Synerzip take on Agile 2013 conference that was held in Nashville, TN, Aug 5-9, 2013. This is our Top 10 list. 1. DevOps Focus 2. Lean Startup Everywhere 3. Hard data on Agile Impact 4. Importance of Agile Mindset & Soft Skills 5. Mobile Strategy Driven by Customer Empathy 6. Open Spaces to Facilitate Agile Adoption 7. SAFe Framework for Enterprise Agile 8. Pushing Understanding of Technical Debt 9. Org Hierarchy is the Main Impediment to Scaling Agile 10. User Research is Too Important to be Left to Researchers

1. www.synerzip.com
Agile 2013 Conference
Key Take Aways
August 2013
@HemantElhence @VinayakJ

2. Today’s Discussion
• Agile2013 Key Take Aways
• Hot topics (Top 3) you voted to discuss
1. How to effectively practice Agile across
multiple geographies and time zones?
2. Architecture/design challenge in Agile - how
much to do upfront? Too much vs. not
enough?
3. Requirements definition challenge in Agile -
how much to do upfront? Too much vs. not
enough?
Confidential

3. Confidential
Conference Overview
• August 5-9 in Nashville, TN
• Approx 1700 participants, 17 tracks, over 200 sessions,
plus inspiring keynotes
• We (Vinayak and Hemant) attended 20 sessions each plus
Exhibit booths of about 40 vendors of tools and training
services
• 3rd year of 1-day Executive Forum, with invited senior
executives
• Like previous years, big sponsors like Google or Microsoft
were absent or kept out giving more relevant companies a
bigger share of the lime light

4. Confidential
Top “10” Take Aways
Disclaimer
1. Limited sample – 40 sessions out of 200
2. Entirely our viewpoint, what we took away
3. Some inconsistencies, representative of conference presentations
4. Where possible, we’ve mentioned the presenter name

5. 1. DevOps Focus
Confidential
$ 3000,0000,000,0000
Three Trillion Dollars

6. Gene Kim Keynote
• Builds should have static analysis of code and asserts to
flag out misconfiguration or force https. Let builds break
before production.
• Worldwide cost of IT failure is $3 trillion. Avoid large scale
failures -chaos monkey(Netflix)-small, frequent failures
• Adrian Cockcroft-do more painful things more frequently
• High performing devops teams deploy automatically and
infrastructure configurations are version controlled.
Resulting in 30X more frequent releases and 12X MTTR
• In value stream Req-Design-Dev-Test-Deploy-Release
fixing anything before or after the bottleneck doesn’t help
• Long release periods happen more because of time taken
in queue – not while running..
• Developers tend to ignore non functional requirements.
Confidential

7. Continuous Delivery
• Visibility: Big Charts-”Ready to release” instead of “Done”
• Cross functional feature teams instead of DevOps team
• Build pipeline slows down if risk management steps kick in
on account of complex code.
• Architecting for reversibility and testability required for CD.
• Ball of mud- too many dependencies make CD difficult. It
takes months to release due to architectural dependencies
• Complex Architecture and lack of collaboration are
blockers for CD
• Automation tests the application and the process that
deployed it
• Feature toggles/ Branch by Abstraction decouple
deployment and release
Confidential

8. 2. Lean Startup Everywhere
Confidential
Lean Startup
Most popular topic

9. Alline Watkins – Lean Startup
• Empathy works better than online surveys
• Steve Blank-Startups fail not because they don’t
have product but because they don’t have cust.
• Value proposition is why your product solves your
customers’ problem better than your competitor
• The primary customer is the decision-maker. The
payer and the user are secondary customers.
• More features don’t make your product better.20%
of them account for 80% of the utility.
• Early adopters give time , attention as they badly
want your product to succeed.
• Patterns emerge after 20 ints.- time to think of soln
Confidential

