity, beginners might need to be told exactly what to do and who can talk in a stand up meeting, but teams that move a little bit up the maturity curve quickly find this kind of advice pedantic.

I won't even get into the whole certification fiasco, which to me is a complete joke.

So in conclusion I think owners of scrum need to take a look at this criticism and seriously consider how they can incorperate public feedback into improving scrum. This is critical if we are to continue to take scrum seriously.

Agile over RUP Part 4

RUP Principles

As I have said before, one of the best parts of RUP is the principles and best practices. Probably the fact that RUP has explicit principles that are clearly articulated makes it a better methodology that many of the SDLCs that I've seen put together, especially by those in the management consultant world. In fact most SDLC I have seen don't even bother having proper principles. Having a consumable set of principles means that development teams can pretty much guide work around whether they are following a principle, not whether they are following a specific detailed piece of processed material.

I have listed below the major RUP principles along with some minor alterations in order to make them more agile.

The RUP is a use case centric

RUP makes a big deal about how every single artifact in the process can be traced back to a particular use case. In RUP, use cases are a collection of scenarios grouped together according to their ability to help a specific user accomplish a specific goal. The idea of developing use cases and then hanging your design documents, plans, test, and anything else might need off of these use cases is a great idea.

Use case traceability is a complete waste of time...

Unfortunately RUP takes what is a reasonable approach and pushes it to the extremes of absurdity. RUP recommends that you follow what is known as "use case traceability". Use case traceability is the notion that you can have a database of every artifact created in your SDLC (including code) that tracks each artifact and their traceability to each use case and each subsequently developed artifact. In my experience, this is a colossal waste of time. By doing this, you are in effect trying to track a multidimensional, real-time, many to many relationship. What makes this even harder, is the only person capable of properly managing the database of artifacts is someone who has a reasonable understanding of the entire SDLC. This is most likely a very senior person on your team and he has better things to do than traceability management. More than likely, the person responsible for managing traceability is the person who drew the short straw in your project and is almost completely clueless about what he is actually managing.

But using use cases as a framework for managing a project is actually not a bad idea...

that being said, I almost always develop and maintain a use case hierarchy like the one prescribed by Alastair Cockburn. I do not always develop complete use cases, but I do use this hierarchy (usually stored in some kind of wiki) to act as an anchor to associate most of my other major SDLC elements. Of course in the agile world, there are a lot less SDLC artifacts so usually I associate individual use case nodes with things like:

• individual user stories
  

• test cases (using tools like FIT)
  

• simple models (as needed)
  

Traceability with working code is done by utilizing a revolutionary concept known as talking to the person responsible for developing or supporting the code. Relying on people seems to be something very scary in the manager world, but rather than focusing a whole bunch of work on doing complex traceability, try spending more work on making sure that there's always somebody who knows how your solution works.
The RUP Is Architecture Centric

The RUP also makes a big deal about being architecture centric. The RUP describes architecture as a filter on the various models necessary to build the system. (e.g. requirements model, design model, implementation model, deployment etc.) This filter represents a common vision of the system, it's common components, and unifying elements. The RUP spends a lot of time describing what architecture is and what it is and using terms that would probably baffle most of us, but the point is that according to RUP, architecture is something that needs to be considered throughout all aspects of developing software. While most people who follow agile probably recoil at the heavyweight definitions of architecture offered by the RUP, what is refreshing about RUP compared to most other methodologies is that RUP believes that architecture permeates all aspects of the system. Most other methods seem to put architecture "above and around" the actual implementation of the system. RUP on the other hand, believes that architecture is represented in its requirements, its design, its code, and how it's deployed. In other words architecture is more than a bunch of pretty diagrams with boxes and lines, and it doesn't cut architects who have no desire to be involved with implementation any slack.

Architecture is important, but keep it lightweight...

Where RUP tends to fail, is in the details. RUP has lots of advice on how to develop detailed use case models, detailed use case realizations and traceability matrices necessary to modeling and maintaining the "architecture" of the system.

Keeping a focus on architecture on any large scale project is important but in order for it to be maintainable it needs to be lightweight, and focused on value. What is valuable is going to change from project to project but in my experience make sure that effort is put into developing a set of architecture and coding standards, and that everyone be on the team is aware of them.

Everything else is gravy. (And gravy is not a good thing if you're trying to stay lean)
The RUP Is Iterative

In terms of principles that add value, this is a no-brainer to anybody who's trying to adopt agile. That being said, RUP does not offer very tangible advice on how long iteration should be, and how to manage what goes on in iteration. Most of the milestones, gating criteria and metrics are based around the larger scale phases.

While the RUP makes a big deal of iterating the best advice you are going to get around how to manage iterations are going to come from things like scrum or XP. Whenever anybody attempts to adopt RUP, the first thing I do is train them up on how to manage a project using iterations using approaches described by a really good text, Agile Estimating and Planning.

The RUP Is Model Driven

The RUP phases places a heavy emphasis on developing one or more diagrams/models to represent the system. When going through the RUP, one will encounter guidelines on how to develop use cases models, use case realization models, design models, deployment models, activity diagrams, etc.

