This presentation examines the points of friction where Agile methodology breaks down on large enterprise web projects.

1. Agile Pitfalls
Seth Brown: Director of Professional Services, Lullabot
Drew Harteveld: AVP Digital Operations, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia

2. EXPERIENCE PLANNING OVERVIEW

3. Agile Pitfalls
MSLO Digital Replatforming Project
 18 month duration
 50+ resources, internal and external
 40+ individual sub-projects, ranging from 4 weeks to 6 months
 Average of 8 sub-projects simultaneously underway
 Content totals:
 500,000 images
 18,425 recipes
 14,686 articles
 7,000 videos
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4. Agile Pitfalls
Flame Wars
 Theory vs. Practice
 Does it Scale?
 Purists Be Warned
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5. Agile Pitfalls
Theory & Practice
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6. Agile Pitfalls
Resource Management
Theory:
 Fully dedicated
 Not shared across projects
 Co-located
 Strong Product Owner
 Represents business, creative, and technical stakeholders
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7. EXPERIENCE PLANNING OVERVIEW

8. Agile Pitfalls
Resource Management
Practice:
 Every resource engaged on 3+ simultaneous projects
 Remote/ virtual resources
 Poor integration of Product Owners into Agile teams until late in the game.
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9. Agile Pitfalls
Product Backlog
Theory:
 Complete list of User Stories representing end-state application
 Active participation of Product Owners
 Fluid prioritization by Product Owners
 Awareness, via Velocity or other means, of implications of shuffling priority
order
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10. EXPERIENCE PLANNING OVERVIEW

11. Agile Pitfalls
Product Backlog
Practice:
 Established backlog
 Composed of tasks, features, epics, user stories
 Resource capacity aware [Gantt chart]
 Highly-structured, semi-formal process for prioritizing backlog
 Transparent, widely socialized to stakeholders
 Allows the project to meander
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12. Agile Pitfalls
User Stories
Theory:
 Each story represents a single testable feature
 User-oriented
 Test conditions written on back
 Non-technical language
 INVEST
 Independent
 Negotiable
 Valuable to users and/or Product Owners
 Estimable
 Small
 Testable
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13. EXPERIENCE PLANNING OVERVIEW

14. Agile Pitfalls
User Stories
Practice:
 Tried to stick to official language
 Often veered form “As a [user type]…” structure for fully back-end tasks
 Never enough time to build robust backlog
 Good involvement of Product Owners for prioritization
 Poor engagement of Tech resources
 Abandoned…
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15. Agile Pitfalls
Iteration Planning
Theory:
 Four-hour planning meetings
 Add new stories
 Prioritize backlog
 Assign Story Points
 Pack Sprint
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16. EXPERIENCE PLANNING OVERVIEW

17. Agile Pitfalls
Iteration Planning
Practice:
 2-hour meetings, including Review, Retro, plus Planning
 Prioritize backlog
 Pack new sprint
 Always rushed
 Grew to handle time estimating in separate meeting, only Tech
resources involved
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18. Agile Pitfalls
Estimating
Theory:
 Story Points associated with each User Story
 Not necessarily predicated on hours
 Utilize Story Points to determine and track Velocity
 Paper clips to represent Story Points
 Triangulate estimates
 Don’t pretend precision is possible (Fibonacci)
 User Story-based Burndown charts
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19. EXPERIENCE PLANNING OVERVIEW

20. Agile Pitfalls
Estimating
Practice:
 Good with Story Points
 We are terrible at estimating
 Strong implementation of paper clips as time and team member
 Clips on cards to socialize
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21. Agile Pitfalls
Taskboard
Theory:
 Public space
 Cards to be moved through representation of process [Kanban]
 Resource engagement with board
 Location for Standups
 Transparent for all stakeholders
 Tactile tools: index cards, sharpies, yarn, paper clips, thumbtacks, planning
poker, etc.
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22. EXPERIENCE PLANNING OVERVIEW

23. Agile Pitfalls
Taskboard
Practice:
 Big, beautiful, centrally located Taskboards
 Classic implementation
 Low developer engagement
 Overlap and duplication with ticketing system
 Product stakeholders never really utilized for status, thus produced separate
weekly reports
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24. Agile Pitfalls
Ticketing Tools
Theory:
 Agile doesn’t want the info. buried in systems
 Information should be accessible, tactile, visceral
 Formats should be comfortable to all team members
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25. EXPERIENCE PLANNING OVERVIEW

