Transitioning from Waterfall to Agile

1. Introduction to Agility

Agility is comprised of a unique set of principles and values that must be understood and embraced before the organization can employ Agile practices. In this section, we will survey the essence of Agility.

Exercise

Identify the problems that you are experiencing with software projects in your organization. You will use this list throughout the course to evaluate the benefits of Agility. Compare notes with other students.

• The Essence of Agility
  • The Agile Lifecycle
  • Learning and Adaptation
  • Collaboration
  • Customer Focus
  • Self-Directed Teams
  • Lean Principles
  • Progressive Requirements Elaboration
  • Incremental Delivery
  • Iterative Planning and Adaptation

Exercise

Identify the Agile concepts that have already gained acceptance in your organization. Compare notes with other students.

2. Us vs. Them Teams

The heart of every project is the team. Yet in traditional approaches, the team often operates as a collection of competing individuals, rather than as a unit. Even worse, many organizations have divided responsibilities in ways that pit different groups against each other, when the project desperately needs cooperation. 
Agility means establishing a single team for each project, and ensuring that it comprises all of the necessary people. Agile practices ensure that all team members are constantly collaborating and driving the project toward success.

• Traditional practices
  • The project manager
  • Shielding developers & customers from each other
  • Building silos of responsibility
  • Documents as the primary means of communication
  • Lessons Learned at project end

• Contrast w/the Agile approach
  • Product Owner
  • The Agile coach
  • One small co-located team
  • Continuous collaboration
  • Face-to-face communication
  • Regular feedback
  • Regular retrospectives

Case Studies

We will discuss the unique needs and situations of one of the three Case Study organizations, and determine how to make the transition from us-vs.-them teams to Agile Teams.

• Sell the benefits of Agile teams
• Defuse misconceptions about Agile teaming
• Address the challenges of adopting Agile teaming
• Define the Agile teaming process
• Train personnel to be Agile team members

Exercise

Determine how to introduce the Agile teaming on projects in your organization. Identify the benefits you would realize and the challenges you would face. Compare notes with other students.

3. My Project Plan, Right or Wrong

Traditional approaches are often referred to as “plan-based” because of the importance they put on up-front planning and then controlling the project so it conforms to the plan. Of course, some organizations go to the other extreme, paying little attention to their plans after the project starts, or even foregoing planning altogether.
Agility means planning just enough, doing that planning when it is needed, and accepting the fact that reality often works out differently from our plans. Agile projects value achieving the project goals; the plan is merely a tool to help them do that.

• Traditional practices
  • Predictive planning
  • Command and control management
  • Corrective action (Conformance to plan)
  • Periodic Status Reporting
  • Document review/sign-off as milestones

• Contrast w/the Agile approach
  • Time-boxed projects & iterations
  • Incremental planning & estimation
  • Self-directed teams
  • Daily status checks & periodic review
  • Adaptation to new information
  • Information Radiators
  • Delivered software as milestones

Case Studies

We will discuss the unique needs and situations of one of the three Case Study organizations, and determine how to make the transition from the plan-based approach to Agile planning.

• Sell the benefits of Agile planning
• Defuse misconceptions about Agile planning
• Address the challenges of adopting Agile planning
• Define the Agile planning process
• Train personnel to use Agile planning techniques

Exercise

Determine how to introduce the Agile planning on projects in your organization. Identify the benefits you would realize and the challenges you would face. Compare notes with other students.

4. The Insidious Creeping Scope

Traditional approaches usually begin with an important (and sometimes long and drawn out) Requirements phase during which all of the product requirements are elicited, analyzed and documented. Everyone in the project commits to the resulting specification, and then significant effort is expended in Change Control. Conformance to the Requirements Specification becomes the measure of project success. (Until the customer complains!)

Agility means documenting requirements just enough, eliciting more detailed information when it is needed, and accepting the fact that thing will change before the project is over. Agile projects value delivering what the customer needs; the requirements are merely a tool to help them do that.

• Traditional practices
  • Big-bang, up-front requirements definition
  • Requirements sign-off
  • Little customer involvement after requirements
  • Restrictive change control
  • Conformance to specification
  • Product delivered/accepted at project end

• Contrast w/the Agile approach
  • Progressive requirements elaboration
  • Prioritization by the customer
  • Incremental product acceptance & feedback
  • Welcome changing requirements

Case Studies

We will discuss the unique needs and situations of one of the three Case Study organizations, and determine how to make the transition from up-front requirements to Agile requirements.

• Sell the benefits of Agile requirements
• Defuse misconceptions about Agile requirements
• Address the challenges of adopting Agile requirements
• Define the Agile requirements process
• Train personnel to use Agile requirements techniques

Exercise

Determine how to introduce the Agile requirements on projects in your organization. Identify the benefits you would realize and the challenges you would face. Compare notes with other students.

