Have your Agile practices become stale or redundant? Does it feel like your team is just going through the motions? Have team members asked to discontinue “critical Agile practices” and ceremonies?
In Lean product development, the minimum viable product or MVP, is defined as the product with the highest return on investment versus risk. It’s a strategy to avoid building products that customers don’t need or want by maximizing our learning of what is valuable to the customer.
Agile is typically learned through exposure to a series of Agile practices, a recipe of sorts. But what if that recipe goes beyond minimal? Have we replaced heavy waterfall process with heavy Agile process?
This session will interrogate the thinking behind some of the Agile sacred cows like detailed sprint planning, detailed release planning, and even some popular estimation techniques. We will try to identify what is truly needed to be Agile, based on needs instead of prescribed recipes. What is minimally sufficient to start realizing the benefits of Agile?
What is your MVA? It might be different than you think!
3. Minimum Viable Agile
Borrowing from the Product Development concept
of MVP or Minimum Viable Product.
"The minimum viable product is that version of a
new product which allows a team to collect the
maximum amount of validated learning about
customers with the least effort."
What is it?
4. Minimum Viable Agile
Minimum Viable Agile is a collection of Agile
practices and ceremonies, informed by Lean and
Agile theory, that produces the maximum amount
of customer value, with the least amount of effort.
(Or Just Enough practices and
ceremonies to be effective).
What is it?
5. Agile Is…?
Burn Down Charts
Sticky Notes
Card Walls
Kanban Boards
Standup Meetings
Retrospectives
Pair Programming
TDD
Sprint Planning
Planning PokerVelocity
Story Points
User Stories
Release Planning
Estimation
Team Room
Definition of Done
WIP Limits
7. The Agile Dysfunction Spiral
Detailed sprint
planning
Formal sprint
commitment
Work the sprintUnfinished work
We need to get
better at
planning sprints
Coaching to help
improve sprint planning
Sprint planning
takes longer
Management
Applies pressure
Culture of Blame
creeps back in…
Team works
overtime
Are we really just after better sprints?
8. Cargo Cult (Agile)
Many early Agile attempts simply installed practices (recipes).
Warning!
Following recipes leads to Cargo Cult Agile
10. Mob Programming: The original MVA?
Reduces or Eliminates:
1. Standup meetings
2. Detailed planning sessions
3. The need for estimates
4. Team alignment activities
5. Context Switching
6. Individual status updates
7. Burn-down charts for performance tracking
8. Code Reviews
All the
Brilliant People Working on the
same problem At the same time
On the
same computer
- mobprogramming.org
11. What if we delivered customer
value faster than we could
generate, revise, massage, and
distribute…
status updates?
12. Story Points: The sacred cow of Agile
Sometimes this causes unnecessary
confusion and drama!
Story points are designed to be abstract.
Velocity is an attempt to plan work
based on an abstraction, based on an estimate.
13. Story point myopia
-- Jim Benson, moduscooperandi.com
16 72 21 19 37
Velocity in Story Points
7 9 9 9 7
Throughput in Card Count
14. Velocity is not Minimal Viable Agile
Velocity (based on story points) has become
a social and business currency.
15. What about Story Point predictability?
Courtesy of Bennet Vallet
Director of Development
Siemens Health Services
Expected Distribution
Actual Distribution
16. Story Point Predictability?
A product team from Microsoft shared their story point estimates.
They performed three release forecasts:
1. Story Points 1,2,3 for small medium and large
2. Story Points 1, 3, 5 for small medium and large
3. All stories are 1 point (just count # of stories)
18. Data used with permission from
Bill Hanlon at Microsoft
”At that point, I stopped
thinking that estimating
was important.”
Bill Hanlon:
http://bit.ly/BHanlon
Data Visualizations courtesy
of Vasco Duarte
http://bit.ly/vasco_blog
@duarte_vasco
19. Planning in the world of MVA
Option #1
Hours-long traditional sprint planning meetings spent playing planning
poker and a team arguing about the difference between 2’s and 3’s.
Option #2
Short story slicing meeting where the focus is on understanding
and slicing large stories.
“Do we understand this story? If not, let’s keep slicing.”
1 2 3 5 8 13 20 40 100
Right-sizing the work
20. Planning in the world of MVA
Input Q Design Develop Test Done1 2 1
3
12
9
7
8
6
4
5
Lead Time
Throughput
10
14 days from this point
5 stories per week
Upstream Planning
1. Prioritize
2. Analyze
S
S
S
S
SS
S
S
S
S
21. Planning in the world of MVA
Probabilistic Forecasting
<= 4 days (50th percentile)
<= 9 days (85th percentile)
<= 13 days (95th percentile)
2
2
3
3
3
4
4
5
6
8
9
10
13
16
Lead times in days
for 14 User stories:
Find the 50th, 85th,
and 95th percentiles…
(Rank = Percentage * Count)
50th
85th
95th
22. The Essence of Agile
Focus
Learning
Simplicity (The art of the work not done.)
(Collaboration is an outcome.)
(Feedback loops enable improvements)
Insist your practices and ceremonies
support the “Why” behind Agile!
Customer Value (We wouldn’t be here otherwise.)
23. Coaching Minimum Viable Agile
• Train teams on estimation techniques or
schemes.
• Focus on making fixed scope, fixed time,
commitment-based sprints work.
• Teach teams how to use burn-down charts.
• Teach teams to use Velocity to plan releases.
I Don’t:
24. Coaching Minimum Viable Agile
• Coach teams to Limit their WIP to achieve better
focus.
• Use simple and pragmatic time-boxes for better
risk management.
• Teach teams how to visualize their work.
• Coach teams to conduct retrospectives and
adopt continuous improvement.
• Plan releases based on historical
measurements.
I Do:
25. Where does Agile go from here?
The first 15 years of Agile prompted us to ask:
“What are all the practices we
need to adopt to be successful?”
Minimum Viable Agile prompts us to ask:
“Now, what practices do we change or
discard to be successful?”
Write down the first few things that come to mind when you Complete the sentence…
Amortized death marches
Practices divorced (mostly) from principles
Let’s install this process, or follow this recipe!
Them: We can’t get our velocity to stabilize. Our story points are all over the map. Sixteen, Seventy Two, Twenty One? What’s wrong with us? Why can’t we estimate?
Anyone heard the comment: We need to increase this team’s velocity.
Or Team A has a higher velocity than Team B
At Best: Velocity helps us predict. At worst: Velocity can mislead and distract!