10. 3. Hard Data on Agile Impact
• Data from Rally’s 9,629 projects. www.rallydev.com/agilemetrics
• Using key dimensions of Software Development Performance Index
(SDPI): Responsiveness, Quality, Productivity, Predictability
• Dedicated & stable teams work much better
– When people are dedicated to ONE team, that result in 2x higher Productivity
– Stable teams result in 60% better Productivity, 40% better Predictability, and
60% better Responsiveness
• Teams using story points & task hours have 3.5x better Quality
– No Estimate (3% of teams)
– SP + Task Hours (79% of teams) << Best on Quality
– Only SP (10% of teams) << Better overall (Productivity, Predictability,
Responsiveness)
– Only Task Hours (8% of teams)
• Teams of 7 +/- 2 have the most balanced performance
Confidential

11. 4. Agile Mindset/ People Focus
• A lot of discussion on the soft skills side of Agile
• “Focus on the people side, and forget about process and
tools”
• Intra-team communications
• Trust & transparency as fundamental building blocks
• Servant leadership model
• Conflict Resolution
• Developing coaching skills
• Negotiation and persuasion skills
• Follow-up sessions by Linda Rising (2011 Keynote
speaker)
Confidential

12. 5. Empathy
Confidential
Empathy
In Mobile Apps Design

13. David Peter Simon – Mobile strategies
based on empathy
• People focus to evolve mobile projects
• MFP for human rights activists in Africa
• Thinkaloud walkthrough and observing people to
validate their stated belief
• What can help people instead of what can be built
• 3 learnings- context centered design, augment
existing answers, create-destroy.
• One eyeball -one hand. Actions like shaking the
phone to lodge a complaint by Google Maps.
• Focus on people instead of hardware features like
speed, screen size, durability, signal strength etc.
Confidential

14. 6. Agile Adoption
Confidential
85%
Troubled Agile Adoptions

15. Open space- Dan Mezick
• Imposing against agile principle of self
determination & “people over process”
• Open sapce-5 principles &1 law (2ft). Whenever,
wherever, whoever, whatever, whenever.
• People design agenda. Rows=time, colums=place
• Purpose of open space is to generate stories to
understand people & culture
• Agile adoption is a game. Games generate
happiness. Open spaces tell you care.
• Leadership evolves- passionate and having sense
of responsibility speak up. Success succeeds.
Confidential

16. 7. Enterprise Agile
• Large scale Agile is still a big topic of discussion
• Major theme in Executive Forum
• Leffingwell’s SAFe framework seems widely
accepted and practiced, but some skeptics
• Scrum of scrum “sort of works”
• Other enterprise agile frameworks:
– Scott Ambler’s Disciplined Agile Delivery
(www.disciplinedagiledelivery.com)
– Eliassen/Damon Poole’s Enterprise Agility Model
Confidential

17. 8. Technical Debt
• Israel Gat’s session
• More mature and well developed in theory and in practice
• Vicious cycle of TD: biz pressure >> TD >> reduced
velocity >> missed time-line >> more biz pressure
• TD is not the problem, it is just a symptom of the problem
• When Business Demand > Team Capacity, you end up
incurring technical debt
• 3 main components of TD, with different impact
– Principal – one time refactoring cost
– Recurring Interest – increase in on-going support/maint. costs
– Compound Interest – created by practices like copy & paste, has
exponential effect
• Useful metaphors: Financial Debt, Rusty Car, Toxic Code: software
where technical debt to value ratio is >100%
Confidential

18. 9. Scaling Agile
Confidential
Hierarchies
Biggest impediment for scaling agile

19. Dan LeFebvre – Circles & Links
• Precondition-self organizing teams-1) Equivalent
elements 2) External source of energy 3) Happiness
due to perceived control/ progress, connectedness
and being a part of something big.
• Multiple scrum teams result in lack of equivalence,
visibility and no sense of belonging
• Disconnected teams>broken system.Conway’s law
• Requirements:bottom-top-bottom.Chinese whispers.
• Red status turns amber/green as it reaches the top.
• Decisions are best made at team level as freshest
info is available there
Confidential