In point of fact, it's probably a full-time job just to keep up with all of the UML diagrams recommended by RUP as well as the approach to using these diagrams within RUP. The biggest issue in using these models is one of maintenance. While not specifically saying so, RUP does imply that these models need to be developed, and kept up to date using reverse and forward engineering principles.

Models have A Lot Of Value, But Use Them for What They're Worth, They Aren't the Solution

Models are actually a great thing, they help us communicate, they help us understand, and they help us abstract implementation details that can take an awfully long time to learn. But models are expensive to create, and they are incredibly expensive to maintain. Models are also only so valuable if they are developed by the technical team in isolation of the business team. In order to be useful agile modeling best practices need to be used to supplement the RUP model driven approach. In short these practices consist of

• use collaborative modeling techniques (like CRC cards)
  

• don't be afraid to throwaway models
  

• focus models on interfaces between teams, complex business logic, and code that is currently being reused by multiple teams
  

• don't create a model without having an audience in mind
  

• don't create a model because your process says so
  

When Using RUP to Scale Agile Make Sure You Follow Agile Documentation Principle

Scott Ambler, has some great on how to develop documentation in an agile manner. In a nutshell, Scott suggests that you should only document when

• you are satisfying a specific project stakeholders
  

• you have a stakeholder who can help you build a table of contents and direct you on what he wants to see
  

• when there is specific business value
  

• above all, don't create a document because some piece of processed material says so.
  

So if you've actually made it to the bottom of this document, you should have a pretty good idea about how I, and you could scale agile using specific modified portions of RUP in a pragmatic fashion. Scott Amber also has some great posts on how to scale up agile with RUP
Hopefully, anybody reading this will also have a better understanding of the particular project take to implementing large-scale software development projects.

Agile over RUP Part 3

In my Previous postI mentioned that the rational unified process is slightly modified can offer good value to large-scale projects, in this submission I elaborate on some of the components of the process.

Product Lifecycle Phases and Skill-based Disciplines

One of the biggest differentiators of the Rational Unified Process is the way that the method uses a two-dimensional grid to categorize work into one or more phases, as well as a specific disciplines or skill sets of work.

The problem with many structured development processes that they categorize work along one dimension only, this dimension is usually based on skill sets. What this in effect means is that work is organized around completing requirements, then completing design, then completing development, etc. Given that the whole waterfall approach to methodology was first described as a anti-pattern almost 30 years ago, it's surprising how often I see software development methodologies popping up that prescribe to it, especially in the management consulting world. The RUP has at least has the good sense to realize that if you're going to break things up by phases, then create phases based on the natural lifecycle of a product.

While the RUP does categorize work into disciplines (requirements, design, etc.) the RUP explicitly states that this work from different disciplines can be conducted in parallel and that there is plenty of opportunity for the work to overlap. Furthermore, the RUP provides advice on how to break up phases into multiple iterations.

RUP Phases

a brief description of each of the RUP phases are as follows:

Inception

At the beginning of a project, there has to be a vision, a good idea that will benefit the business, and there has to be some method of generating the money. Agile doesn't talk about any of this, when you start an agile project, you're in requirements design and development. Somebody has to talk about putting together the business case, looking at the solution from an enterprise technology perspective, (should the solution is Java, or.Net, how about a package like PeopleSoft?) Stakeholders need to be lined up, and a high-level estimate of what the overall solution is going to cost needs to be put together. Someone asked all sorts think about organizational change and training. Many agile projects are doomed to failure (IMHO I don't have a stat of this or anything) if they don't spend it least a couple of weeks to a couple of months (depending on project size) working on inception. Think of inception as an iteration zero on steroids, and work is not only done by developers, although they do need to be heavily involved on the technical side.

Elaboration

Once the team has a general idea of what they are doing, and why they're doing it, the RUP recommends to start the SDLC process (i.e. requirements, design, development, test, deploy) in multiple iterations focusing specifically on technical uncertainties, scary requirements, and generally anything that makes the developers "stay up and shiver at night". Again, elaboration can be looked at as the enterprise version of a combination of multiple iteration zeros, but supplemented with a comprehensive, planned set of spiking. One of the fundamental pillars of RUP is that any large development project should contain a phase where a subset of a large development team can get together and experiment, prototype, and mitigate technical risk before applying a large-scale team to developing the entire solution. One interesting thing to note is that many companies adopting RUP confuse elaboration with design, in point of fact elaboration requires one or more complete iterations of requirements, design, develop, test and deploy to be considered complete. The difference between elaboration and construction is that elaboration is focused on mitigating technical risk.

Construction

Once the majority of technical risk or guiding a new platform, adopting some legacy code, or understanding some complex requirements have been mitigated through a number of completed development iterations. Management is supposedly able to magically deem that all architecture risk has been eliminated, and it's time to start a brick laying, brainless, assembly-line approach to completing the solution. Now that all risk has supernaturally disappeared, it's time to expand the team, and optimize the delivery approach so that is an effective, efficient manufacturing style process. (Excuse me while I laugh hysterically) As naïve as this viewpoint is to developing software is, what is even worse is that many organizations confuse construction with the phase where all software development is conducted. According to RUP construction still requires revisiting requirements, revisiting design, and of course developing and testing. The emphasis is that more development than requirements or design should take place.

