SUGSA Gauteng 13 Aug 2009 Event Feedback – Agile Engineering Practices

It was a wonderful event, full of Agile content made possible by keen Agilists!

This event was proudly sponsored by:

As promised, herewith the content from the event:

Agile Engineering Practices:
( Click here to download a PDF version of the presentation )

Lionel talking to us about Agile Engineering Practices

Trying to cover Agile Engineering practices in 30 minutes is pretty tough – there will always be a different way to do it. What Lionel tried to do was ignore specific code or technical aspects, and to present the essence of what Agile engineering is.

Summed up from the presentation it is:

• Let the “7 lean principles” and “7 wastes to be wary of” guide your every decision
• Software is part engineering and part craft – practice your craft and be proud of what you do
• Run a clean and efficient workshop through “Sort, Systematize, Standardize, Shine, Sustain” – for all your tools and code
• Code must be read and re-understood many, many times over, by humans, therefore code should be as clear and “English” as possible – use abstraction and a never ending focus on good naming of abstracted logic to achieve this
• Test driven development is the best process to achieve good, modular, well named code developed in a highly iterative fashion
• Design in the large follows the same principles as design in the small – use interfaces, abstractions and ensure single responsibilities
• Quilt coding – by having cohesive but loosely coupled components working through stable interfaces where separation of concerns have been achieved, one approaches the situation where multiple functional components can be stitched together as and when their functionality is needed
• When tackling a big new system, go breadth first, and only when really needed go deep to prove a certain functionality or technology. Where to go deep is driven by the risk associated with functional and technical unknowns – don’t go deeper than what is needed to reduce risk to an acceptable level – then repeat for remaining risk areas across the breadth. Follow lean principles
• Use sensible, repeatable, maximally automated release processes all the way from a workstation to dev to integration to qa to uat to live. Be able to roll forward and back to any point in time on the code and database.
• Use Agile version control methods – good introduction by Henrik Kniberg at http://www.infoq.com/articles/agile-version-control
• If you do the above, you do not need Big Design Upfront (BDUF). In fact, you will beat a BDUF approach every time, since you can change your mind at multiple levels in your solution stack and between components, with TDD watching your back
• Stay lean – question the status quo – build your craft

Kanban Case Study – Educos
( Click here to download a PDF version of the presentation )

Liz talking to us on Kanban at Educos

Liz Bath from Educos Vision Services, http://www.educos.co.za, then went ahead and treated the audience with a well-prepared case study on the effects of Kanban as an Agile solution to Service Support within Educos…

This was an eye-opener and definitely opened-up some minds during the presentation…

Thanks Liz and all from Educos, not just for the Case Study, but also for the lovely gifts everyone received!

The committee would like to thank each and everyone who attended, and for those who could not make it, well, hope to see you next time, we hope these presentations will convince you to make the time!

Book the next event so long, we are tentatively planning the next event for 1 October 2008, and if you would be interested in speaking at the event, please send us your details and proposed topic to agile@kaizania.co.za.

We are also looking for venue sponsors for the evening, please mail Arrie van der Dussen at agile@kaizania.co.za may you be willing to either provide us with a suitable venue or willing to assist in paying for a suitable venue…

Keep Scrumming!

An Agile Approach To Office Furniture

We have recently found ourselves in a bit of a chair dilemma, which was easily resolved by buying some new chairs, but these chairs still had to be assembled…

Now for one person it would probably have taken quite some time to assemble nine office chairs, but we decided to take an exciting and fun approach to this: A chair building competition.

As if the exhilaration of competing was not enough, there was even prize money of R100 for the builder of the first STABLE chair (with no left over parts).

Each contestant got themselves setup with a chair-box on the patio, and on the word “Go” the race started.

I was not involved in the building myself, but thoroughly enjoyed watching how each person attempted the chair building process:  Developers, QA and IT; each with their unique approach.

Some immediately sorted all the parts and checked the manual, while others jumped right in and started assembling.

After only a few minutes, we had our winner!! Our QA Manager, Orrin

Thanks again to all who took part in this – it was so much fun!!

Agile Bootcamp public training completed!

Another 2-day course completed by Kaizania, Agile Bootcamp, last week in Centurion…

This was again a fantastic group of people, seems like the people who attend Agile training are always open-minded, eager to learn and active particants!

The companies represented, NuPay – JunkMail – Telamenta – Investec, made for good variety in opinions, experiences and organisational size and complexity!

We deviated a little bit from our previous course outline which was focused around Scrum, to a course outline focusing on laying the foundation of Agile first – Flexible Production Era (download the whitepaper here).

