Synerzip AGILE2015 Highlights & Take Aways

Top 10 Takeaways
Vinayak Joglekar, CTO
@vinayakj
Hemant Elhence, CEO
@HemantElhence

http://synerzip.com
Conference Overview
• August 3-7, in Washington, D.C.
• Approx 2200 participants from 40 countries, 17 tracks, w/
approx 300 sessions, plus Open Jam sessions and
Lightening Talks of 5min each
• Inspiring Keynotes
– Luke Hohmann: Awesome Superproblems
– Jessie Shternshus: Individuals, Interactions and Improvisation
– Jim Tamm: Want Better Collaboration? Don’t be so Defensive
• 5th year of 1-day Executive Forum, with invited senior
executives, ~125
Confidential – August 2015

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17 Tracks
• Agile Bootcamp
• Coaching and Mentoring
• Collaboration, Culture &
Teams
• Development Practices &
Craftsmanship
• DevOps
• Enterprise Agile
• Experience Reports
• Leadership
• Learning
• Lightening Talks
• Project, Program and
Portfolio Management
• Research
• Stalwarts
• Testing & Quality
• User Experience
• Working with Customers
• Government (New)

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Synerzip’s Top “10” Takeaways
Note: 40+ sessions were attended by
Hemant Elhence and Vinayak Joglekar. Where possible,
the presenter’s name and other reference are listed.

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Top 10 (14) Topics
1. VJ: Red Zone/Green Zone
2. HE: Scaling Agile/SAFe
3. VJ: Lean Experiments-
Pitfalls
4. HE: DevOps+Culture
5. VJ: No Management!
6. HE: #NoEstimates
7. VJ: Remote UX Design
8. HE: Team Dependencies
9. VJ: Pareto’s Law for Good
Code
10. HE: State of Agile Practice
11. VJ: Lean Hiring!
12. HE: Interesting Soundbites
13. VJ: Docker for DevOps
14. VJ: Interesting Soundbites

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1. Red Zone/Green Zone
Red Zone
● Low Trust-High Blame
● Threats and Fear
● Guardedness
● Hostility
● Withholding Energy
● Risk Avoidance
● Attitude of Entitlement
● Cynicism and Suspicion
● Work is Painful
● External Motivation
Green Zone
● High Trust Low Blame
● Mutual Support
● Dialogue & Shared
Vision
● Honesty & Openness
● Co-operation
● Risk Taking
● Sense of Contribution
● Sincerity and Optimism
● Work is Pleasurable
● Internal Motivation
Green Zone cos- Net Income +755%, Stock Price
+822%, Revenue +516%, Workforce +246%

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Radical Collaboration
• “Want Better Collaboartion? Don’t be Defensive” – Keynote
by Jim Tamm
• http://www.radicalcollaboration.com/
• The RED ZONE – GREEN ZONE concept is a way of
describing the culture of an organization.
– The RED ZONE is a more adversarial, conflicted and un-
collaborative environment.
– The GREEN ZONE is a more collaborative, supportive
environment.
• We rarely see an organization that is pure RED ZONE or
pure GREEN ZONE; most are a unique combination of
both, to varying degrees.

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Green Zone Impact
Kotter and Heskett's landmark study Corporate Culture and
Performance documented results for 207 large U.S.
companies in 22 different industries over an eleven-year
period. Kotter and Heskett reported following performance
difference.
Enhancing Cultures Non-Enhancing Cultures
(Green Zones) (Red Zones)
Revenue Increase: 682% 166%
Stock Price Growth: 901% 74%
Net Income Growth: 756% 1%
Workforce Expansion: 282% 36%

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Overcoming Defensiveness
• James Tamm in his keynote address said that
defensiveness (AKA CYA) is the worst block in the
way of collaborative culture.
• Defensiveness doesn’t protect us from other
people - It defends us from fears we don’t want to
feel.
• He proposed a 3 step process
– Start noticing if you are in red zone or green zone
– Look for early warning signs
– Practice your defensiveness action plan