Transition

At some point in time, the solution needs to be handed over to the client. Training needs to take place, consultants need to be replaced with counterparts within the organization and the solution needs to be entrenched within the organization. This is all completely reasonable, and is something to say doesn't really talk about, and in my opinion probably shouldn't. I'm not sure I see the value in having any SDLC try to provide advice on how to fundamentally deliver a software product to an organization, it's not that I find the transition phase to be incredibly important, I just think that the RUP provides extremely superficial advice, and waters down its own strong points by trying to do too much. I personally work for a consulting company that has an extremely strong organizational change department. And trust me, software process geeks really have no idea on how to approach this One. Again, the biggest mistake organizations make when adopting RUP is to confuse transition with testing and deployment, the two have nothing to do with each other. If anybody out there is really interested in how to tackle transition, I recommend reading the Heart of Change for a start.

Compared to other methodologies RUP phases make sense but...

Let's be honest, has anybody out there actually done any development work and said "hey we are done elaboration phase, it's time to start construction...". Well I have actually been on projects where we had a "elaboration team" which was responsible for putting together the architecture framework, setting up the technical foundation, and making sure that the platform was solid from a performance point of view, and could handle the various "complex" requirements. We then had a "construction team" which was scheduled to start several months after the elaboration team, which was supposed to use the "common design components", patterns and other pieces that the elaboration team that put together.

While this sounds great on paper, the reality is that the majority of elaboration work really started once the construction team had landed, it was only when they started using the "common components" to implement the "non-complex requirements" that the elaboration team really figured out how the common components should operate. In short, software development cannot be neatly broken out into elaboration and construction phases, what I see happening is that iterations tend to start out with what appear to be largely "elaboration style" activities. These early iterations tend to have more experimentation, prototyping, and spiking necessary to mitigate technical risk and figuring out the intricacies of whatever new technologies are being used on the project. Subsequent iterations tend to have less and less elaboration style work and more and more construction style work. That being said, every once in a while, a drastically new requirement comes into play, or the development team figures out a new approach that can drastically improve your overall solution but requires a dramatic rethinking of the way things are being done. In short, replace the RUP construction and elaboration phases with a development phase, and plan to have a decreasing but fluctuating amount of elaboration style activities in each development iteration.

In my next post on this topic, I complete this article by giving an overview of RUP principles and best practices and how to modify them to make them more agile.

Agile over RUP Part 2

This post is a continuation of my Previous poston my preferred development approach.

Reading about Agile Is Pretty Simple (which is a good thing...)

In my previous post on my preferred development approach, Agile over RUP, My Preferred Development Approach I touched upon the idea that mixing Agile with a more structured methodology like the Rational Unified Process (or the unified process in general) was a good way to combine what I see as a energetic, creative and real-time approach with a structured, more methodical framework that can help to organize large-scale projects.. I then went on to describe what agile means to me, and gave a summary of the agile best practices that I found useful on projects that I have been a part of.

In general, talking about agile is relatively straightforward. The practices are deceptively simple, and relatively easy to explain. The real difficulty in agile is in the implementation. I have probably been attempting to use "agile development" since early 2000, and I'm still probably learning at an incredible rate. I doubt that this rate of learning is going to decrease anytime soon, getting agile right is actually quite hard to do, but then again so is real success. IMHO this is all about what a good process should be, really easy to read, and incredibly hard to master.

Reading about the Rational Unified Process Is Pretty Complex (Which Isn't a Good Thing...)

The Rational Unified Process, on the other hand is a fully featured software development lifecycle framework that tries to encompass all aspects of software delivery. Unfortunately this leaves consumers of RUP with the impossible task of trying to get one's head around a complex, dense, and sometimes contradictory piece of work.

It's important to note that the creators of RUP refer to the unified process as a process framework, meaning that the process should be customized to the particular needs of a project, program or IT organization. RUP should not be taken out of the box and applied as is.

The RUP framework is a complex web of disciplines, (specific skill sets, i.e. requirements, design, development, etc.) phases, (product lifecycle stages i.e. inception, construction, etc.) process groupings, processes, artifacts, templates, gating criteria, and a bunch of other detailed process material, enough to make process geeks the whole world over cackle with glee, much to the detriment of those of us who are actually trying to get some work done. Here's a quick picture of all the pieces of RUP, written in UML, taken from my memory

So what's wrong with the above picture? For one, its complexity and sheer volume of information makes it incredibly difficult to actually find the valuable pieces of the process. Unfortunately, as of the last time I looked at the Rational Unified Process (which to be fair is ever evolving) it contained some incredibly good information (especially in the requirements and analysis and design of object-oriented systems) but there was a huge amount of process details that appear to be ad hoc, and added just to make the process complete. This seems to be a systemic problem of any detailed and "comprehensive" software methodology. The quality of different pieces of the process vary incredibly (the project management and testing is laughably bad), and it takes a very intimate knowledge of the process framework and some very real experience using it to determine what to use and what to completely ignore.

But even if all aspects of the rational unified process were of proper quality, RUP is just too complex.

