Talk by Tomasz Wykowski on “Process oriented approach to Agile Software Development” at Agileee.org conference

1. Process oriented approach to
Agile Software Development
Tomasz de Jastrzebiec Wykowski
Agileee, 18 Sep 2009
Kiev, Ukraine

2. Let me introduce myself

3. Distributed teams – the pain
• Different location, different time zones
– “phone” stand-ups
– How to make demo, retrospection and planning in
one meeting
– How to share story
– What to do if I’ve completed my story
– Why shall I bother about other’s stories

4. The Pain
• Anyone who’s attended an Agile planning
meeting knows they can often last about an
hour longer than you can stand it.
Jeff Patton
http://agileproductdesign.com/blog/2009/kan
ban_over_simplified.html

5. Distributed teams – the pain
• The pain is increasing with team size

6. Process
• definition

7. Let’s combine
• Discuss stories in advance
• When you finish your story:
– Demo to product owner (can even be done during
development)
– Select next story. Decompose and Estimate.
• You can still share a story in one location
• On stand-ups, concentrate on things “other
need to know” like blockers or completed
stories, rather than detailed info about tasks

8. Profs
• Iteration planning becomes a be-weekly review (much
shorter)
• Shorter stand-ups – concentrate on critical things
• Release Burn-down chart showing progress
• Feedback from product owner received earlier than in
traditional iteration (as soon as story is completed)
• “Iteration” can be reduced to any short period of time
• Stories can be bigger and more meaningful (no need to
decompose stories to very low level to fit iteration)
• Newly discovered work (bugs, new stories) can be
implemented faster – no need to wait till the end of
iteration to start it.

9. Cons
• Limited value of iteration burn-down, as
stories can be added in the middle of iteration
• Required “agile”-educated and self motivated
team
• Might cause bigger variance to velocity. It’s
not a problem for long running projects
• This still does not solve “we vs. them”
problem observed in multi-locations
environment

10. Thank you!