Agile Update

We completed our third Agile iteration last week. Each iteration we've done has been a bit different from the other. Our first goal is to simply learn to iterate. It sounds so simple, right? Just agree on a set of work to try to complete within a 2 week span and get on with it. For the most part, we have been successful at a basic level. Each iteration has started on a Monday and ended the following Friday. However, some observations are worth mentioning.

First, the background of the team was minimally controlled anarchy. It was an approach that has taken them very far. For most of the past history the team has been very small. We have grown the team by 2 or 3 new members over the last several months. The total is 9 developers, 2 test engineers and 1 technical writer. It is a good-size team for experimenting with Agile.

Before starting the first iteration we had trialed and adopted Rally as an Agile project management tool. Having this tool in place made it easier in many respects to be more successful that if we had not done that. For one thing, it allows us to be a "little" Agile in that we actually work more like an iterative development team with very short iterations than a true Scrum or XP approach. Adopting one or both of those approaches would have been a pretty radical culture shift for the team.

The first iteration felt a little frazzled. Some team members were stressed about getting everything done in 2 weeks, even though we had carefully scoped the work to fit. The additional urgency around actually committing to being done at the end of two weeks added energy to the team. Also, there were lots of questions about how to handle process-related things that came up. We learned a lot about Rally and how to use it to enable more efficient communication paths.

The second iteration felt a little more natural. We accepted a very high percentage of the work we had set out to accomplish. There were many less questions along the way and we adapted some of the practices we tried in the first iteration to be more natural in the second.

The third iteration was completely different. First, we started with much more committed work. We ended up only accepting about 45% of the work by the end of the iteration. That was good in that we learned that we can push work if it is not done and not feel too badly about it. Our average productivity over the 3 iterations was respectable. Pushing so much work into the next iteration renewed a commitment toward really being "done" with a story and not just chopping it up to make it fit within an iteration.

We had our first retrospective this past Monday at the beginning of the fourth iteration. The comments from the team were focused on how we get better at doing iterations. One common theme was the desire to do better at transtioning from one iteration to the next. Suggestions for a demo/planning day at the end of the iteration and more time discussing the stories at the start of an iteration were voiced. This will probably be the one thing we work on in this current iteration.

At this point our focus is on using iterations as a synchronization mechanism. We are not having daily standups (although we do send daily email status reports to the entire team with the same format as Agile standups). We do not do a good job of grooming the backlog and having stories fleshed out before we start the iteration. We are using an adjustment in "points estimation" that couples us a little too closely to concrete ideal time estimates. We also have to react to changes mid-iteration due to customer demands or whims within the company.

These are all things that need to be addressed over time if we are successful at getting real buy-in from other departments in the company.