But RUP Still Has Incredible Value, It Just Needs to Be Pared down a Little...

Since RUP is a process framework, it's okay to actually tailor it to make it compatible with an useful style of delivery, in fact many of the fundamental pieces of RUP are completely compatible with an agile way of doing things.

Listed below are the portions of the rational unified process that I consider actually valuable to a software development project...

• phases like it or not, the kind of work you do during specific iterations are going to change over the length of any project, lightly applying a notion of a lifecycle is a good idea

• disciplines, while agile projects categorized work into just a couple of roles, there really is more involved if you consider all aspects of delivery, RUP disciplines represent a reasonable way to organize the different types of work that need to be done, just be flexible in applying multiple roles to the same person

• principles and best practices are IMHO the most important part of the process. By tweaking the RUP best practices and principles to be a little more agile in nature, you're left with a solid foundation in which to base your development and delivery.

• Roles as stated previously, agile only has a couple of roles (e.g. Product Owner, Scrum Master, Developer) I personally like to see this list expanded, as long as everyone is clear that each single role does not equal one person, each person needs to fulfill many different roles.

• Discipline Oriented Guidelines where many software development processes fail is that they offer either too little advice, or offer to much and present this advice as standards that must be followed. Detailed process material should be represented as a suite of advice, patterns, and lessons learned based on real project experience. Above all this detailed process work needs to be presented as accelerators that can but don't have to be used. I think it's also okay to base guidance on the work of established authors, but make sure you test the waters on a real project before socializing the guidance across different project teams. So far, I have based my guidance, and implemented real projects, on work presented by the following authors, of course this is a continuing work in progress...

• Alastair Cockburn (Patterns for Effective Use Cases)

• Eric Evans (Domain Driven Design)

• Michael Cohn (Agile Estimating and Planning)

• Scott Ambler (Agile Modeling Method)

• Kent Beck (Implementation Patterns and Test Driven Development)

• and a whole bunch of other stuff...

Please refer to
Part 3 of this post for further details of other valuable components of RUP

Agile over RUP, My Preferred Development Approach

In this post I thought I would describe my delivery approach of choice, in a brief, and (hopefully) understandable format.

As anybody who knows me can attest, I'm a big fan of agile development. That being said, I don't believe that agile alone is typically sufficient for me to successfully run all software delivery engagements. Although I always tweak the delivery approach I take to suit the conditions of a particular project, I frequently have relied on a combination of agile delivery combined with elements of the rational unified process (RUP). In a nutshell, the delivery approach I typically recommend for myself and my clients can be described as agile over RUP.


What does agile mean to me?
I have seen number different descriptions of what agile software delivery is and what it means to different people. The one that resonates the most with me describes agile development as:

1) a set of software development principles that emphasize:

• individuals over process and tools
• working software over documentation
• collaboration over contracts
• responding to change over following the plan
  

2) a set of complementary best practices that support these principles and are

• collaborative
• lightweight
• simple

Note the "collection of complementary best practices" part of this definition, this is important (IMHO). In my experience agile is not something that is "done" or "not done". I've never understood the comment "we are doing agile delivery" or alternatively that team "isn't doing agile". Rather agile is something that can be applied to any development engagement on a graduated, practice by practice basis. When taken in isolation an individual agile best practice can still add value to a software development project. However, when an agile best practice is combined with and complemented with other agile best practices, there is a potential to provide an exponential amounts of value to the project.

These agile best practices come from a number of different but complementary agile "methodologies". Examples of these methodologies include SCRUM, XP, Crystal-Clear and the Agile Modeling Method. Increasingly, there is growing industry evidence that many organizations are selecting these best practices à la cart, rather than choosing a specific methodology and following it in its pure form. This is an approach that I follow, and it's one that I recommend...

Here is a brief list of the agile best practices that have provided value to delivery engagements I have been a part of in the past...

Test Driven Development

Test driven development is a development technique where test cases are written first, then the code necessary to pass the tests is implemented, and finally the software is refactored to accommodate changes. The availability of tests before actual development ensures rapid feedback after any change. "Refactoring" source code means modifying it without changing its behavior, and is sometimes informally referred to as "cleaning it up". Refactoring improves the understandability of the code and changes its internal structure and design, and removes dead code, to make it easier to comprehend, more maintainable and amenable to change. Many of the other tenets of agile development (like evolutionary design, responding to change, etc.) start to fall apart if application code is not supported by a robust and well thought out automated testing framework and periodic refactoring cycles.

Iterative Development

Another core best practice essential to effective agile delivery is the delivery of working software using a just-in-time assembly model where potentially shippable software is created at the end of each iteration. The first step in iterative development is to create a upfront but simple plan for the implementation effort as a whole, estimating and scheduling work into iterations of equal length ranging from one week to one month. At the beginning of each iteration a more detailed version of the plan is developed, scheduled work is completed, working code is presented to the business, progress is measured, and the plan is adjusted as necessary. For iterative development to truly work, software must be thought of as being potentially shippable at the end of each iteration. Work must also be focused on delivering real business value to the business, rather than developer "gold plating". Finally, estimates and planning needs to be done by the resources were actually going to do the work.

