program selection system

Any successful recording artist eventually submits to releasing a “Greatest Hits” album. This is the opposite: a beat-up XP coach putting his biggest and furthest-reaching mistakes in a neat package and releasing them to the public. This talk could also be named “Ten ways to guarantee your Agile transition is a total failure”, or “Apologies of an XP coach”; however I’m sure I’ll mention more than ten mistakes and I make no apology for them.

ORIGINAL SUMMARY:

Rich will answer business leadership questions such as…
* “Why should I pay for two to do the job of one?”
* “Why should I pay for unit testing? Get it right the first time!”
* “We paid for the cubes and now you want me to take them down?”
* “Why do we have to visit weekly, didn’t you read our requirements document?”
* “How could people work in a loud environment like yours?”
* “If you use paired programming, how can you tell who the best programmers are?”

Agile in development teams has distinct benefits, but in large organizations a development team is a small part in the chain from customer request to customer delivery. Introducing Agile is a massive change in both our culture and our ways of working. The results are impressive: team motivation and product management satisfaction increased. We will present how to leverage on improvements in development in a large organization, the main choices we made, the resistance we had to overcome and how we made the changes stick.

This experience report describes the experiences in building and growing a professional agile software development group in a research context over the past 7 years. It desribes how the way of working evolved over time, by growing an organisation, changing customers, and CMM certification.

In this client organization, agile methods were not producing expected improvements, primarily because the stakeholders could not agree on priorities of the work. The team decided to use extremely short iterations to expose the problems caused by a lack of prioritization.