How Not to do Agile:

A Practitioner’s view in sharing lessons learnt

Freddie Quek, 29 May 2014Agile Evangelist No. 22, Park Plaza County Hall

About Me

Partnering external third party with a large technology integration component

Responding to urgent competitive threats

Execution of an acquisition due diligence

Completion of large high profile customer engagement

Freddie Quek, Director of Strategic Initiatives, Pan Wiley

http://www.linkedin.com/in/freddiequek freddie.quek@wiley.com

Joined Wiley in 2006, responsible for Wiley’s largest web application2010, launched Wiley Online Library2013, charged with establishment of new organizational capability2014, pan Wiley focus

Strategic Initiatives Team

History with using Agile1999Daily stand ups, iterative development – Teams of 2-6

2005Led first Agile team at Elsevier – Team of 10

2009Led large scale implementation of Agile for Wiley’s largest application development – Team of 150

2011Running 10 agile “project” teams

2012Led Agile team to achieve Mission Impossible

About Wiley

• One of the oldest and largest global publishers • World’s largest society publisher• 5000+ employees• US$1.8B revenue

Professional Development25%

Global Research

58%

Global Education17%

2013 REVENUEBy Core Business

Wiley Online Library

Largest customer facing application65 million page views per month240 million visitors annually

1,600 queries per second (4 billion per mth)

Access toOver 18 million documents2,000 journals with 6 million journal articles15,000 books with 300,000 chapters6 million bibliographic references

About the Presentation

How do you get help to do Agile?

Is Pairing smart?

Can you really do agile with remote teams?

How do you hire the right people?

How Agile should you be?

How Not

to doAgile

What does doing Agile really mean?

Which one is better?

No need for Management/Organising?

No need for product vision/architecture?

Stand Ups – waste of time?

Not really doing Agile if you don’t co-locate

and do pair programming?

Does not matterRemember guiding principles of Agile - People over Process

Importance of Stand Ups and Retrospectives

How not to do Stand Ups

• Not just one big team• Have individual scrum team stand ups - up to 10• Big teams also have everyone including non devs - no limit

• But also have SoS (Scrum of Scrums) - only team leads/representatives

• Not get “traditional” pm to run it

• Not let “management” interfere

• Not run it for too long

• Not allow anyone to get away with “no update”

Make Stand Ups quick and usefulAnswer 1 of 3 questions:1.What you did yesterday and what you will do today 2.What you need others to know3.What you need help with

Stand Ups – in open spaces next to wall

Stand Ups - anywhere

Essential Tools – White Boards, Walls…

To Writable Walls

How not to do Retrospectives

• Not willing to provide feedback – do Safety Check

• Not team members in attendance

• Not just the negatives

• Not enough time to get to next steps

• Not doing one

Make it a culture

Do it after every iteration/major eventHave actionable item(s)

Large Team Retrospective

How do you get help to do Agile?

Agile Assessment

Team Enablement

Inception Preparation

Team Building – Leaders within

Agile Assessment

As-is Process: Development perspective

In essence – download from teamthrough facilitated sessions

As-is Process: Requirements perspective

Putting the picture together & playing it back

Get help when you need!

Always good to have impartial input

Team Enablement

• Team/Skillset Assessment• How many know Agile?• How many practice Agile?

• Training• Hire Agile Coach• Hire Agile Enablement consultants• Hire experienced practitioners

• Who can show not tell• Who can lead not debate

Wiley’s example50% know Agile25% practice Agile

Build 3 teams

Inception Preparation

Requirements – grouping and coverage

Spiking

Systems touch points

System flow

Managing stakeholder expectations

Engaging stakeholders from the beginning

Inception Preparation - Continue

Inception planningRoles and Responsibilities

Continuous Integration Shopping List

Iteration Planning

Team Building

Question:How often we do team building before starting on a very important project?

Is Pairing Smart?

Double the cost of doing work

When one stops, the other stops too

Fighting over the keyboard

Start from scratch with new partner

Arguments with no new code

How not to Pair…

• Pair for the sake of pairing

• Excuse for not doing work because not in a pair

• Not ready/comfortable to work as a pair

• Not recognising personal space

Smart PairingWhen you are training/mentoring/reviewScrum Master make the call

Two Pairs

Four Pairs

Can you really do Agile with remote teams?

Agile manifesto says co-location

Not physically possible to do pair programming

from distance

How not to work with remote teams

• Not treat them as second class citizens•Play to their strengths and recognise their weaknesses

• Not find excuses - Make it work •Organisational reality•Invest in them•Invest in tools

Extension of TeamTreat remote team members as full team membersBe inclusiveInvest in training – bring members over and vice versa

Ideas tried

• Change working hours to have some overlap

• Use video conferencing facilities (e.g. Skype)

• Assign appropriate work to remote teams

• Lead and organise work for remote teams (initially)

• Send local staff to remote teams and vice versa

How do you hire the right people?