Daily Standup Meetings
Daily Standup Meetings is a core agile practice that requires a very little effort to run successfully. Communication among the entire team is the purpose of the daily standup meeting. A stand up meeting every morning is used to communicate problems, solutions, and promote team focus. Everyone stands up in a circle to avoid long discussions. It is more efficient to have one short meeting that every one is required to attend than many meetings with a few developers each. Organization and involvement of all levels of team members is encouraged by requiring each member to specify what they plan to accomplish the day before, what they actually accomplish, what they plan to accomplish today, and what, if anything is preventing them from being successful. On large-scale projects, hold "super daily standups" once a day to coordinate work across different teams. This super daily standup should be attended by one representative from each separate team.

Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration is a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently, usually each person integrates at least daily - leading to multiple integrations per day. Each integration is verified by an automated build (including tests) to detect integration errors as quickly as possible. Many teams find that this approach leads to significantly reduced integration problems and allows a team to develop cohesive software more rapidly.

Common Coding Standards And Self Describing Code

Coding standards tells developers how they must write their code. Instead of each developer coding in their own preferred style, they will write all code to a common standards. This makes sure that a large project is coded in a consistent style -- parts are not written differently by different programmers. Not only does this solution make the code easier to understand, it also ensures that any developer who looks at the code will know what to expect throughout the entire application. A typical supplementary best practice is to employ Self Describing Code, a set of coding conventions with the intent of making code a self-documenting artifact. Specific implementation patterns can be followed to ensure that code is developed with readability as a primary consideration, in effect reducing the need for code comments, supporting documentation, and other artifacts which may not always be kept up to date with production code.

Collective Code Ownership

Encourages every developer to contribute new ideas to all segments of the project. Any developer can change any line of code to add functionality, fix bugs, or refactor. Collective code ownership helps to mitigate the eventual transfer of resources from a particular project. This practice has been cited as being much more effective than conventional approaches such as code documentation, code walk-throughs and other knowledge transfer mechanisms.

Sustainable Pace

This best practice simply states that developers are much more effective at delivering high-quality code when they are put under the "right" amount of stress to perform. I.e. they are well rested, enthusiastic, and able to look at a problem with a fresh eye. This needs to be balanced with reasonably short term objectives, and a consistent and continual need to produce real results within a relatively short time. (I.e. a specific iteration)

Collaborative Modeling

Collaborative Modeling involves the use of simple and accessible tools to develop low fidelity, often throw away models of software that is to be built. The use of simple tools like index cards, whiteboards, and sticky notes allows for non-technical resources (i.e. the business) to actively partake in modeling HUP solution. Collaborative modeling calls for business users to actively engage and own any models that are developed to help guide the development.

An excellent example of collaborative modeling (one espoused by XP) are CRC cards (Class Responsibility Collaborator). CRC cards allow developers to create a low fidelity, object-oriented model. CRC models are created by laying out a set of index cards on a table or particle board, and labeling one or more of these cards with a major concept (a class) that needs to be represented in the software. Examples can include long-lived information such as a Student, an Account, or an Address. More temporary concepts can also be represented such as a ShoppingCart, or a RateCalculation. Using CRC modeling techniques facilitate a collaborative modeling atmosphere, one in which both business and technical resources can engage in.

Co-Located Teams

it is hard to overemphasize the amount of waste that is created by placing members of the same team in different locations. This should seem like a no-brainer, but the reality is many organizations really struggle with getting their team members into the same room for the duration of a project. Co-locating teams drastically reduces the need for official meetings, just go to the room where the work is being done, and resolve the issue. There is also a huge amount of information being simply from overhearing the conversation of others. On large-scale projects, organize teams to minimize the dependencies between teams and then make sure each team is in one room.

Retrospectives

While a set of best practices may look great on paper, the reality is that any best practice (even the ones described above) will require considerable refinement and adaption to the actual environment where the project is taking place. Retrospectives are short meetings held by the entire team at the end of every iteration. Retrospectives allow the team to add any best practices or processes that can help with the delivery of software, and remove one's that are getting in the way. Lessons learned are incorporated into the approach, and allow the team to continually improve over the duration of the project. Retrospectives are another essential agile best practice (IMHO) but one that is easy to implement.

Pair Programming

Pair Programming is a development technique involving the pairing of two developers to one computer, one mouse when keyboard. One developer enters in code (the driver) while the other developer (the observer) reviews, provide strategic direction, and refactoring suggestions. The two developers should switch roles for equally, a standard best practice is every 30 minutes. While seemingly simple, pair programming is (IMHO) probably one of the most difficult agile best practices to pull off, developers by their very nature like to work on their own computer on their own tasks. It is also counterintuitive to believe that their programming would not result in a drastic loss of productivity. There is actual empirical evidence that this is the case, with some studies showing overall effort reduced by 15% and code quality being increased by 50%. Pair programming also makes it incredibly easy to onboard and offboard resources, increases developer discipline (someone's always watching over somebody else) and lead to more effective problem-solving.