5. Where's the Quality?

Traditional projects are often quality-challenged. The testing phase at the end of the project seems to be never-ending, and in spite of all that time and effort, a defective product is delivered. This results in high support costs, unhappy customers and out of control costs.

Agility means keeping the focus on quality from the very beginning of the project, testing continuously and ensuring that every piece of code is technically excellent. And because testing is not saved for the end, quality surprises are eliminated. Agility means producing production-ready software regularly throughout the project!

• Traditional practices
  • Little focus on developer verification
  • Separation of responsibilities (testers vs. developers)
  • Testers responsible for quality
  • Testing postponed to the project end

• Contrast w/the Agile approach
  • Developers focused on technical excellence
  • Developer/tester/customer collaboration/feedback
  • Testers as members of the development team
  • Early and regular "System" & "Acceptance" testing
  • Each product increment production-quality

Case Studies

We will discuss the unique needs and situations of one of the three Case Study organizations, and determine how to make the transition from traditional quality practices to Agile quality practices.

• Sell the benefits of Agile quality practices
• Defuse misconceptions about Agile quality practices
• Address the challenges of adopting Agile quality practices
• Define the Agile quality process
• Train personnel to use Agile quality practices

Exercise

Determine how to introduce the Agile quality practices on projects in your organization. Identify the benefits you would realize and the challenges you would face. Compare notes with other students.

6. Course Wrap-Up

There is too much to Agility for you to adopt all at once, so you will need an action plan. In this section, you will review what we have covered in the course and prepare a viable action plan for your organization to become more Agile.

Exercise

• Review the Essence of Agility

Prioritize the Agile concepts that you could introduce in your organization. For the three highest-priority concepts, create an action plan to make those things a reality on your projects. Compare notes with other students.

• Understand the key differences between a waterfall and an Agile approach to software development, then identify the areas you will benefit from most
• Identify and eliminate the traditional practices that undermine your project success
• Learn the 5 measures of Agile enablers then map implementing them to Agile practices to project success
• Uncover the organizational problems that most companies never discover they have, then learn the Agile techniques that address these deficiencies
• Discover how transitioning to Agile provides better techniques to manage the value and quality of your project and product development efforts
• Create a customized, hybrid approach to software development that takes into account your company's unique challenges and constraints
• Uncover the pitfalls that teams will encounter in an Agile transition and understand how to overcome those challenges
• Lay the foundation upon which you can build a learning team and organization

Exercise 1: What are the biggest project issues you and your organization face? You will compile a list of what is broken and use this list as a touchstone for the exercises that follow.

Exercise 2: What aspects of agility have you already incorporated into your organization? Review you current processes, even if they are described with other names, and identify ways in which your organization has embraced any of these concepts.

Exercise 3: Explore how adaptive planning can benefit the organization. Where can this help the highly regulated business, government organizations, methodology centric organizations?

Exercise 4: Explore the benefits of progressive elaboration of requirements. Discover how prioritization of the feature set can deliver the highest business value to the customer.

Exercise 5: Explore how adaptability defuses the scope-creep issue. As users prioritize needs and features, changes in scope are assimilated into the project based on prioritized need. Reviewing the case studies, select several that would receive benefit from implementing adaptable change.

Exercise 6: Explore the triple constraints of project management in terms of quality. Identify the top elements that contribute to customer satisfaction. How does your customer define quality?

Exercise 7: Several organizations that employ the concept of self-organizing teams will be explored. How does this drive greater ownership of the project deliverables on the part of the performing organization? In what situations is a C & C model effective and where does it fail?

Exercise 8: Certain development environments function very well using a waterfall approach. What kind of project organization, product cycle, and methodology is used for a well-executed waterfall approach? Several case studies will be reviewed and the results analyzed.

Exercise 9: You will use a Excel "case studiesspreadsheet to review agile techniques and define which techniques can be implemented immediately, in one to four months, or which may be problematic at any phase.

Exercise 10: Identify the issues in your organization that lead to excessive rework, waste, service after service, scrap, or any situation that costs the organization wasted time and wasted dollars. Address these issues on the agile "Techniquesspreadsheet. Use the "cost of quality" spreadsheet to quantify the loss in dollars.

Exercise 11: Define the areas where your organization may put up resistance to implementing agile process. Identify where the resistance is due to fear, misunderstanding, lack of training, or some other issue. You will explore avenues of resolution and methods to help your organization harvest the benefits of agile implementations.

Exercise 12: Prioritize the Agile concepts that you could introduce in your organization. For the three highest-priority concepts, create an action plan to make those things a reality on your projects. Compare notes with other participants.

This course is valuable for anyone who is contemplating making their software projects more agile.

This class is for you if you are a:

• Software Development Manager
• Software Project Manager
• Software Team Lead
• Quality Assurance Specialist
• Process Engineer
• Software Developer or Tester
• Software Project Customer
• IT Director or Manager