Risk Management in an Agile Lifecycle

PMI Chicagoland Professional Development Day

November 1, 2013

Elena Yatzeck eyatzeck@gmail.com

Or…Optimized Risk Management With Agile

What is Agile?

Popular Agile Brands

v  Scrum - Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber/Mike Cohn

v  Lean Software Development - Tom and Mary Poppendieck

v  Extreme Programming - Kent Beck

v  PMI-ACP

Agenda v  Proposition: choose Agile if you want less risk and better

control.

v  Core Agile practices that better reduce, monitor, and control risk:

v  Do the hardest things first: create frameworks

v  Embrace the wisdom of crowds

v  Always have a working build that can deploy a full working system

v  Agile at Scale practices:

v  Build a big enough scaffold

v  Automate

What is the greatest source of risk on the diagram?

Solution: Reduce In-cycle Risk, and Enhance Monitoring & Controls

Agile Minimizes Change Risk

Agenda v  Proposition: choose Agile if you want less risk and better

control.

v  Core Agile practices that better reduce, monitor, and control risk:

v  Do the hardest things first: create frameworks

v  Embrace the wisdom of crowds

v  Always have a working build that can deploy a full working system

v  Agile at Scale practices:

v  Build a big enough scaffold

v  Automate

Long Runways Are Needed

Concretely v  Identify what you don’t know and quickly learn it:

“Spikes”

v  Solutions architecture: how will the pieces work? Build frameworks (not fully detailed):

v  Life of a Query

v  Data model

v  Error handling

v  Riskiest system pieces first (along with highest value to product owner)

Agenda v  Proposition: choose Agile if you want less risk and better

control.

v  Core Agile practices that better reduce, monitor, and control risk:

v  Do the hardest things first: create frameworks

v  Embrace the wisdom of crowds

v  Always have a working build that can deploy a full working system

v  Agile at Scale practices:

v  Build a big enough scaffold

v  Automate

Increase Risk Monitoring with Crowd Wisdom

Concretely v  Hire the whole team, provision them properly, and keep

them all the way through.

v  Schedule and facilitate efficient communication paths and meetings:

v  Collocation

v  Daily stand-up

v  Story and backlog refinement

v  Story kick-offs and desk checks

v  Demos, Product Owner sign-offs, Showcases

v  Information radiators

Agenda v  Proposition: choose Agile if you want less risk and better

control.

v  Core Agile practices that better reduce, monitor, and control risk:

v  Do the hardest things first: create frameworks

v  Embrace the wisdom of crowds

v  Always have a working build that can deploy a full working system

v  Agile at Scale practices:

v  Build a big enough scaffold

v  Automate

Working Software

Concretely v  Build environments and deployment pipeline first.

v  Build your continuous integration engine, and implement “hello world” before anything else.

v  *DD techniques:

v  ATDD:

v  Build automated end-to-end acceptance tests first; incorporate functional details before story acceptance

v  Build end-to-end flows first, then add details

v  BDD: Build failing functional tests within E2E framework first; satisfy with working software

v  TDD: Build failing unit tests first, one at a time; Write just enough functionality to make unit tests pass.

But wait! There’s more!

Agenda v  Proposition: choose Agile if you want less risk and better

control.

v  Core Agile practices that better reduce, monitor, and control risk:

v  Do the hardest things first: create frameworks

v  Embrace the wisdom of crowds

v  Always have a working build that can deploy a full working system

v  Agile at Scale practices:

v  Build a big enough scaffold

v  Automate

Build a Big Enough Scaffold

Disciplined Agile Delivery

Scrum … AND

Scaled Agile Framework

Concretely

Agenda v  Proposition: choose Agile if you want less risk and better

control.

v  Core Agile practices that better reduce, monitor, and control risk:

v  Do the hardest things first: create frameworks

v  Embrace the wisdom of crowds

v  Always have a working build that can deploy a full working system

v  Agile at Scale practices:

v  Build a big enough scaffold

v  Automate

Automation

Concretely: Don’t Just Log. Dashboard.

For REAL Risk Management…Go Agile!

Questions? Elena Yatzeck | JPMorgan Chase | eyatzeck@gmail.com | 773-573-7114

http://pagilista.blogspot.com

As Manifesto Hints: Agile Is All About Reducing Risk of the Unknown

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

v  Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

v  Working software over comprehensive documentation

v  Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

v  Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Abstract Increasingly, risk control is key to successful project delivery, and large companies are incorporating Agile practices into their SDLC specifically to improve their risk controls. Although Agile has a reputation for “legalized cowboy coding,” core Agile principles actually accelerate identification of risks, enabling more time for mitigation. Additionally, some of the newer Agile practices create even better controls over project delivery risk, making Agile the best available framework for risk control. Core Practices that Control Risk: •  Group conversation provides “wisdom of teams” to bring out risks earlier. •  Partitioning the work into small pieces instead of handling in batch allows for

better quality control and business inspection. •  “Fail fast” philosophy puts “solving unknowns” first in line for project execution,

and asks IT to start identifying those unknowns and proving out solutions from Day 1.

Evolved Agile Practices: •  “Scrum-AND” and other scaled Agile frameworks call for a mandatory, collocated

workshop at the start of the project (business and all roles represented) to build a higher quality backlog that can be prioritized for risk.

•  Continuous integration, delivery, and deployment with automated testing guarantee defect-free software that meets functional requirements from day 1.