Active Business Stakeholder

Every form of agile methodology has some notion of this practice. XP calls the on-site customer, SCRUM calls it a product owner. In all instances, some form of user, or user proxy, plays an active part of the development team, providing advice, direction, and knowledge of what the product should do. The active business stakeholder is responsible for developing all requirements for the system, and has the final say on priority. The active business stakeholder is empowered to make decisions on the fly, and serves as a buffer between the development team and other business stakeholders.

Given the list above, the set of agile best practices could also be represented as:

Agile itself could be represented as a set of agile principles and agile best practices...

stay tuned for part 2 of this presentation where I described how RUP fit into the picture...

Co-Presentation with Scott Ambler at Deloitte

It's been a while since I've had the opportunity to blog, but last week I had a opportunity to present on real-world agile development on large-scale projects with another firm employee, Sunny Ip, as well as the notable agile luminary Scott ambler . Our firm invited Scott to speak to some of our practitioners on why agile matters, and how it can be applied to environments that many critics state agile can not possibly thrive or succeed in.

As I have stated in previous posts, the firm that I work for it as much a management consulting firm as it is a applications development firm. Needless to say, many agile best practices and principles do not form the core tools that a lot of our practitioners use. While this is slowly changing, thanks to a core team is passionate and experience in using agile, having Scott present on the values of these approaches is essential to spreading this message within our firm.

I thought Scott did an amazing job in giving a no-nonsense and extremely frank presentation on why our firm and others like us need to start taking this seriously.

Scott managed to pack a lot of material in a relatively short period of time, topics included:

• agile overview


• surveys on the success of agile and traditional projects-a lot of great no-nonsense material was presented


• shortcomings of pure agile approaches (XP, scrum, etc.)


• extending agile with the rational unified process (RUP)


• applying agile in outsourcing staff situations


• applying agile to the database group and database platforms

I'm sure I did not list every topic covered here, but these were the major ones that resonated with me.

After Scott's presentation sunny and myself presented 4 separate case studies where our firm has taken advantage of agile best practices on large-scale delivery projects. Examples included:

• large-scale public sector transformation project with 20 plus developers in parallel


• assisting the enterprise architecture office in developing a reusable SOA platform


• using agile modeling techniques to properly analyze and design a domain driven solution for a provincial students assistance and loans application


• using agile delivery on a large-scale package implementation also dedicated to any students assistance and loan application

During our portion of the presentation, the audience began to ask questions which were mostly answered by Scott, with additional color/perspective from our firm added in by us.

For my part, my major take away from listening to Scott was that everyone in our firm needs to be much more forthright in pressing our clients on the need for change, and applying innovative/different delivery practices to their organizations. I think anybody who's done any solid delivery work for any length of time is more than aware of how dysfunctional many of our development processes and approaches are in a majority of organizations. But changing the situation requires courage, and the bravery to speak out to CXO level leadership. We really need to provide a frank assessment of the things we see on our day-to-day implementation projects. There's a huge amount of reward that can be gained from adopting agile in a pragmatic fashion. Costs can be lowered while simultaneously increasing quality and reducing risk. These things that business can buy into.

Again my thanks to Scott for a great presentation.

Great blog on "realistic" agile

Scott Ambler has recently started a blog Agile Software Development at Scale. Finally, an established authority on agile is providing advice on how could you to apply agile in a variety of real-world situations. Now this might seem like a funny statement from somebody whose blog is titled "Agile Consulting", but in my opinion a large portion of the agile community is too concerned with purity to be truly effective in a large number of real business world situations. This is not to say that agile is not full of incredibly useful material. The majority of development approaches and tools that I employ are almost always based on agile techniques. (CRC cards, agile modeling, velocity, release and iteration plans, test driven development, continuous integration, etc.)
What makes Scott Ambler's blog so refreshing (and much of his work on agile in general) is that it contains great advice on how to take all the great tools and techniques offered by agile and apply them to full program delivery, large-scale solutions, offshore, fixed-price engagements, and many other circumstances. Many agile purists simply throw up their hands in defeat when faced with one of these situations saying that "unless you follow practice number xx, you aren't agile". Which of course in my opinion is missing the point, which is how to apply agile techniques and common everyday situations that we find ourselves in.

SDLC-Guiding Principles

In my experiences, when a lot of resources speak about SDLC (short for software development lifecycle) in my organization they immediately focus on the concrete portions of the process. Tangible things such as roles and responsibilities, phases, activities, and artifacts all come in to mind. While these things are important, to a lesser and greater degree, depending on your point of view, they miss the most important point of a methodology, which is to describe the overall rationale and goals of the methodology itself.

The problem with using tangible, physical components to describe how an organization should develop software becomes immediately obvious to anybody who has tried to follow anybody else's SDLC. Primarily, a working environment, even one within an organization, fluctuates wildly from project to project. Resource experience is almost never consistent, team size can never be a given, nor is the scale of the solution. Other things such as technology, resource distribution, and project risks are also rarely a constant. What this means is that even a well thought out SDLC will never be more than partially applicable to any given project. I've seen organizations attempt to create a methodology that "scales" to various environmental factors. What this means is that a base SDLC is created, then offshoots are developed for projects that are smaller, larger, offshore, et cetera. Unfortunately, this has the effect of creating an incredibly dense and complex library of processes and approaches which become unwieldy in terms of communication and maintenance. Of course compounding this issue is actual process compliance, which is something that very few organization (I do not know of any) realistically achieve. In my personal experience, the majority of project members within organizations claiming to be CMI level XXX certified really just do the minimum they can to survive a project audit, and do not actually get a lot of value from their SDLC, often not following the "intent" of the SDLC.

