Agile reflection

quickly and easily and nimble. change direction quickly, intentionally, and with finesse.

Features of an Agile team

Cross-functional, Collaboration, Fast feedback

Agile Manifesto, we value the items on the left more

  • Individuals and interaction over processes and tools
  • Working software over comprehensive documentation
  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

  • Responding to change over following a plan

  • We focus on the people doing the work and on direct communication.
  • We focus on building the solution and getting frequent feedback.
  • We work to delight customers by working with them to achieve the best results.
  • We need to respond to customer needs when they occur to enable success.

redefine Agile

the length of your work cycles, the frequency of customer feedback, the frequency of releases, and the complexity of newly-released products.

waterfall

  1. First, define all the requirements
  2. Next, do all the design
  3. Implement everything
  4. Finally, verify it all

Developing incrementally in a series of short iterations allows for faster feedback from the customer and faster value.

Adjectives of Agile

  • Adaptive (responds well to change)
  • Collaborative (requires many hands and minds)
  • Iterative (repeats the process)
  • Incremental (adds small pieces of value)

Agile in Summary

  • Ability to respond to change
  • Customer-centric development
  • Fast, frequent feedback
  • Built-in quality

Recommendatoins

  • Validate the most important features with the customer
  • Work with customer to understand their needs before designing the jacket
  • Build a basic version of the jacket then add more features

Agile Team

self-organizing, self-managing, cross-functional group of 5 to 11 people. optimized for communication, interaction, and the ability to deliver value

User Stories

  • small piece of desired functionality, provide enough information for both the business and technical people
  • completed in an iteration, typically a 2-week period of time or less
  • written from the perspective of the customer
  • As a (user role), I want to (activity), so that (business value). who is using the system, what they are doing with it, and why they are doing it

Being Agile means using the right tool for the right situation at the right time.

XP - Extreme Programming

  • Coding
  • Testing
  • Listening
  • Designing

XP benefits

  • Technical Practices
  • Customer Collaboration
  • Simplicity

Scrum

Scrum is a framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining complex products.

Scrum Process

  1. Team Backlog, All the work to be done. It is to-do list.
  2. Iteration Planning
  3. DSU, what they’ve done, what they will do, and if there’s anything blocking them
  4. Iteration Review
  5. Iteration Retrospective

Product Owner: represent customer

  • Prioritizes the team’s work
  • Ensures the team’s work is well expressed and sequenced to best achieve customer value
  • Ensures that current and potential future work is visible and clear
  • Serves as the customer proxy for the team
  • Ensures the team understands how their work addresses the needs of their users

Scrum Master

  • Models an Agile Mindset and educates the team on Agile behaviors
  • Removes impediments, things blocking the team from achieving their goals
  • Fosters an environment for high-performing team dynamics, continuous flow, and relentless improvement
  • Improves team performance by facilitating and challenging norms in areas of quality, communication, predictability, flow, and velocity
  • Facilitates meetings and events

Main benefits of Scrum

  • Repetition
  • Embedded Coaching
  • Bounded Autonomy

Kanban: A way to visualize the team’s work

Each column represents a step in the workflow, and a physical or electronic card represents each story. to-do, doing or work-in-process (WIP), and done.

The more stories in WIP, the slower the work gets done. The fewer the stories in WIP, the more team members are likely working together with a singular focus. Kanban is based on three main tenets: Visualize work, limit work-in-process, and measure performance to improve.

#Main benefits of Kanban

  • Boards, increase communication and collaboration
  • Shared View
  • Focus on flow
  • Increased visiblity

Agility methods

XP, Scrum, Kanban: Deliver value to customers early and often, eliminate wasteful activities, create healthy teams.

  1. XP: developers buliding custom or internal solutions
  2. Scrum: developers building customer-facing products, hardware teams, and marketing.
  3. Kanban: Customer Service, IT Support, and HR Teams.

XP

  • Peer Programming
  • Customer Collaboration
  • Automated Testing
  • Simple Design

Kanban

  • Kanban Board
  • Work-in-process
  • Harness Flow
  • Continuous Improvement

SAFe represent the network operating system.

Business agility

The ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative business solutions.

Essential Level

Provides the minimal elements necessary to be successful with SAFe

Large Solution Level

Is used for building complex solutions that require coordination across hundreds of people

Portfolio Level

Aligns strategy with execution and organizes solution development around the flow of value

Spanning Palette

Contains various roles and artifacts that may apply to one or more levels of SAFe

Core Competencies

A set of related knowledge, skills, events, and behaviors which enable business agility

Foundation

Principles, values, mindset, leadership roles, and implementation guidance to drive change

seven core competencies

  1. Enterprise Solution Delivery
  2. Lean Portfolio Management
  3. Organizational Agility
  4. Continuous Learning Culture

  5. Lean-Agile Leadersh

  6. Team and Technical Agility
  7. Agile Product Delivery

ART

This team of teams is called an Agile release train or ART.

10 Critical ART Success Factors

The minimum set of elements required to successfully deploy SAFe across teams of teams

SAFe Core Values

Alignment, Built-in Quality, Transparency, and Program Execution

Built-In Quality

Establish Flow Pairing and Peer Review Collective Ownership and Standards Automation Definition of Done

Fixed Mindset: Desire to avoid: Change, Mistakes, Challenges

Growth Mindset: Desire to: Learn, Improve, Innovate

House of Lean

Value - Roof Respect for people and culture - Pillar Flow - Pillar Innovation - Pillar Relentless improvement - Pillar Leadership - foundation

Principles of flow

Understanding the full value stream Visualizing and limiting work in process Reducing batch sizes Managing queue lengths Eliminating waste and removing delays

Lean is different than Agile

Agile was developed as a team-based process for a small group of cross-functional, dedicated individuals who were empowered, skilled, and needed to build working functionality in a short timebox. Management, however, was not part of this definition. By contrast, in Lean, managers are leaders who embrace the values of Lean, are competent in the basic practices, and teach these practices to others.

Twelve principles of the Agile Manifesto

  1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
  2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
  3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
  4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
  5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
  6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
  7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.
  8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
  9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
  10. Simplicity - the art of maximizing the amount of work not done - is essential.
  11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
  12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

SAFe® is firmly grounded in two bodies of knowledge: Lean and Agile.

Lean-Agile Mindset: 精益敏捷思维方式

Agile Manifesto: 敏捷宣言

10 SAFe-Lean Agile Principles

  1. Take an economic view
  2. Apply systems thinking
  3. Assume variability; preserve options
  4. Build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles
  5. Base milestones on objective evaluation of working systems
  6. Visualize and limit WIP, reduce batch sizes, and manage queue lengths
  7. Apply cadence, synchronize with cross-domain planning
  8. Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers
  9. Decentralize decision-making
  10. Organize around value

Scrum Pillars

  • Transparency
  • Inspection
  • Adaptation

Scrum Values

  • Commitment
  • Focus
  • Openness
  • Respect
  • Courage

Plan-do-check-adjust(PDAC) cycle of an iteration

Plan - Iteration Planning Do - Iteration Execution Check - Iteration Review Adjust - Iteration Retrospective

Differentiate Agile from waterfall