Considering business value as the prime driver fo Agile development, focusing on quality as a means of contributing to value.

1. Agility, Business Value &
the 11 Axis of Software Quality
Schalk W. Cronjé
ysb33r@gmail.com
ACCU 2009
© Schalk W. Cronjé

2. Are you still agile?
Do you believe in quality?
Do you deliver business value?
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© Schalk W. Cronjé

3. Agility, Business Value &
the 11 Axis of Software Quality
● Agility and institutional theory
● Views of quality
● Software quality factors
● Measuring for value
● The real world
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© Schalk W. Cronjé

4. Human capital
● Knowledge
● The most important asset of any organisation
● Hated by bean counters
– Difficult to measure
● Requires non-linear, empirical management
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5. Institutions
● Sets of internalised rules Institution
supported by values
– Has tacit influence
– Rules will be contested
● Shape understanding of Organisations
social meaning + order
– Provides a framework for
performance
● Shapes of rights + duties People
– Political authority
– Economic opportunities
An organisation can become "institutionalised"
Institutions don't last forever
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© Schalk W. Cronjé

6. Scott's Model
interpret
Societal Institutions innovate
invent, error
negotiate
diffuse,
impose
Organisational Fields
invent,
negotiate
diffuse,
impose
Organisations invent,
sanction negotiate
behaviour
diffuse,
impose
Actors
Limitations of cognitive / social rationality (groups/individuals)
Selective perception
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7. Agile Today
● Mature
● Well-known methodologies agile
today
● Embraced by many
– Even if only by lip service
● Misunderstood by many
● Too easy to tick the boxes
than to deliver value
● Tyranny of the urgent
– Discipline
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8. Time to Revisit Agile Values
We value people and interactions
above processes and tools
We value responding to change
over following a plan
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9. Business Value
● "Business Value" is executing / procuring /
producing that which is of "value to the
business"
● Responding to change can provide value
● Indirect actions at grass roots can provide
long-term business value
ACCU 2009
© Schalk W. Cronjé

10. Agility, Business Value &
the 11 Axis of Software Quality
● Agility and institutional theory
● Views of quality
● Software quality factors
● Measuring for value
● The real world
ACCU 2009
© Schalk W. Cronjé

11. Quality as an Institution
● Well known concept
● Contested nature
● Has a tacit influence
● Embodied in many organisations
● Cannot be directly measured
● Improving quality can have side-effects
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12. Product / Service Quality Features
(Kano model)
● Primary
– Basic features
● Secondary
– Distinguishing performance features
● Tertiary
– Excitement features
– Discovered after purchase
– Predisposes to repeat purchase
Quality scope == Fitness of Use
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© Schalk W. Cronjé

13. Cost of Quality
● Appraisal costs
– Discovering condition of hardware & 3rd-party
software components
● Internal failure costs
– Defects found before shipment
● External failure costs
– Defects found after shipment
● Prevention costs
– Costs for preventing all of the above
ACCU 2009
© Schalk W. Cronjé

14. Agility, Business Value &
the 11 Axis of Software Quality
● Agility and institutional theory
● Views of quality
● Software quality factors
● Measuring for value
● The real world
ACCU 2009
© Schalk W. Cronjé

15. Relative easy to The one always
quantify remembered
Correctness
To what extent does the
system satisfy requirements
and meet objectives?
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16. Know your Directly related
boundaries to fitness of
use
Reliability
Measures of stability and
precision
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17. Builds
Difficult to
perception
measure
Usability
Effort to learn and use the
application / API
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18. Major long-term
Affects process
costs
throughput
Maintainability
Effort required to find, fix and
test defects or update running
systems
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19. Requires vision Separation of
concerns
Portability
Effort to adapt to another
HW /OS / SW environment
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20. Know your Directly related
boundaries to fitness of
use
Efficiency
Resource usage
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21. Time and cost
contributor Design it in
Testability
How easy is it to test the
system?
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22. Are you
responsive to ... know your
change? but... boundaries
Flexibility
Effort to modify / adapt to
different consumers
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23. Cost of
Design in,
violation can be
rather than
high
afterthought
Integrity
Access control
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24. APIs / SOA Reducing cost
of others
Reusability
Repackaging within other
applications
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25. Use of Cost for others
standards to connect to
your systems
Interoperability
Effort required to connect
systems together
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26. 11 Axis of Software Quality
Correctness
Reliability
Flexibility
Reusability
Portability
Efficiency Maintainability
Integrity
Interoperability
Usability
Testability
ACCU 2009
© Schalk W. Cronjé

27. Agility, Business Value &
the 11 Axis of Software Quality
● Agility and institutional theory
● Views of quality
● Software quality factors
● Measuring for value
● The real world
ACCU 2009
© Schalk W. Cronjé

28. Agility, Business Value & Quality
● Quality contributes to business value
● The team is in the best position to judge
software quality
● Quality is a tacit process
– Need ways to frame quality
It's business value Jim, but not as you know it
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© Schalk W. Cronjé

29. "Value delivery advocates measuring value
using quantified business objectives in
alignment"
Ryan Shriver, Overload 89, Feb 2009
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30. Advocacy
Evaluation
Why measure?
Strategy
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31. Measuring for Value
● Metrics are nothing, measuring is everything
● Start small
● Think strategically
● Apply Pareto's law
● Use checks and balances
● Avoid too many metrics
● Know when to change reason to measure
– evaluation → advocacy
● Know when to no longer measure
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© Schalk W. Cronjé

32. Example: Clean Build Failures
● Measures of daily clean-room failures
– Tracked over quarter
– Daily visibility
● Very simple measure - small heartbeat
● "Getting in the groove" metric
– Subtle team introduction to measurements
– Team can relate to objective
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© Schalk W. Cronjé

33. Example: Code-coverage
● Code coverage measures amount of code
exercised during a test run.
● Code coverage does not:
– validate usefulness of tests
– directly address any of the software quality factors
● Why measure it?
– Implies underlying automated tests
– Change in coverage implies change in quality
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© Schalk W. Cronjé

34. Example: Outage Time
● Measure the time production systems are off-
line
● Uses Nagios statistics
● Addresses reliability
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35. Metrics vs Business Value
● Do these metrics contribute to business
value?
– Clean-room failures
– Code coverage
– Outage time
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© Schalk W. Cronjé

36. How do you measure up?
Correctness
Reliability
Flexibility
Reusability
Portability
Efficiency Maintainability
Integrity
Interoperability
Usability
Testability
ACCU 2009
© Schalk W. Cronjé

37. Agility, Business Value &
the 11 Axis of Software Quality
● Agility and institutional theory
● Views of quality
● Software quality factors
● Measuring for value
● The real world
ACCU 2009
© Schalk W. Cronjé

38. "Excellent system qualities are a
continuous management and engineering
challenge, with no perfect solutions"
Tom Gilb, Overload 85, June 2008
ACCU 2009
© Schalk W. Cronjé

39. Institutional Sustainability
● Continual maintenance
● Human capital development
● Mutual trust building
– Historical perceptions
● Requires learning
– Environment that "learns to learn"
● Humans create quality not technology
● Tied to continuous improvement
ACCU 2009
© Schalk W. Cronjé

40. End note
If change does not make sense,
it will not happen.
ACCU 2009
© Schalk W. Cronjé