Then we covered Scrum, history and principles of Scrum, Scrum framework and all the roles, ceremonies and artefacts in detail.

Different to our previous courses, we introduced Kanban to the delegates as an Agile solution to service support development organisations and teams. We did this by playing a great game to illustrate Kanban and the financial effect thereof… What was nice to see was the teams actually embracing the concepts and principles discussed earlier from Lean, especially avoidance of waste!

Overall, a great success and a fantastic opportunity to spend time with eager Agilists!

Kaizania likes to think that we not only train and coach folks on our training courses, but that we also treat them a little bit… and we can truly say we did, what a fantastic venue for training at KleinKaap, and the food was fantastic!

A venue with style, warm and friendly service and absolutely great food! Well done all at KleinKaap!

Here is some feedback from JunkMail who were on the course:

“I found the course to be highly informative and enlightening with regards to a better PM approach, handling the demands of modern online business development. The course was very well presented and kept the flow going strong, making for a mentally sparking and invigorating experience.

I am confident that this will assist us significantly in our development team to minimise development time and maximise accountability among developers for their various tasks. The reduction in project specifications time is also a huge bonus to us.

Well done guys! I would recommend Kaizania training in a heartbeat.”

- Douglas Bailey, Internal Development Manager, JunkMail Publishing Group

Next course is planned, not yet confirmed, for mid-September… may you be interested, please send a mail to agile@kaizania.co.za or phone Arrie on 083 700 2181 and we can place your name and preferred dates on a list, which will help Kaizania to try and accommodate all as best as we possibly could!

Watch this space – Kaizania White Papers on the way

In helping organizations take full benefit of Flexible Production Era work practices, Kaizania is continually seeing how much organizations need to change in order to achieve the full benefit. Every now and then we summarize our learnings in a white paper.

It is that time again and here is an overview of white papers we are currently producing. We will post them soon as we are done, so watch this space!

Service Support and Kanban

IT departments everywhere are under continuing pressure to deliver excellent customer service to their customers – whether these be internal and/or external customers. The cornerstone of most organization’s approach to deliver has thus far been the combination of ITIL and a Help Desk system. The following are still significant problem areas not well covered by ITIL and a Help Desk system, which are very well addressed by introducing Kanban:

• Task visibility
  What is in progress? Information is available on Help Desk systems but there is no one single, public, visually rich view of what the work and service status is at any one time.

• Knowledge transfer
  Reducing knowledge “single points of failure” is a challenge – how to go about it? ITIL does not provide any real guidelines in terms of work practices to promote knowledge transfer

• Self organization and tasks
  How are tasks assigned to teams and individuals? Is there significant management overhead? How can a work environment be created where support teams have clear goals and self-organize to reach these goals?

• Continuous improvement
  How is a continuous improvement culture introduced, nurtured and soon turned into an ingrained habit for service teams?

• Process bottlenecks
  What is impacting a service team’s ability to reduce cycle time i.e. resolve service calls better and faster? Kanban makes it very clear and visible where process bottlenecks are occurring, and makes it very clear when and how service teams must act in order to resolve and permanently remove these bottlenecks.

We will introduce an integrated ITIL, Help Desk application and Kanban approach to delivering excellent customer service in one of our next White Papers.

Project and Portfolio Management in Service Organizations

The way in which IT projects and project portfolios are managed in service companies needs to change so much it is daunting.  The key problems with how service organizations currently work are:

1. Apparent control of risk and soundness of the project business case through significant upfront requirements gathering, detail task breakdowns and time and cost estimations – just a pity these detail plans are at best 50% correct – so much waste to maintain the comforting illusion of a perfect plan.
2. Inability to get a pilot off the ground – with so much upfront effort it is terribly difficult to be quick and exploit opportunities – innovators feel like they are working in mud….
3. Ensuring the “perfect plan” succeeds actually creates huge obstacles to learning and improving what is delivered – think change control board…. – must we really make it sooo difficult to ensure the best possible product or system is built in the shortest possible time, adapting as we learn more on exactly what we want and exactly how we build it?
4. “Efficient” resource allocation as project “teams” are continually broken up and formed – just a pity that writing software is akin to a team writing an epic poem under direction of the customer, requiring intimate knowledge of the subject matter, the capability of each team member, commitment and passion. It is very, very tough to do this with a new team every few months, or even every 2^nd day. Why not let the same team write more than one epic poem together? Surely they improve their creative ability over time….

We will summarize our views of the road ahead in one of our next white papers.

Kaizania – changing the way we manage projects, portfolios and creative people; bit by bit, day by day