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Schneider Model of Culture

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2. State of Scaling/SAFe
• In spite of some criticism SAFe seems to most
widely adopted
– Visual framework
– Accommodates large enterprise need for Portfolio,
Program, and Team levels
• Main frameworks
– Jeff Sutherland’s Scrum at Scale/Scrum of Scrum
– Craig Larman’s Large Scale Scrum (LeSS)
– Scott Ambler’s Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)
– Dean Leffingwell’s SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework)

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Scaling Agile
From VersionOne’s 9th Annual State of Agile Survey of Agile 2015

http://synerzip.comConfidential – August 2015
From http://scaledagileframework.com/

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3. Lean Experiments - Pitfalls
● Startups jump stages problem>solution>
market validation: “Good idea! Let’s test
launch in 2 months.”
● Unidentified Assumptions: “Now users can
… will they?”
● Unfalsifiable hypothesis - not having any
success criteria: “Lets observe.”
● Metrics that are not actionable.
● Wrong metrics - Measuring # of video
uploads vs playbacks.

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Good idea, Lets launch it ASAP!
Startups start validating the product without
validating if their customers even have the
problem the product is supposed to solve.

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4. DevOps + Culture
• The core requirements for successful Agile
transformation is
– DevOps, i.e. CI & CD
– Org culture + Agile mindset
• The essence of Agile is
– Inspect & Adapt
– All practices are optional
– Being Agile vs. Doing Agile
• Org culture drives org performance
– Org culture follows org structure
– “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”
• Separate DevOps session in Exec Forum

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Culture = Org Anchor
http://agilitrix.com/culture/

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5. No Management!
● No managers - self organizing teams with
many leaders.
● Only 13% of employees are engaged as
per Gallup.
● Problem with hierarchy – decision-making
power is concentrated. 80% people need
permission to do what is good for the Co.
● Consensus drive decision-making is
extremely emotional -> indecisiveness.
● At LL anyone can make a decision provided
they consult experts & all affected people.

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5. No Management!
● At Lunar logic people started making
decisions that they had never done before.
● Information transparency & freedom to fail.
● LL has transparent salaries which forced
them to have fairness.
● Control feels good - it’s hard to let go - but
it’s an illusion.
● Lack of autonomy -> lack of engagement,
empowerment and leadership.
● Cultural pockets - 10-20% people left LL.

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6. #NoEstimates
• http://zuill.us/WoodyZuill/beyond-estimates/
• Alive and well, but still being evangelized
• Statoil case study of Beyond Budgeting
• For estimation, use neither story points nor hours, just
count the stories
– Management and teams often misuse SPs
– Velocity in SPs is also abused
• All estimates are just guesses anyway, so might as well
just use statistical techniques
• “Cone of uncertainty is bogus” – check out
https://leanpub.com/leprechauns
• Better Requirements  Better Estimates

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#NoEstimate Rebuttal
• For more balanced viewpoint see Steve
McConnell’s rebuttal video
– Author of Software Estimation book
– Proposes
• #KnowWhenToEstimate
• #AskTheBusiness
• Also see Ron Jeffries discussion on this
topic

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7. Remote UX Design
● Teleplaying “Speedboat” & “Buy a feature”
○ Brutally honest/necessary conversations
○ Sense of bonding & breaking of barriers
● Multitasking/Distractions - ask questions/be
unpredictable/encourage banter/guest
● Over-communication gets tuned out; share
protos/documents actively by walking thru
● UX designer should act like facilitator allow
others to take Keyboard/Mouse control
● Listen to listen, don’t listen to respond

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Six Ways to Bridge the Distance
Graphics presented by Mary Brodie

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Remote UX Process/ tools

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8. Team Dependencies
• Entangled: Solving the Hairy Problem of Team
Dependencies by Troy Magennis
• Balancing # of teams vs. size of each team
• Be aware of the impact of dependencies
– A single dependency reduce order options 50%, < 1% with 4
– Every dependency removed doubles your chance of on-time delivery
• Don’t be afraid to have teams of up to 15 people
– If it avoids even a single dependency
– Otherwise, 7 +/- 2 is still a good rule of thumb for optimal team size
• Visualize your dependencies – co-locate/merge teams
based on that
• Manage your team skill balance to avoid constraints, but
keep new hires on a team to less than 30%
• Get cookies aligned between teams and dependents

