Are You Ready for Agile? Questions to consider before embarking on
Agile Journey
Ramesh Donnipadu
• 18 years in Industry. Currently with UNTD
• CSM & Agile enthusiast
• 3+ years of experience with Agile/Scrum
• Successfully helped organizations in adopting to Large-scale, Multi-
site Agile adoption
Who am I?
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•Audience – Who is this session for?
• Do you know what Agile is?
• Are you considering adopting Agile?
• Have you started Agile recently?
• Have you been practicing agile for a while?
•Pre-requisites for succeeding with agile adoption
Agenda
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Is Agile hard?
• Is Agile a Process? Set of Practices?
• Commitment from ALL levels
• Requires great discipline & Courage
• Willingness to Change
Checklist
• Management Preparedness
• Engineering Preparedness
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• Do you have the support of your Management?
• Have you trained your folks?
• Do you have a dedicated Team, Scrum Master & Product Owner?
• Have you planned for additional help during initial iterations?
• Have you assessed suitability of existing facilities?
• Is appropriate attrition strategy in place?
• Should I start with one team or bring everyone on board?
• Do you have a plan on Dependency Management?
Management Preparedness
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1. Do you have the Management’s support?
• “Check-box” support Vs Passionate commitment
• Provide resources, time, constant encouragement
• Willingness to let go – Estimates, decisions, agreements, directions are now
owned by the Team!
• Empower the teams
• Revise measures of success
2. Did you train your folks?
• Does the team understand Agile Manifesto, Principles behind them?
• CSM training for Scrum Masters – recommended for entire team
• CSPO training for Product Owners
• Scrum awareness program for the support staff
• Pre-training with study groups, Participation in user-group meetings & discussions
Additional Training
Scrum Team Scrum Master
Product Owner
Execs, Line Managers
Punctuality, Teamwork
Delegation Customer Expectation management
Team empowerment
Cross-functional skills
Conflict resolution, Facilitation skills
Conflict resolution, Facilitation skills
Facilitation, Conflict resolution
Ownership (Functional, Technical, Operational)
Root-Cause analysis
Root-Cause analysis, 5-Whys
Servant Leadership
3. Have you signed-up for additional help?
- Have a full-time coach to help you during initial sprints
- Can you seed your teams with experienced Agile practitioners?
4. Do you have dedicated staff?
- Dedicated Team
- Dedicated Scrum Master
- Dedicated Product Owner
- PO => Rep of all end-users
- No PO or Multiple POs - ×
5. Changes needed to Facilities?
• Is your team co-located?
• Cubicle based team Vs war-room based team?
• Enough space for hanging charts
6.Is appropriate Attrition strategy in place?
• Tightly gelled teams
• Small teams, shorter iterations => any departure is setback
• New member = disruption
• Frequent additions/deletions = disruption
• Have a trained pool of resources (buffer)
Large scale Agile adoption
- Start with one team Vs entire organization
- Team-specific product backlog Vs Org-wide Vision & Roadmap
- Dependency Management
- Exclusive Code ownership Vs Shared Ownership
Distributed Agile
• Build Trust among the team members
– Frequent face-to-face communication, travel ambassadors, team building exercises, Working agreements, Delivering commitments
• Communication tools
– IM, Tele/Video Conf, Skype, Email, Wiki, WebEx, VNC
• Project Management tools – Rally, Version One, ScrumWorks, Jira, Crucible
• Source Code repository replication systems (Git, WanDisco, CollabNet)
Engineering Practices
• Do you have sufficient Unit test coverage?
• Do you use Automation testing?
• Do your teams know
– Refactoring?
– Pair-Programming?
– Test Driven development?
• Is your build/deployment system fully automated?
• Do you practice Continuous Integration?
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Tools
• What kind of collaboration tools to use?
• Auditing monitoring tools?
• Bring every system from DEV sandbox to Production under monitoring
• Multi-location teams
– Source code replication tools
– Video conf, IM, WebEx
• Project Management tools
– Version One, Rally etc.
Conclusion
• Agile is hard
• Systematic preparation is key to success
• No need a ‘√’ for ALL questions
• Are the questions related to Agile?
www.agiletour.org 05/11/10
THANK YOU
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