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Agile Project Experiences

The Story of Three Little Pigs

Craig Smith

Suncorp, Australia

Dr Paul King

ASERT, Australia

Agile 2008 - 1

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Topics

• Introduction

• Straw

• Sticks

• Bricks

• Conclusions

Agile 2008 - 2Image source: http://www.threelittlepigs.ca/game

The projects• Every project will have different

characteristics– Shouldn’t expect one size to fit all

• Straw– Insurance processing system

– Most team members fairly new to agile

– Team geographically dispersed

• Sticks– Batch processing system enhancement

– Deemed too small for agile

– Small enough to plan up front?

• Bricks– Large enterprise document processing

system built across 3 phases/2 years

– Very XP focused within but sometimes misunderstood outside the team

Agile 2008 - 3

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Images source: http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~odenbach/pigs

Project ‘Straw’ …• Challenges

– Geographically and technically dispersed team

• Senior technicians in one city, graduates and vendor in another

• Rotational travel, daily scrum and project meetings for communication

• Pair programming Peer programming

– Daily sitdown• Conference phone call = sit down habit

• No easy way to reference visual cues

– The four-week syndrome• Follow Scrum “by the book”

• Not enough planning, filling tasks to time

• Revert to 2 week sprints, XP planning game

– Releasing before we are done• Release sprint at beginning of last week

• No urgency for tests and backlog Agile 2008 - 4

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… Project ‘Straw’• Lessons Learnt

– One chance to influence• Education on techniques not enough,

such as TDD and pair programming

• Need a coach or mentor to reinforce

– Challenge the different• Knocking over roadblocks helps teams

that follow

• Commitment from management helps

– Technology helps, but collocation is better

• Video conferencing and virtual desktops made team feel close

• When team travelled and were really together, productivity appeared better

Agile 2008 - 5

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Project ‘Sticks’ …• Challenges

– The busy customer• Not colocated and busy on many tasks

• Use of IM for quick discussion

• Agile sessions such as iteration kickoff and retrospective important

– Start waterfall, finish agile• Not too late to start

• Rewrite requirements to storycards and prioritize

• Wrote storycards for customer with them reviewing to aid acceptance

• Use of XPlanner and Wiki to share progress and information

Agile 2008 - 6

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… Project ‘Sticks’• Lessons Learnt

– Just because you’re small doesn’t mean you drop the ball

• Demonstrate use of techniques even on a fairly small project, no overhead

• Pair programming used for skills transfer and shared experiences

– Short project equals short iteration cycles and big progress

• One week iterations for quick progress updates

• Customer knew work was on track and meeting goals

Agile 2008 - 7

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Project ‘Bricks’ …• Challenges

– Honesty leads to trust• Train management to recognize

honesty, not jump to fix small issues

• Move from questioning to sheltering

– Bring your own screwdriver• Making do with the surroundings

sometimes means some DIY

• Clamps, partitions, whiteboards

• Opted for more isolated but more suitable accommodation

– Be careful what you promote• Enthusiasm is not always shared by

management and peers

• Fly under the radar and demonstrate techniques through results

Agile 2008 - 8

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… Project ‘Bricks’• Lessons Learnt

– Build it and they will come• Good people are attracted to good

teams, through word of mouth

• Others admired culture and practices

– Turning the dials to eleven and doing XP to the extreme

• Innovative and continuous improvement environment

• High commitment to code quality

– Everyone has a voice• Technical team discussions to solve

problems

• FIX and TODO comments to document discussions and direction

– Design up-front when appropriate

• Customer API designed up front

• Rest of system designed on demand Agile 2008 - 9

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Conclusion …• What to do about wolves?

– Wolves are any influences that threaten to blow away project success

• Internal wolves dressed as sheep

• Packs of non-believer wolves looking for any strange-looking projects to devour

• And even well-meaning management wolves not familiar with where we keep our pots of boiling water!

– We certainly observed many kinds of wolves at one stage or another

• Some were threatened because reward structures ended with delivery to production not success in production

• Some were skeptical because we had no shared understanding of what quality or agile meant (a new CIO wolf is fixing this organization wide now)

– While many of these wolves were very capable of large scale huffing and puffing, in the case of our three projects, they were resilient enough to not be blown down

Agile 2008 - 10

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Image source: gamehiker.com

… Conclusion• Moral of the story

– Can’t construct all projects of the finest materials

– No defined template that can be rolled out verbatim to agile practices

– Storycard estimation remains difficult but an appropriate set of tools and agile responsiveness help

– Obtaining and keeping team focus is a key for an agile team and different for every project

• Futures– An agile change program is being

lead by senior management and rolled out across the organization and the current projects that we are involved in are using the lessons learnt from these

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Image source: The Bleachers, Steve Moore

Sneak peek…

For Agile 2009 in Chicago...

Agile 2008 - 12

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Working Title

“Goldilocks & The Three Bears”...

Projects aren‘t getting blown over

anymore.

It all about the warmth of the porridge

and removing the lumps...

About the contributing organizations• About ASERT

– ASERT helps organisations define and make best use of their

eBusiness platforms by providing professional and cost-

effective training and consulting & system development

solutions including but not limited to Agile development,

Java/J2EE development, Groovy and Grails development, SOA

and web services implementations and agile deployment.

• About Suncorp– Suncorp is one of Australia and New Zealand's largest

diversified financial services providers, supplying banking,

insurance and wealth management products to around 7 million

customers through well-established and recognized brands

such as AAMI, Australian Pensioners Insurance Agency,

Shannons, Vero, Asteron and Tyndall, as well as Suncorp and

GIO. Today, Suncorp is Australia's sixth largest bank and

second largest domestic general insurance group, with over

16,000 staff. Suncorp has representation in 450 offices,

branches and agencies throughout Australia and New Zealand.

Agile 2008 - 13

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