Are you using agile practices but struggling? If so, you are not alone. Experienced agile practitioners know that some practices are more difficult than others, and most need tuning over time. If you are looking for ways to get more value or improve your skills, this session will pass your acceptance tests. David Hussman shares his coaching tools for improving and tuning practices including product planning, roadmapping, story writing, planning sessions, and stand up meetings. David divides the journey to deliver value into four essential areas: growing community and vision, planning releases and iterative delivery, delivering value, and continuing to improve and learn. For each area, David shares tools for evaluating the value you are receiving relative to the ceremony you are using. If your stand up lacks value or energy, learn new ideas for truly getting value instead of merely meeting and standing; standing is the easiest part.

1.
MH
Half‐day Tutorial
6/3/2013 8:30 AM
"Tuning and Improving Your Agility"
Presented by:
David Hussman
DevJam
Brought to you by:
340 Corporate Way, Suite 300, Orange Park, FL 32073
888‐268‐8770 ∙ 904‐278‐0524 ∙ sqeinfo@sqe.com ∙ www.sqe.com

2. David Hussman
DevJam
Working with companies of all sizes worldwide, David Hussman teaches and coaches the
adoption of agile methods as powerful delivery tools. Sometimes he pairs with developers and
testers; other times he helps plan and create product roadmaps. David often works with
leadership groups to pragmatically use agile methods to foster innovation and a competitive
business advantage. Prior to working as a full-time coach, he spent years building software in a
variety of domains: audio, biometrics, medical, financial, retail, and education. David now leads
DevJam, a company composed of agile collaborators. As mentors and practitioners, DevJam
focuses on agility as a tool to help people and companies improve their software production
skills. For more information, visit devjam.com.

3. 4/28/2013
Tuning and Improving Your Agility
David Hussman - DevJam
DevJam coaches and produce products
Design
Deliver
Learn
DevJam Tunings Vary
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4. 4/28/2013
Today’s Session
Learning thru Story Telling
Inventorying Your Skills
Questioning The Status Quo
Evolving and Augmenting
What are your expectations?
Learning by Story Telling
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5. 4/28/2013
A bit about me …
Extremely Familiar
- practical and pragmatic -
Extremely Popular
3

