2017 Agile Development Cheat Sheet

Based on recent studies about agile development. The goal here is to have a starting point and references for people to study Agile development related practices in 2017.

Index

1. Scrum

• Simple
• Transparency
• Inspection
• Adaption
• Iterative and incremental
• Product Backlog
  • Grooming
• Sprints
  • Sprint Goal
  • Sprint Planning
  • Sprint Backlog
  • Sprint review
  • Daily Scrum
• Definition of Done (DoD)
• Members
  • Scrum Team
  • Scrum Master
  • Product Owner
  • Stakeholders (chicken)
• Monitoring
  • Burn down chart
  • Cumulative work

2. XP (Extreme Programming)

• Engineering oriented
• Continuous Integration
• Pair Programming
• Test Driven Development
• Small releases
• Planning game
• Spike development
• Collective code ownership
• Metaphors
• Coding standards
• Sustainable pace
• Simple design

4. Scaling Agile

• Multiple frameworks/tools
• Simplest to most complex

4.1 Scrum of Scrums

• AKA meta Scrum
• One representative from each team
  • Scrum master?
• Daily scrum with all these representatives
  • Sync everything in that meeting
  • completions
  • next steps
  • impediments
  • on behalf of the teams they represent

4.2 Nexus

• Augment scrums
  • One new role
  • Expanded events and artifacts
• Life cycle
• Nexus
  • 3 to 9 Scrum teams
• One extra team
  • Integration team
  • Responsible for all integrations
  • Members from Scrum teams can be part of Nexus team
  • Nexus work takes precedence as impacts more people
• Product backlog
  • Should be detailed enough before teams can start working on it
  • Dependencies must be identified and preferably resolved
  • Backlog distribution should be made to minimize dependencies
• Daily Scrum
  • Nexus daily occurs first
  • Identify dependencies and integration problems
  • Use it as input for Scrum daily so teams can plan their work accordingly
• Influences technical architecture
  • Architecture can simplify synchronization and scaling problems

4.2 LeSS

4.4 SAFe

• Biggest framework for scaling agile out there
• Just like the others, revolves around techniques to synchronize the work of all teams involved
• Three flavours:
  • Essential
    • Starting point for implementation
  • Portfolio management
    • Multiple projects
    • Helps manage and prioritize projects based on value flow
  • Large solutions
    • Require multiple teams for the work to be completed
  • Full SAFe
    • Union of all flavours
    • For companies that have multiple and/or large projects
• Program Increment (PI)
  • 8-12 weeks
    • Timeboxed iteration
    • Is to program the same as Sprint is to one single team
  • Present an integrated demonstration
  • Followed by IP
• Innovation and planning (IP) iteration
  • Retrospectives
  • Review
  • Planning
  • Problem solving
  • Experimentation (innovation)
• Release train
  • Releases are made on scheduled time
  • If a team/feature misses a train it will be released on the next
  • Supported by a specific team (ATR Team)
• Implementation
  • Start small (1-10 teams)
    • 8-12 weeks
  • Scale as people learn and adapt
• Heavily dependent on DevOps
  • Technology
  • Architecture
  • These two are fundamental to support all the synchronization required

5. Agile vs Legacy

• Agile deliver value as uncertainty and complexity grows
• Legacy environments (mainframe, banks, etc) are usually more predictable
  • The value of agile is diminished in these environments
  • Tehcnology often doesn't help
• In this scenario usually agile is used for non legacy projects and waterfall/standard approaches used on the rest

6. Product prioritization techniques

• Right technique depends on goal
  • Internal vs External
  • Quantitative vs Qualitative
• Kano (questions)
• QFD (house)
• Opportunity cost
• Buy a feature (game)
• Story mapping
  • Map following business flow order
  • Activities
  • Backbone
  • User tasks
  • Slices releases and development strategy
• MoSCoW
  • Should
  • Could
  • Won't
• Prune Tree (meh)
• Speed Boat
  • Pain driven
• Financial analysis

7. Facilitating retrospective

• Like a negotiation
  • Separate people from the problem
  • Interests and not positions
  • Objective criteria
• Opportunity to:
  • learn
  • build trust
• No blaming
• Everybody has to participate
• Try not to favor extroverts and HIPPO (highest paid person opinion)

7.1 4L's

• Liked
• Learned
• Lacked
• Longed for

7.2 Mad, Sad, Glad

7.3 Sinking boat

• Variation of speed boat prioritization technique
• Sail (good stuff)
• Anchor (bad stuff)

8. Spotify agile model

• Pillars:
  • Autonomy
  • Direction
  • Community
• Squads
  • Cross functional
  • TA - Testing automation
  • QA - Quality assistance
• Tribe
• 1 Tribe -> N Squads
• Chapter
  • Same role
  • Cross squads
• Guilds
  • Same role
  • Cross tribes
• Squads/tribes structure reflect communication requirements
• Heavily based/dependent on software architect
  • Release train (leaves no matter what)
    • Feature flags
  • One click deploy
  • Continuous integration
  • Limited blast radius and partial rollout
• Culture
  • Mistakes are not punished
    • Otherwise people hide them
  • Failure recovery > failure avoidance
  • Blame is not handed off to other people
    • Squad who builds it, owns it
  • Optmize for value
  • Measure impact and not output
  • Data > opinion
• Health check
  • Systemic problems
• New ideas
  • Think it
    • PR Story
    • Metrics (what does success looks like?)
  • Build it
  • Ship it
  • Tweak it
  • Repeat

9. References