Exposing the “devils” within - Agile taboos and other hurdles in a large organization
Summary
In the last couple of years, some agile practitioners are moving away from the core values and principles. We are now seeing that many of the practices we love in Agile is reduced to academic ramblings. This fuzziness has lead parts of the community back to vague and undisciplined processes. In large organizations this is becoming particularly prevalent since many people that really never understood the core values, now adopt simplified ways of Agile, ignoring the hard and still most important parts of it.
This workshop will challenge you to expose and discuss how we can get back to the core Agile values; Delivering high quality software at a racing pace, with a happy team. Even in large globally distributed organizations. We want the participants of this workshop to be able to reveal who and what is blocking their efforts and how to get through them to make a real difference. After this workshop, you will have more clarity, so that you are able to come up with a tangible plan for improving your own situation in your organization.
The format of the workshop will be in a modernized way of structured “open space”.
1.The presenters give a small introduction based on their experience with large distributed organizations to set the tone for the workshop.
2.In the good nature of standup meetings, all participants are asked to name and quickly explain issues and taboos they have encountered. We will make sure to follow a very strict approach, so that this does not take more time than it needs to.
3.Together with the attendants, we select the two most pressing matters and split into groups. The groups will discuss one subject each. Participants are free to choose which group they want to attend.
4.After the first discussion, we have another very quick standup where the participants are asked to name new subjects they want to discuss.
5.Since new issues and subjects should have emerged from the first discussion, the participants vote for two new items to discuss and we divide into two new groups.
6.We repeat the process once more, so that we have in total three discussions.
7.The presenters sum up the output of the discussions.
We are two presenters and we will be active in one discussion group each. Our responsibility will be to make sure that the discussions are relevant to the subject and that all participants get to state their experience and opinions. We will take notes and sum up the workshop at the end.
Example experiences
Below are some examples on concerns we have had based on our own experiences in the environments we have been working in:
Project managers who takes an interest in Scrum, but due to lack of experience in agile practices neglect the importance of self-directing team and tries to impose direction and delegation and tasks. Unfortunately this happens often. Project managers may be uncomfortable leaving the normal command-and-control style. We would like to discuss such experiences and how those could be dealt with
Similarly projects that just introduces daily stand-up meetings but no other practices to support agile development. I have heard projects claiming they are agile just because they run what they call scrum-meetings. What happens then, and how can we get it right from there.
Test-driven development is catching on, and project managers have started an interest in the coverage reports and want to follow up ridigly on the coverage numbers. In some cases we have seen that the members have created tests just to increase the coverage, not really adding useful tests. In such cases you can create a good environment to discuss the quality and attitude towards the tests itself, and the purpose of those.
The point of the session is to dare to challenge and assess all the experiences the participants have had and use those experiences to move forward in an even more positive direction.
Organizers experience:
Our Bios will highlight some of this. In addition, we would like to point out these experiences for the purpose of this workshop:
1) We started early; Jan-Erik started 8 years ago, Lars started 6 years ago in introducing agile practices in our own work
2) Through the years we have seen the evolution of the practices, new fads come and go, and the real usefulness of them as well as the current risk of not achieving what we expect due to missing important pices of the puzzle
3) In particular we expect some discussions around Scrum with a focus on management discipline and XP with a focus on the practical measures to put in place to ensure delivering working software - we are seeing that the popularity of Scrum has lead to less focus on other important areas; to highlight this: we are seeing a lot of meetings and frequent deliveries, but often times tests still have poor quality or are neglected, people skimp on pair programming, the daily standup meetings turn out to be a drag etc…. I.e. we have observed important signs of neglecting important practices.
4) The “taboo” in question could very well be Scrum - we all enjoy the positive interest in agile practices that Scrum have created; however has the popularity come at the expense of other important practices?
5) We have now worked for larger organizations for a couple of years (Lars in a 18.000 people european-based IT company; Jan-Erik in a 5.000 people global naval certification company); and have first hand experience in scaling agile practices, and the value of scaling agile to larger organizations as well as the added challenges such organizations impose on making agile practices deliver on the promise
6) Still - this is a workshop format, and our intention is to bring people together who have started to experience these challenges, and encourage discussions and sharing of these experiences. We will be happy to share our own, and focus on bringing out the groups experiences on the table in order to facilitate how we can improve