So where do methodologies add value? IMHO, the most important part of any methodology is the section that describes the Best Practices and Guiding Principles of the SDLC. If your organization's SDLC does not frame its processes, artifacts and other tangible assets within a set of overriding goals and quantifiable values then resources will have no guidance around what to do when a process does not properly fit into a specific situation. (most situations in my experience) Best practices and guiding principles offer guidance on how software teams can/should strive towards success. They are goal/value oriented, and can thus be more applicable to many different situations than a set of concrete/tangible items such as processes, gating criteria etc. Principles and Practices also have the benefit of typically being shorter than a complex roles/responsibilities/process map which means that more people will actually read it, and may even actually follow it.

I recently was asked to put together a customization of the Rational Unified Process by one of my clients. While I believe the Rational Unified Process has a lot of value within it, much of this value is hidden away in detailed activities, artifact description, and low-level guidelines. I wanted to make sure that followers of the customization focused on the right values represented by the framework, which in my opinion was the emphasis on iterative work, modeling and extraction, and scenario driven requirements. I also wanted to put a clear emphasis on some of the more agile aspects of software delivery which are all compatible with RUP. The first two sections of the methodology customization dealt with these values. I have decided to post them here, as an example of what I believe IMHO is a good best practices and guiding principles section for an SDLC.

It should be noted, that I am about to share around three to four pages of advice on how to proceed for a number of different situations relating to development, requirements, testing etc. There's still a lot of leeway on how to interpret this advice, which I believe to be a good thing. Telling somebody that scenario driven requirements are a good thing and why, is much more valuable than telling somebody what the exact table of contents has to be for a requirements document. A particular artifact on a project might follow a specific template to the letter, but still miss the entire intent of the artifact. Better to focus on the values, some overall best practices and patterns, and allow the resources who are creating and/or using a particular artifact to determine what exactly needs to go in and go out.

Guiding principles

Uses an iterative approach:
· An iteration incorporates a set of activities from multiple disciplines (requirements, analysis and design, implementation, test, etc.) in various proportions depending on where in the development cycle the iteration is located.
· The schedule and scope of an iteration is fixed.
Risks are mitigated earlier, as most disciplines are engaged in the process from inception onward.

Follows a use case/scenario driven requirements approach:
· Requirements are organized in a way that tells a story of how someone may use the system, and how the system reacts to user behavior. Related scenarios are grouped into a specific use case or epic/theme.
· Nonfunctional requirements are captured in the context of one or more scenario driven requirements.
· Systems are developed by realizing requirements as part of the analysis and design discipline.
It is easier to develop requirements that are complete and consistent using stories.
A scenario driven approach provides a better understanding of a requirement from a user's perspective.

Is architecture centric:
· Design activities are centered around the notion of system architecture.
· The focus of early iterations of the process is to address architectural uncertainty
· Subsequent iterations may than reuse this architecture and focus more on completing business functionality
Technical risk is managed early on in the process
Greater control of system complexity and integrity

Is based on modeling visually:
· Visual representations of the system allow understanding at a higher level of abstraction than browsing through source code and other implementation artifacts
· Design models should focus on 3 fundamental aspects of the system
· Architecturally significant components, frameworks, and patterns
· A business domain model that clearly expresses the system in terms of business concepts understandable by business domain experts and system developers alike
· Common models/interfaces with other systems/programs that must be integrated
· While UML allows for the illustration of clear and unambiguous design decisions, it should not be the only modeling notation used (workflow, storyboards, ERD, etc.)
Modeling helps shorten the learning curve to understanding a complex system for both technical and business stakeholders

Is Agile, both in terms of development and documentation:
· All documents should have a specific audience, and the level of detail should be directed to that audience
· It is often not necessary to document all aspects of the system, focus on sections that are architecturally significant, difficult to understand, or have significant business logic
· Travel light when creating documentation. Every document that is created must be maintained over time. Some documents need only be temporary in nature
· All documentation should have a clear audience and purpose, and should assist in developing useful, high-quality software. Creating and maintaining documentation should not be a burden to the development team
· Use an evolutionary test driven approach to requirements and design
· Don't overcomplicate system design in an upfront manner in an effort to predict future requirements
· Use automated testing and build frameworks to enable the team to embrace change
· Architecture, requirements, and business concept should be prototyped with real code as early as possible, often in parallel with the documentation effort
· Continually validate with business stakeholders throughout the lifecycle of the project
Being Agile allows for greater emphasis on developing working software over comprehensive documentation and allows resources to “embrace change”, not resist it

