Adopting Agile in EstoniaAgile Saturday (first conference of Agile Estonia)

13.02.2010 Tallinn

Alek Kozlov, Hanno JarvetScrum.ee

References / customers / personal experience

Experience in implementing Agile in development teams working on

Public / Private sectors & as Supplier / as Customer

• Self Service portals• e-Commerce solutions• Financial Management Information Systems• e-procurement• e-Archives• Distributed Retail Enterprise Information Systems• Business Intelligence• Middle-ware• Front end for embedded software• Web portals

Retrospective

Find a partner and discuss (2 minutes):1. What have I learned today?2. What do I still want to know?

Reported reasons for implementing agile in Estonia

• Hype (we heard it somewhere, our customers want it, it seems to be a good buzzword etc.)

• A specific project is in trouble and nothing else seems to help.

• We are not sure what our developers are actually doing.

• We are not happy with our current results (time, quality, customer satisfaction) – “MASU”.

Some Local Quotes• We are using our own

methodology. It is called common sense and it works just fine.

• Someone in our company is using some parts of Scrum in some projects where it is useful.

• The developers are lazy and stupid - if we don't control them they will never get the project done.

• Agile is just for developers who do not want to do their job well.

• Agile is just RUP with a pretty face and we are already doing that with prototyping and early releases.

• Agile is a new management fad that will pass.

• The customer/supplier will never go along with it.

• We already have a couple certified specialists who seem to be working on adoption.

• Our supplier has their own methodology

Adoption Antipatterns

• New religion• Go it alone• Forced adoption• No pilot project• Don't train anyone• Ignore the corporate

culture• Don't engage the gold

owner

• Worst Employee As ScrumMaster

• ScrumMaster Is Nominated

• “Project Manager is ScrumMaster”

Source: Wayne Allen

Obstacles for adoption(we met most often)

• Forced adoption of agile for micromanagement purposes– Lack of trust– Unwillingness to change– Unmotivated team

• Fear of failure– not to reach the goal of the project– to lose reputation– to be kicked out of the company

Obstacles for adoption cont.(we met most often)

• Lack of knowledge– don’t train anyone– blind belief in agile– how to cope with communication issues and emotions– We have sent our specialists to certification courses so it

should start happening any minute now• By-the-book attitude– Implementing processes without understanding the

principles. – The purpose of agile development: to provide value to the

customer

Success stories

• Issues:– The customer wants everything at once– Lack of visibility

• Solution (4 first steps):1. Creating a common vision2. Writing architecturally important user stories3. Creating a prioritized backlog4. Scrum Most often we implement Stealth-SCRUM

• Consequences– Resumed communication /working relationship without lawyers– Increased productivity

Find a partner and discuss (2 minutes):

1. What do I plan to implement?2. What do I plan to do differently in my work?3. Surprises from today

Recommendations

• Don't reinvent the wheel– It costs a lot of time and money

Minimum for implementation in Crystal Clear (Alistair

Cockburn) : – Frequent delivery of usable code to users– Reflective improvement– Osmotic communication preferably by being co-located

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Clear_(software_development)

Don't do this at home, we are trained professionals ;)

We offer:• Coaching• Training + consultation• Agile implementations• Production management and improvement• Innovation games® workshops for new

product development