6. 4/28/2013
Extremely Essential
“This is what you should do”
Prescriptive vs. Descriptive
“This is what I have seen work”
Extremely Skeptical
```
Goals (Why) and Mechanics (How)
Creating Community (Common Vision)
Form Communities
Develop Product
Create an Eco-System
(Collaborative Chartering)
(Personas - Story maps - Sketching)
(Iteration 0 - Common Workspace)
Discovery (Planning)
Product Releases
Iterative Delivery
(Opportunity - Effort - Dependencies)
(Iterations [cycles] - Kanban (flow))
Delivery (Iterating)
Staying Connected
Tracking Progress
Technical Agility
(Standup - Common Workspace)
(Task Walls - Burncharts - Velocity)
(CI / CD - Test Driven - Refactoring)
Measuring Value
(Acceptance Tests – User Testing)
Learning (Tuning)
Examining Progress
Learn and Improve
(Product Reviews - User Feedback)
(Retrospectives – Pivots – Replanning)
What’s your story?
What’s your process?
4

7. 4/28/2013
What Tools Do You Use?
( let’s inventory a bit )
The Agile Tool Chest
Sprint Backlog
Burndown
Sprint Reviews Sprints Product Backlogs
Daily Scrum Meeting Cross Functional Teams
Iterations
Kanban Personas Test Driven
Releases
Kaizen User Stories Refactoring
Iteration 0 Velocity
Mura Acceptance Tests Technical Debt Burnup
WIP Evolutionary Design Chartering
Continuous Integration Retrospectives
Domain Driven Design Common Workspace
Collective Ownership Information Radiators
Pivot MVP Story Map Sustainable Pace
Story Telling Story Points Planning Poker
What’s In Your Tool Set?
Create a post it for each tool you use today
( values - principles - practices )
Then add tools you’d like to use in the future
What’s Missing?
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8. 4/28/2013
Why are you the tools you listed?
Sprint Backlog
Burndown
Sprint Reviews Sprints Product Backlogs
Daily Scrum Meeting Cross Functional Teams
Iterations
Kanban Personas Test Driven
User Stories Refactoring Releases
Kaizen
Velocity
Iteration
Mura Acceptance Tests Technical0Debt Burnup
WIP Evolutionary Design Chartering
Continuous Integration Retrospectives
Domain Driven Design Common Workspace
Collective Ownership Information Radiators
Pivot MVP Story Map Sustainable Pace
Story Telling Story Points Planning Poker
Dude’s Law: Value = Why / How
W
V= H
W
V= H
Qualifying Your Tool Set
Add a status of each
(w)orking - (c)hallenged - (b)roken
- (d)ead - (m)issing
Any tools you want to drop?
6

9. 4/28/2013
What challenges do you face?
What questions do have ?
Questioning the Status Quo
What is commonly working?
What is commonly challenged?
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10. 4/28/2013
Checklist Thinking (and leaning)
Focusing on outcomes over process
Questioning Standups
What are trying to accomplish?
What could you change?
8

11. 4/28/2013
Questioning Planning
Why are you planning?
When are you done?
Questioning Testing
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12. 4/28/2013
Are you learning or just coding?
Expected Outcome
Adaptive System
Working Code
Which tests are you not writing?
How much testing is enough?
What’s your next investment?
Questioning Metrics
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13. 4/28/2013
What does this data tell you?
What’s missing?
What questions do you need to ask?
What data do you need?
Do your metrics teach?
Release Burnup Chart
160
140
120
Total Points
100
80
60
40
20
0
1.1
1.2
1.3
2.1
2.2
2.3
3.1
3.2
3.3
4.1
4.2
4.3
5.1
5.2
5.3
Iteration (Sprint) End
How do they help you improve?
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14. 4/28/2013
Questioning Retrospectives
Do people value your retrospective?
How do you know it is helpful?
Questioning and Measuring
( What real value are you getting? )
12

15. 4/28/2013
Choose four practices to question
What value do you seek from each?
How can you improve each practice?
Do you need to change the “how”?
Let’s Sample the Room
What are we questioning?
What do we want to improve?
Evolving and Augmenting
13

16. 4/28/2013
Avoiding Epistemic Arrogance
The difference between what you know
and what you think you know
Unnamed or Overlooked Evolution
(from) Last Millennia
(to) This Millennia
What’s required?
How many hours?
How much cost?
What’s needed?
How much product?
How much opportunity?
How big?
Learning to estimate
Completing work
Too big?
Learning from estimates
Validating value delivered
Building for the future
Talking about code
Late integration
Building to adapt
Talking about tests
Continuous Deployment
What is the “evidence of success?”
Why iterate?
Why sprint?
What are the real measures?
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17. 4/28/2013
From Cycles to Flow
What’s a meaningful learning cycle?
What’s a meaningful product cycle?
From Continuous Integration …
… to Continuous Delivery
15

18. 4/28/2013
What does this graph tell you?
# fails
avg fix time (min)
6
140
5
120
100
4
80
3
60
2
40
1
20
0
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
Who cares?
Who doesn’t?
Continuous Delivery
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19. 4/28/2013
What are your integration challenges?
How would more deploys help?
From measuring story points …
… to measuring value delivered
Who wants to do what and why?
Personas, Maps and Slices
17

20. 4/28/2013
How often do you engage users?
What do you do with user feedback?
Outstanding Questions?
Be an Epistemocrat
“… someone of epistemic humility, one who holds
her/ his own knowledge in greatest suspicion.”
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21. 4/28/2013
If you are looking for some help …
Learning is the New Currency
david.hussman@devjam.com
© 2012 DevJam - All rights reserved.
Questions?
________________________________________
Coaching and Developing Agility
david.hussman@devjam.com
www.devjam.com
© 2013 DevJam - All rights reserved.
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