26. Agile Pitfalls
Ticketing Tools
Practice:
 Tickets are the preferred currency of developers
 Less technical resources never felt comfortable
organizing project as tickets
 Prioritization cumbersome and invisible
 Power dynamic shifts away from Product Owner to
developers
 We utilized Unfuddle
 NetFlix queue?
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27. Agile Pitfalls
Burndown
Theory:
 Daily reconciliation of time or points remaining vs. work remaining
 Sensitive diagnostic of Sprint health
 Allows visualization of project trends
 Provides historical foundation for future estimation
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28. EXPERIENCE PLANNING OVERVIEW

29. Agile Pitfalls
Burndown
Practice:
 When we did them, they rocked
 Regime for hour estimation was strong, thus good
data in reporting
 Time consuming for PMs
 Hassle for developers
 Tough sell for team members
 Product stakeholders never fully engaged with
reporting
 Burndown as hours or Story Points?
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30. Agile Pitfalls
Standups
Theory:
 Daily SCRUMs
 15 minutes max
 No rabbit holes or “solutioneering”
 Detailed issues deferred for optional aftertalks
 3 questions:
 What did you do yesterday?
 What are you doing today?
 What roadblocks?
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31. EXPERIENCE PLANNING OVERVIEW

32. Agile Pitfalls
Standups
Practice:
 Only afforded 2x per week due to shared resourcing
 In front of Taskboard
 Held to 15 minutes, 80% of the time
 Fantastic participation across cross-functional groups
 Prone to solutioneering
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33. Agile Pitfalls
Release Planning
Theory:
 End of every Sprint results in shippable code
 Iterate
 Enterprise deployment best-practices
 Version control
 Code promotion strategy
 Start with:
 Pared-down interfaces
 Fewer features
 Fewer roles
 Simpler permissions
 Fewer modules
 Key workflows
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34. EXPERIENCE PLANNING OVERVIEW

35. Agile Pitfalls
Release Planning
Practice:
 Major issues with gap between Agile Sprint work and
aggregating all on one platform for Production
 Iterative releases had to be feature-complete
 Like-for-Like Replatforming
 Goldilocks scope – “Not too big, not to small, just right”
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36. Agile Pitfalls
[Intermission]
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37. Agile Pitfalls
Pitfalls
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38. Agile Pitfalls
Design in a vacuum vs. what we get
“outta the box”
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39. Agile Pitfalls
Design in a vacuum vs. what we get
“outta the box”
 Diagramming the “rainbows and unicorns”, greenfield design
 Offensive to the Tech team
 More work to build an experience around the provided functionality, than just to build
from scratch
 Ignoring one of the major strengths of the Drupal platform, its modularity. You get
some functionality just by installing!
 Steve Jobs: design-driven engineering
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40. Agile Pitfalls
Lack of fully-allocated team
resources
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41. Agile Pitfalls
Lack of fully-allocated team
resources
 Highly likely we were hobbled right out of the gate by this, just weren’t smart enough to
realize it
 Never got that deep, selfless integration across the team
 Resources more concerned about their own deliverables [across projects] than the
project’s own deliverables. How can you blame them?
 Does it scale?
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42. Agile Pitfalls
Selling Agile to stakeholders and
clients
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43. Agile Pitfalls
Selling Agile to stakeholders and
clients
 Fixed timeline
 Negotiable scope, willingness to meander
 Complex process for stakeholders to understand
 Diametrically opposed to “fixed-price bid” contracts
 If all three constraints of the “Iron Triangle” [scope, cost, and time] are fixed, Agile isn’t
a good fit for your project
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44. Agile Pitfalls
No Map
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45. Agile Pitfalls
No Map
 No functional specification to document scope
 Difficult to onboard new team members
 Nearly impossible to facilitate formalized stakeholder approvals
 Doesn’t provide the “Big Picture” of a classic waterfall Gantt chart
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46. Agile Pitfalls
Infrastructure projects not suitable
for Agile
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47. Agile Pitfalls
Infrastructure projects not suitable
for Agile
 Scope not negotiable due to “Like-for-Like” expectations
 Hard project deadlines
 Foundational code doesn’t lend itself to stakeholder-prioritized iteration
 Stakeholders don’t value it [“where is the sizzle?”]
 Can’t ship with just the foundation
 Can’t build a nuclear submarine in an agile fashion – the bulkheads won’t be
water tight.
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