Agile Conversations

Business Client's New Problem ...
Business client: "This project approach (agile) now puts the focus on me. The team delivers product so fast, I have to get business decisions made much quicker than on waterfall projects ..."

Prior to the agile pilot, business clients never had a sense of urgency to get answers for development teams, since projects were so long in duration. With rapid delivery every two to four weeks, the business clients now appreciate the development team's need for rapid answers.

The Value of Priority

ScrumMaster: We've estimated 2700 hours of work, but the capacity of the team is 2500 hours. We have two choices: delay the lowest priority item 'feature' until later, or extend the sprint five days and slip the elevation date by five days ..."

Product Owner: "We'd rather make the planned date, so let's delay 'feature'."

Business Client's New Agile Role ...

Product Owner (after three sprints, looking at the backburner outside his office): "I feel like a chef, and this is my kitchen."

You Get What You Pay For ...

After seeing productivity metrics (LOC/PersonHour) of the agile team compared to the prior outsourced team. The collocated agile team was producing higher quality code (backed up by automated unit tests) at ten times the rate of the outsourced distributed team ...

CEO: "I can't afford to outsource."

Cross-Training, Role-Sharing

A new agile team made up of specialists not used to pairing up had to get over the desire to create documents. UI tier specialists and middle tier specialists were notorious for spending long design periods creating API documents to base their coding activities. Working together (paired up) they soon realized that the documents were not needed. Instead, they quickly agree to the interface and code both sides. An unintended benefit was that each specialist quickly learned the designs and practices of each specialty, and was quickly "cross-trained."

A real quote from a sprint retrospective was "I'm confident now to code in both tiers." This allowed the agile team to adapt to changing demands from sprint-to-sprint versus being dependent upon the organization to supply varying numbers of specialists based on each projects estimated demands. 

Cross-Training, Role-Sharing Part 2:

Product owner (during sprint retrospective): "I'm amazed at how I can go to any person for any issue, and he or she can answer my question. There's no silo of expertise."