From Troy Magennis’ Agile2015 Presentation – “Entangled: Solving the Hairy
Problem of Team Dependencies”

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9. Pareto’s Law for Good Code
● Encapsulate anything that is going to vary.
Separate use from construction.
● Write code for testability. Well defined
responsibilities having well defined interfaces.
● Software entities should be open for extension but
closed for modification.
● Favour aggregation over inheritance.
● Comments that tell what the code is doing implies
that the code isn’t self-documenting.
● Programming by intention - pretend that you have
the methods/interfaces needed.

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Good Code
Find what varies and
encapsulate it
Favor Aggregation over
inheritance
Relationship between any entity A and
any other entity B in a system should
be limited such that A uses B or A
makes B - never both

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10. State of Agile Practice
• Here are highlights from 9th Annual State of
Agile Survey conducted in Jul-Oct 2014
• Sponsored by VersionOne, conducted by
Analysis.Net Research, an independent
survey consultancy
• 3,925 responses across industries in global
software development community

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Only 5% Traditional/Non-Agile

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Agile Maturity

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Reasons for Agile

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Distributed Agile

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11. Lean Hiring!
● Auditioning should be relevant. If you pair on the
job, you should pair in the interview.
● Filtering on tools/technology is irrelevant - new
tools/technology can always be learned.
● Look for behaviors not practices.
● Screen resumes in a group and classify in
Yes/No/Maybe - discuss conflicting cases.
● Ask open-ended questions - “Tell me about a time
when...”, “What would you do if...”
● Test adaptability. “When were you surprised?”
● Cultural misfits result in frustration.

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Lean Hiring (Cont’d)

Take
Feedback
Top 3
resumes
Inspect & Adapt
Applied to hiring

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12. Interesting Soundbites - HE
• Don’t break scrum teams at time-zone/geography
boundary – “you do scrum where you can do scrum”
• Companies doing DevOps are 50% more productive
• “Individual performance management is still a $64B
question” – Jim Benson
• “Software shapes business, so the shape of your software
matters” – Michael Feathers
• There is carrying costs of (dead) code, so teams should
have planned obsolescence of code/features
• “There is no correlation between effort and value in
knowledge work. Your management practices need to
acknowledge that.” @KevinTrethewey

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12. Soundbites (Cont’d)
• “People are always awesome, in all ways and always.
Address the system.” - Daniel Roux (SPINE Model)
• Problem w/ middle management - “We are naturally
collaborative individuals, but punitive managers” – Jim
Benson
• Technical Debt
– Resist the urge to quantify technical debt
– Technical debt should not be incurred by doing some thing quick &
dirty (to go fast)
– To go fast, reduce the feature scope

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13. Docker for DevOps
● Docker is a container having a slice of
kernel vs. full OS virtualization
● Docker eases coordination between Dev,
QA and DevOps
● Offers.com halved their AWS spend but did
face some issues while scaling
● It’s still early for DevOps automation
needed to use Docker in production
● Scaling up is easy, knowing when to scale
down is tough

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14. Interesting Soundbites - VJ
● “Stop using user stories - start using hypotheses”
- Tobias Mayer
● “If you adopt only one agile practice, let it be
retrospectives, the rest will follow” - Woody Zuill
● People will forget what you said or did but will
never forget how you made them feel
● “Look good by making others look good. Make
your team look bad and you’ll start looking bad” -
Jessie Shternshus
● “Planned work fills capacity leaving no room for
unplanned work” - George Dinwiddie

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Questions?

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www.synerzip.com

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What is Org Culture?
• Organizational habits = core of the culture
– Culture is how organizations “do things”
– Culture is consistent, observable patterns of behavior in
organizations
• Organizational culture is the sum of values and rituals
which serve as “glue” to integrate the members of the
organization
• The cultures of organization are never monolithic
– Variations across functions, e.g. finance vs. mktng
– Across business units, e.g. Pharma BU vs. Consumer BU
• Cultures are dynamic. They shift, incrementally and
constantly, in response to external & internal changes

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