Agile

Owned by Roger Cruz
Last updated: Jul 21, 2019
2 min read

Intro


My notes on Agile, which should be tied to DevOps.


PDCA - Plan, Do, Check and Act


Get the teams to adapt the "plan, do, check, act " methodology.

Encourage teams to feel comfortable talking about inefficiencies and waste and taking action.




Lean


Some notes from DevOps Foundations: Lean and Agile

  • Lean product development is characterized by independent teams of experts, integrated from multiple disciplines, empowered to pull their own work, and using visual work management tools.
  • Lean product management, popularized by Eric Ries in his book Lean Startup. In it, he proposes the Build-Measure-Learn loop, as a variation of the usual Kaizen plan-do-check-act cycle.
  •  Mary and Tom Poppendieck's 2003 book Lean Software Development, an Agile Toolkit, famously adapted these Lean techniques to software development. They identify seven principles to follow when developing code. Eliminate waste, amplify learning, decide as late as possible, deliver as fast as possible, empower the team, build integrity in, and see the whole.
  • The accompanying resources have many good links: DevOps_Fundamentals-Lean_and_Agile_Course_Handout.pdf

Surveys


User Stories


New feature requests need to be created and described from the perspective of a product user (leave the technical details out, describe what the user expects in the functionality).

Develop personas for each user type.



Prioritizing


  • Initial sizing of work should be done in T-shirt sizes: XS, S, M, L, XL, and XXL.  This will help the backlog owner understand the impact of the work.
  • Big tasks should then be broken into smaller and sized with Fibonacci numbers: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13.   Some people a modified the sequence to 1, 3, 5, 8 and 13.
    • Bigger stories should be broken down to fit into the above numbers.




End Of Sprint Demos


All teams participating in the end-of-sprint demos brings a lot of value in sharing what new changes are being made to the product(s).

  • Understand different portions of the system
  •  Have a chance to ask questions and put themselves into a customer's shoes.
  • Gained a shared understanding of the entire product


Metrics


  •  Set measurable goals for the entire department.  SLA commitments on:
    •  performance, availability, delivery speed, customer support, and percentage of our time spent on new features versus maintenance.
  • Create dashboards to display metrics.
  • Avoiding the negative effects of misusing metrics - Make sure you build trust.  Metrics should help business and not be used to compared teams.


Communication


"In 1967, programmer Melvin Conway proposed what became known as Conway's Law. It states that organizations end up producing systems whose design copies their organizational communication structure. Given this, how you organize your teams and lines of communication become pretty critical to your product outcome"



Resources