Keynote present at Agile Tour Vienna (2018-10-06) Velocity. Sprints. More points, more speed. An obsession with speed often overtakes the core values of agile software development. It’s not just development of software; it’s development of working software. Sprints are not about sprinting; they’re about sustainable pace. Time to market is less important than time in market. Full-stack development is normally a statement about technology, but it also applies to individuals and interactions. The full stack touches both the code and the world outside the code, and with that view comes responsibility and pause for thought. Doing the wrong thing smarter is not smart. The point of a team is its group intelligence not its numbers. Is scaling up the challenge, or is scaling down the real challenge? The distraction and misuse of speed, velocity, point-based systems, time, team size, scale, etc. is not the accelerant of agile development. Agility lies in experimentation, responsiveness and team intelligence.

1. Agility ≠ Speed
@KevlinHenney

5. agile, adjective
▪ able to move quickly and easily
Concise Oxford English Dictionary

6. agile, adjective
▪ able to move quickly
Concise Oxford English Dictionary

7. I have made this [letter]
longer than usual
because I have not had
time to make it shorter.
Blaise Pascal

8. Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus
longue que parce que je
n'ai pas eu le loisir de la
faire plus courte.
Blaise Pascal

9. I have made this [letter]
longer than usual
because I have not had
time to make it shorter.
Blaise Pascal

10. time

11. I spent a lot of money on
booze, birds and fast cars.
The rest I just squandered.
George Best

12. https://twitter.com/KevlinHenney/status/922803893167427584

13. Move fast and
break things

14. speed

15. velocity

16. v = vx + vy

17. v = |v|

18. v = s'

19. v =
ds
dt
__

20. v =
s
t
_

21. t
s

22. t
s

23. t
s [T]
[T]

24. utilisation

25. quality of
estimation

26. Observe
Gather information
from a range of
sources
Orient
Understand where
you're at and where
you want to be
Decide
Develop a plan for
action
Act
Carry out the plan
Boyd's OODA Loop

27. Decide
Develop a plan for
action
Act
Carry out the plan
Observe
Gather information
from a range of
sources
Orient
Understand where
you're at and where
you want to be
Boyd's OODA Loop

28. Plan
Establish
hypothesis, goal or
work tasks
Do
Carry out the plan
Study
Review what has
been done against
plan (a.k.a. Check)
Act
Revise approach
or artefacts based
on study
Deming/Shewhart Cycle

30. The design process
is an iterative one.
Andy Kinslow

31. You have to finish things —
that's what you learn from,
you learn by finishing things.
Neil Gaiman

33. code
tests
scripts

34. codified
knowledge

35. knowledge
acquisition

36. learning

37. communication

38. social
negotiation

39. model of
participation

40. The biggest advantage of
autonomously working teams is
risk reduction through increased
group intelligence.
Kevlin Henney
https://jaxlondon.com/blog/java-core-languages/the-error-of-our-ways-kevlin-henney/

41. There’s little correlation between a
group’s collective intelligence and
the IQs of its individual members.
But if a group includes more
women, its collective intelligence
rises.
"What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women"
Anita Woolley & Thomas W Malone
http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-team-smarter-more-women/

42. People from diverse backgrounds
might actually alter the behavior of
a group’s social majority in ways
that lead to improved and more
accurate group thinking.
"Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter"
David Rock & Heidi Grant
https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter

43. Diverse teams are more likely to
constantly reexamine facts and
remain objective.
"Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter"
David Rock & Heidi Grant
https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter

44. The four conditions
that characterize
wise crowds:
diversity of opinion,
independence,
decentralization,
and aggregation.

45. speed

46. size

47. scale

49. Software development does not
have economies of scale.
Development has diseconomies
of scale.
Allan Kelly
Beyond Projects
http://www.slideshare.net/allankellynet/no-prokects-beyond-projects-refreshed-version

50. completion time
for one person
𝑡 = 𝑡1

51. division of
labour
𝑡 =
𝑡1
𝑛

52. 𝑡 = 𝑡1 1 − 𝑝
𝑛 − 1
𝑛
portion in
parallel
Amdahl's law

53. communication
overhead
(typical)
connections
(worst case)
𝑡 = 𝑡1 1 − 𝑝
𝑛 − 1
𝑛
+ 𝑘
𝑛 𝑛 − 1
2

54. 𝑡 = 𝑡1 1 − 𝑝
𝑛 − 1
𝑛
+ 𝑘
𝑛 𝑛 − 1
2t
n

55. The Facebook iOS app has over 18,000
Objective-C classes, and in a single
week 429 people contributing to it.
Facebook's code quality problem
Graham King
http://www.darkcoding.net/software/facebooks-code-quality-problem/

56. For every activity
there is a certain
appropriate scale.

57. Your customers do
not buy your
software by the line.
David Evans

59. We may therefore picture the process of
form-making as the action of a series of
subsystems, all interlinked, yet sufficiently
free of one another to adjust independently
in a feasible amount of time.
Christopher Alexander
Notes on the Synthesis of Form

60. It works, because the cycles of correction
and recorrection, which occur during
adaptation, are restricted to one subsystem
at a time.
Christopher Alexander
Notes on the Synthesis of Form

62. The basic thesis [...] is that
organizations which design
systems [...] are constrained to
produce designs which are copies
of the communication structures
of these organizations.
Melvin Conway
How Do Committees Invent?

63. We have seen that this fact has
important implications for the
management of system design.
[...] A design effort should be
organized according to the need
for communication.
Melvin Conway
How Do Committees Invent?

64. thrustdrag
liftgravity

65. designdebt
practiceconway

66. F = ma

68. µονόλιθος

69. Why do cars have
brakes?

70. Cars have brakes so
you can slow down.

71. Cars have brakes so
you can go fast.