Agile Clinic Questions DECEMBER 2008

Here are the questions asked during the 5th December 2008 AgileMalta conference Agile Clinic facilitated by Jelena Vencl Ohlrogge.

More questions will be added as the answers are entered.

1. Rating: +0

   

   Are you still Agile if you don’t use the XP engineering practices?

   Agile != Xp or Scrum. It is you to you to decide what are the practices that you use to achieve agility and the targets set by the Agile process you adopt. For example, automated testing is not mandatory in Scrum, but it definitely helps to speed up regression testing.

   Many times we focus too much on the technical side too little on the importance of acting on upon the feedback created during retrospectives. The focus of Agile is the constant strive for improving your process; making things better.

2. Rating: +3

   

   Complex and shifting priorities throughout the day. Individualist duties. Does Agile apply?

   Aldo: Yes. Small iterations; there are various time management techniques. Jelena mentions Pomodoro on her blog?
   Jelena: Yes, here is the link we promised, from there you can go and read more on Staffan Nöteberg's site, he is an expert on Pomodoro.

3. Rating: +0

   

   Cross-functional teams or narrowly specialized individuals?

   Cross-functional teams offer many benefits in comparison to specialised individuals. With a cross-functional team you gain productivity speed, reduce complexity through better communication and improve knowledge and creativity through different points-of-view. In contrast, tradistional team organisation involves additional overheads for sign-off between one specialist team to another, creates barriers between people working towards the same goal and also creates the possibility for a single point of failure.

   Beward thoguh that cross-functional teams require time and money to set up properly and acheive their intended benefits. I would not recommend cross-functional teams if you do not intend to invest in your people.

4. Rating: +1

   

   How can people be motivated if organization is bureaucratic and offers no incentives?

   Aldo: A friend of mine went to a Scrum Certification course and having been to a different training company I asked to see his handouts & notes. I came across one note: "If you do not like the way a company works, leave!". It was highlighted. A couple of week later he left the company.

   Jelena: If all else fails (there have been examples of successful shifts of the company policies that came bottom-up way), and if you can not change your company, then -change your company (paraphrasing Martin Fowler, who said something similar. Basically, if the change isn't possible then one has to question why he should stay there).

5. Rating: +1

   

   How do you keep up the motivation in your team?

   Every team is different and has different needs. In general, you should always keep team members involved in the process they are committed to. Have them included in the decisions that will have a direct influence on their daily work. Hear their opinions, reward good team behaviour, create an environment that supports the team. Remove team impediments as fast as you can.

6. Rating: +0

   

   In your approach how would you handle being close to a deadline and some serious bug emerges that needs action but postpone the deadline would have serious impact on the business?

   My opionion is to prevent defects from happening thrtough rigorous testing and use of practices such as Test Driven Development (TDD) or even Behaviour Driven Development to minimise the possibility of bugs cropping up unexpectedly. Prevention is always easier than cure.

   For simplicity's sack let us look at the Project Triangle (or Iron triangle). There are 3 point, Resources, Time and Scope. In a project one or more of these need to be flexible. In Agile, time and resources are fixed while scope is dynamic so based on backlog priority the most importasnt issue will be tackled. If scope and time cannot be changed you need to increase your resources. When all 3 points are fixed your project is most likely not doing very well. You can read here from more on the The "Broken Iron Triangle" Software Development Anti-pattern.

7. Rating: +0

   

   Lesson learned? Seems that it is important to have continuous contact between business and development? How to communicate?

   Verbal communication, calls, emails, anything that gets your message across. We just finshed a project which went really smooth because we were in constant contact with all parties. All we did was have our daily meeting and made sure that key people were present. Also, whenever we had a question we called or sent an email to the person based on availability. As a lesson learned, if one team has more domain knowledge than another team it is very helpful to have a domain training session and make sure there is easy access to the domain knowledge.

8. Rating: +0

   

   Optimizing the technical part cannot fix the whole picture. How can we optimize?

   Winning a battle does not win a war. Fixing the part does not help to fix the whole and in some cases it can also impair fixing the whole picture. Focus on optimising the whol value stream (see Lean), focus on making sure that all part are contributing towards the whole and your common goal.

9. Rating: +0

   

   Talking a lot about commitment… how do you make people committed?

   Each person is an individual and requires different incentives and motivations to get committed. Rather than tackle each individual separately, you can focus on creating a team and get the team committed. To get commitment, you need to have trust, open conflict, discussion and honesty which leads to commitment.

   Empowering people is also a good way to get commitment. When management empowers people along with accountability and responsibility with the trust that they will achieve what the team has been empowered to do is good. When management empowers teams and still takes the decisions for the team they are effectively killing the team's commitment.

10. Rating: +0

    

    What Agile experiences do you recommend beyond Scrum?

    Lean principles and XP practices, Crystal... there is a wide range of choice out there. XP tends to be more technical focused and Lean spans the whole business and not just production. Crystal focuses on team work. The nice thing about Scrum is that it is 'lightweight' when compared to for example, DSDM which has a whole suite of practices to follow.

11. Rating: +0

    

    What can one do to avoid or resolve blame games in a multi-team environment?

    Conflict is the result of the natural friction between the Ego (see my notes on what I mean by Ego) of one individual and another. In a multi-team set up, each team can be considered as an individual with its own Ego. The approach to improving team work between teams is the same as improving team work between individuals. The collective Ego of a team is larger and stronger than of an individual so it will also be harder to fix.

    Multiple cross-functional teams are a better solution than common setups with teams of specialists (e.g. dev team, ui team, test team, etc.). I find that a team-forming workshop for a day or more (depending on the size and number of teams) helps a lot. Track all decisions made in joint-planning sessions.

12. Rating: +0

    

    Ways to enforce usage of common vocabulary, examples?

    Jelena: Make a glossary and put it in a Wiki, or a whiteboard, somewhere visible and so it is possible that everyone in the team updates it and reads the content whenever.

    Aldo: Process facilitator or project manager can look out for these.

    Dave: Domain Drive Design definately helps

13. Rating: +0

    

    In my previous work place a team stopped taking responsibility for the teams result. In a way they blamed the team but didn’t feel accountable for the team. How you handle that?

    I would conduct an analysis (thorugh observation) and deduce issues on why the team is behaving this way. The reasons can be entirely on the team's side, such as, lack of discipline or skill or on management's side who indirectly manage to kill team spirit. I once worked with a team who work on a core company product. They however felt that their work was not important as management was not as involved with them as they did with other products. One course of action was to ask the stakeholders to visit the team and discuss their progress. Also see answer on commitment.