Train existing staff?

Convert non believers?

Hire agile leaders?

Outsource to agile companies?

Believers who are pragmatists

Not evangelists who are purists

• Not everyone wants to do or get TDD• Not giving team freedom to learn and make mistakes• Not letting it become religious wars

• TDD or not• Pair or not• Intellij vs Eclipse• Jira vs Mingle• SQL vs NoSQL

How not to manage people

Everyone is doing agileRecruit Agile leaders – conversion takes timeBe a Leader - People over processSelf organising but not self steeringKeep learning and adapting

How Agile should you be?

Agile S/W Development vs Agile Product Development

Your team is Agile , but not rest of organisation

Being agile Agile – The Wiley AGU story

About Wiley and AGU Partnership

• Wiley’s largest revenue generating society owned partnership

• ‘Flagship’ product in the subject area of Earth, Space & Environmental Science

• Not-for-profit corporation dedicated to furthering geophysical sciences

• World’s leading society publisher in Earth and Space Science, accounting for 25% of journal articles and 40% of citations in the geosciences

Crowdsourcing weather using smartphone batteries13 August 2013The OpenWeather smartphone app

collects temperature, humidity and air pressure information from users around the world to track weather conditions in real time

The Deal

Contract signed on 5 Sep 2012

Largest society deal in Wiley’s 200+ year history

Challenging Timeline

• 4 months to achieve everything

in the contract

Measurable Success (and Failure) 1. Contractual Obligations to be met from January 2013:

1.1 Start revenue earning from publishing new content• 20 Accepted Articles per day• 20 Early View Articles per day• 19 Issues per month

1.2 Give AGU’s 60,000+ customers and users access to all licensed content• 21 journals (160,000 articles)• 33 personal choice products (i.e. virtual journals)• 743 special sections• Migrate all customers, users, products, licenses and alerts data

1.3 Vendors, systems and business processes in Editorial & Production ready to publish 2013 content

• Integration with new editorial system• Changes to workflow

1.4 Achieve similar functionality on AGU site with 60+ enhancements and all content converted, improved, loaded, tested and accessible on a single platform, Wiley Online Library

Failure is not an option

Challenging Timeline

• 4 months to achieve everything

in the contract

The Challenges

Key Challenges •Resolving unique ID for journal titles in both internal and external systems•Content with no issue number and no pagination•Journal with 7 parts, of which 3 of those parts have sub-parts!•Many moving parts within Wiley - 17 systems to check•Content completeness and quality (and external vendor)•Unknown unknowns - coping with changing and emerging requirements throughout development phase

Non standard practices and variations (that we didn’t know until we started)•New licensing model •Create Special Sections as another slice of content view•New workflow for handling daily society data updates via feeds•Changing content workflow for legacy vs current content•Start development before requirements were clear•Complete testing before we had all the content•Cannot complete certain types of testing•Break some rules

• Significance of achieving project success

• Project goals achieved in 4 months – typically projects take at least 3 months to get going

• Major releases typically take 9-12 months to complete

• This project had two major releases in 6 months with more than 90 enhancements

How to become even more Agile?

60-Day Plan6 weeks (6 x weekly iteration) for dev2 weeks for end-to-end testing

6 dev teams in 4 locations (London, Russia, Singapore, Switzerland)

People over Process

The Plan = The Wall + Excel

Finding the best peopleSingleton workMore than 1 stand-ups dailyQuick decision making – rest of team elsewhereFlexible and adjust daily

People over Process

• Use of Enabling Technologies like MarkLogic• As XML Store for content• Use of technology with unintended side effect for

troubleshooting, auditing and reporting tool• As a search engine, saves a lot of time from the native indexing

when loading new content

• Achieve rapid software development• Enables rapid implementation of 60+ enhancements in 6 weeks• Reuse search service for alerts and loading of saved search• Reuse vocabulary service to help with hierarchy of index terms• Supports faceting through configuration, no extra development

required

Enabling Technology

Recognition for Team

Wiley’s President Award for Excellence

Visit by AGU CEO

in May 2014Customer Excellence

Award

Celebrate SuccessStrong team workExcellent business and technology collaborationTeam never met – no time!CalmBonded for life!

People over Process

Conclusion

People over Process

Forget what I say

Remember to do one thing differently

Play Hard!

Which Agile Approach is Better?

• Does not matter• Remember the core

values/principles of Agile• People over Process