20. Dan LeFebvre – Circles & Links
• Scrum of scrums- sharing of status- no action
• Scaled Agile Framework(SAFE) – difficult to
implement.
• Self organizing delivery circles create and deliver.
elect members to join co ordinating circles that
provide infrastructure, requirements, architecture
• Equivalence, visibility , external source of energy.
• Consensus vs consent to live with a decision.
• Community circles where functionally similar
members improve skills, coach others.
Confidential

21. 10. User Research
Confidential
Lies
What most users tell when asked

22. Aviva Rosenstein-Rapid Research
• Rapid research helps UX designers to keep up with
agile iterations. Customers don’t share knowledge ,
values, assumptions and interest. Need to elicit truth.
• Before-Interviewing/shadowing.During- card sorts,
tree sorts.After- pdt experience feedback
• Personas-user roles, characteristics, situations
• Empathize with user’s pains and frustrations.
• Users interest -cash, sneak peak, being heard
• Observe-don’t ask.Don’t interrupt. Open ended q’s.
• User research-too important to be left to user
researcher
Confidential

23. Rapid Product Design
• Michele Ide-Smith’s team built an MVP in a 3 day
exhibition event. (Source Control for D/b schema)
• Red Gate (.Net+D/B) .Customer interaction difficult
• No visibility into user environment and context.
• Predefined w/flow 20 ints before. Interviewing at
conference booth. Three days- 9 mini sprints.
• Bootstrap prototype- 25 User feedback sessions in
2.5 days. Paper prototyping extensively used.
• Empathy map for customer needs. Affinity map to
avoid repetitive/ similar feedback. Sketching env.
• 600 beta users signed up .
Confidential

24. Confidential
Contact Information
• Hemant Elhence (Dallas based)
– hemant@synerzip.com
– @hemantelhence
– Cell Phone: 214.762.4873
• Vinayak Joglekar (India based)
– vinayak@synerzip.com
– @vinayakj
– Blog: vinayakjoglekar.wordpress.com
• HQ and US office in Dallas, TX
– 14228 Midway Rd, #130, Dallas, TX 75244
– Office Tel: 469.322.0349
• Development center in Pune, India.

25. Beyond The “Top 10”
Confidential

26. 11. Agile Contracts
• A number of sessions on Agile contracts
– Gabriella Benefield & Ryan Shriver
– Simon Bennett
• Consensus that traditional contracts don’t work for
software development
• More developed topic, with real contract templates
http://flexiblecontracts.com
• Value or Outcome based payments
• A combination of Business Terms agreement,
along with multiple Statement of Target Outcomes
Confidential

27. 12. Architecture & Architect Role
• Scott Ambler session on Continuous
Architecture and Emergent Design
• “Architecture is so important in Agile, that
we do it throughout, not just in the
beginning”
• There needs to a role of Architecture
Owner, similar to Product Owner
Confidential

28. 13. Feature Based Release Teams
• Mehernosh Patel’s lightening talk
• Organize each scrum team around a feature
• Have one production trunk, and let each team work on the
branch
• Who ever finishes first, gets to integrate to trunk. But has to
also deliver automated tests for their feature.
• All others, need to now pull that trunk and integrate
• The process repeats
• Creates healthy race towards delivering the feature fast!
Confidential

29. 14. Stable Teams vs. ROI
• From Executive Forum
• Stable (and dedicated) teams are
significantly more productive
• Senior mgmt should fund development
capacity (and prioritize project), rather than
look project-by-project ROI
Confidential

30. 15. Agile Metrics
• A number of sessions on metrics
• Many guidelines, but no single prescription
• Vanity metrics vs real metrics - velocity alone is
not a good metric
• Monitor balanced metrics, e.g. Velocity, Quality,
Hours, and Team Joy
• Be aware of Hawthorne effect and gaming
• Where possible, try to measure UP, i.e.
– Measure the team, not the individual
– Measure the business, not the team
– Measure UP, start with the customer – Net Promoter
Score
Confidential

31. Other Soundbites
• Retrospectives are NOT optional in Agile
• TDD is like teenage sex – more people
talking about it than actually doing it!
• Capex vs. Opex classification can be
handled at story level, e.g. new feature
(capex) vs. maintenance story (opex)
Confidential