Best Practices

Methodology Based Best Practices

Model and develop using an iterative, evolutionary approach
· Use more than one modeling artifact when determining requirements, design or architecture.
· Many modeling approaches, complement each other and may be conducted in parallel
o Use case, business domain, UI-prototyping
o Class modeling, database modeling, sequence modeling
· Architecture, requirement, and business concepts should be prototyped/validated with real code as early as possible, often in parallel with the modeling/documenting effort
· Within the same core team, design and implementation activities should be broken up into "miniature iterations" involving stakeholder review and clear testability

Use the simplest approach possible when modeling and developing the solution
· Use the simplest modeling tools necessary
o For smaller engagements involving co-located teams, whiteboards, sticky notes and other informal tools can be used
o As projects increase in scope, introduce case tools as necessary
· Avoid over designing solutions for requirements that have not yet been defined, as this can unnecessarily complicate the solution
· It is more important to have models that are correct than complete
o The purpose of models is to abstract knowledge and conveying meaning
o Extensive, overly detailed models typically obscure this meaning

Include testing activities within all phases of the lifecycle
· In order to support a culture that is able to embrace change, testing must be done early and often
· Modeling efforts should be validated with real code before committing to extensive documentation
· Automated testing harnesses should be used to validate all major system components
· When doing any work (documenting, planning, coding, etc.) always ask the question "how can I test/validate this?

Focus documentation efforts on creating essential artifacts necessary to develop and support the solution
· It is usually unnecessary to document all aspects of the system, focus on architectural significant pieces and business domain logic
· Some documentation and models, are used for understanding purposes only, and need only be temporary in nature
· Focus on creating detailed documentation (if necessary) after prototyping and other validation activities
· Clearly documented interface contracts are required between teams and systems
· Document with a purpose
o Focusing effort on what is required from the readers point of view
o Involve the "user" of the document to determine essential content

Take advantage of agile approaches , but structure them within more prescriptive processes as necessary
· Organize manageable units of work (app. 2 to 3 weeks) around moderately sized, co-located teams using XP, SCRUM, AM or other agile processes
· Document clearly defined interfaces between teams and major systems
· Organize these units of work using more prescriptive processes such as rup or sip

Organizational Best Practices

System stakeholders must be active participants in the development process
· Business representatives should own the requirements and be empowered to make decisions
· Organizational structure should support fluid lines of communication
· Requirements should be allowed to grow and evolve
Emphasize collaboration and communication
· Have a clear strategy that ensures that all documentation, modeling, and other system artifacts are clearly accessible to all project members and stakeholders
· Encourage collective ownership and development of system artifacts
· Ensure that the right tools are in place to support extensive collaboration and communication when using offshore/global teams

Favor staffing generalists, as opposed to specialists on projects
· Modern software development require a large number of skill sets to be successful (requirement gathering, interface development, object-oriented analysis and design, development, database, etc.)
· Employing "single artifact resources" will cause project resource counts to become unnecessarily large
· Specialists tend to be too narrowly focused on their own problem domain, and have difficulty seeing the larger picture (if the only tool you have is a hammer, all problems look like nails)
· Large amount of "document handoff required" resulting in information loss
· Hire/train resources to have 1 or 2 specialties, but have good general knowledge of the overall SDLC lifecycle
· Generalists require more experience than specialists and are not always readily available.
· However, working to maximize the number of generalists available for projects is essential to increasing delivery capability

Work to eliminate institutional barriers to change
· There are built in barriers to change specifically around infrastructure and databases in many IT organizations
· Processes and approaches can often be streamlined to be more responsive
Implement a governance model to support an enterprise system and process view
· Agile and iterative approaches are successful with small teams and 1 or 2 business experts
· Enterprise efforts require an enterprise view and a governance model to support a cohesive architecture and consistent approach

When taking advantage of offshore/global delivery capability use an agile approach to prepare key artifacts prior to hand off
· Functional prototypes, requirements, information architecture, and other artifacts can be prepared and validated using agile approaches
· Once validated, formally document these artifacts and transfer them to offshore/global resources

Technology-Based Best Practices
Focus development effort on mitigating areas of highest risk
· Elaboration and early construction iteration should be focused on addressing
o New/untested architecture
o Complex business logic
o Integration with external systems
· Risky areas of the system should be comprehensively covered by automated unit tests to ensure an early warning of possible faults
· Integration points
· Reusable assets
· Architectural risk
· Business process support

Make the right tools and resources available to support rapid application development
· Modeling/case tools are required for moderately sized and larger efforts
· Tools should support a superset of the uml notation (UML alone is not sufficient)
· Automated testing and build tools are the cornerstone to successfully implementing solutions using an iterative/ highly responsive approach
· Resources must have access to adequate development, staging, and testing environments

Develop using an appropriate platform supported by a robust technical architecture
· A solid enterprise architecture is a foundation that supports the ability to rapidly implement functional requirements
· Iterative and agile techniques along nicely to J2EE/.NET technologies
· Most web scripting and legacy technologies, languages lack appropriate tool support, and often are implemented using a more serial/waterfall approach

Implement a best in class Configuration Management Suite
· A comprehensive Configuration Management process is one of the most fundamental requirements of an iterative process:
o Automated unit testing support
o Automated build support
o Continuous integration several times a day
o Flexible versioning, release support
o Mock or stub object generation