Agile

Last week, I visited this years Goto Zürich 2013, which is a two-day conference with tutorials wrapped around it. Topic areas range from lean start-up over technology to a leaders track. I spent most of my first day on the so-called leaders track as here most talks revolved around adopting agile and lean methods, but also went to some more technical talks in other tracks, too. I’ll summarize most of the talks and my impression below. Btw., the slides to most of the talks can be found on the conference website, more precisely on the schedule overview for the two days.

The conference started out with a keynote by Scott Ambler on his work on Disciplined agile delivery which provides a framework on where decisions are needed when implementing agile methods in a larger setup, drawing from many different methods like Scrum, XP, Kanban, the Scaled Agile Framework and many others. The first part of his talk was mainly concerned with the question if agile holds up to its promise of delivering ‘better’, which he tries to answer with regular surveys. These seem to confirm that team size, location, complexity and methods used do have an impact. Not surprisingly, small team size are more successful than larger, co-located teams better than distributed ones and simple projects are much more likely to succeed than complex ones. And of course, there are still projects using waterfall-like approaches that succeed, while the difference between an iterative and an agile approach are rather minimal. Still, however, the number of project failures are always high, even for simple projects there are more failures than one might expect.

The first talk here was about Spinning by Ralph Westphal, which is well-known e.g. for his association with the Clean Code Developer initiative. His premise was that today’s business reality is a constant change of priority which is at conflict with assuming bigger time boxes during which developers can focus on some goal. His answer is that we should ‘seize the day’ (as Dan North might have put it) and deliver ‘value’ daily. It’s important that this value should be something worthwhile to the customer and the customer should be able to give feedback daily as well. I’m wondering whether it is really always possible to accomplish this, e.g. fixing a bug might require analysis well beyond a day. But even if you might not always hold up to the idea, it might still be a worthwhile guideline for organizing work. Another question which I don’t have an obvious answer for is the question who should be in charge to decide what should be worked on on any given day? Ralph required a thorough triage to be carried out to avoid wasting time, but it’s unclear whether this job belongs e.g. in the hands of the product owner.

Dominik Maximi spoke next about ‘Hostile waters’, e.g. how company culture might influence your chances and approaches to introducing agile in an organization. He made the important point that every company culture exists because it is (or was in the past) successful to work like that. This needs to be respected when you want to change something fundamentally. He then gave a nice overview of the Schneider model on how to classify company culture. Non-representative survey results indicate that ‘agile’ has a similar characteristics to ‘collaborative’ or ‘cultivation culture’, but doesn’t fit in so nicely with a ‘competence’ culture or ‘control’ (no surprises here). Changing the mindset of a company might take up to 7-10 years. Dominik finally discussed John P. Kotter’s work on change steps to implement agile.