Agile From First Principles

In April, Lyn Girvan and I will see the results of over a year's work come to fruition when our book - Agile From First Principles - is published by BCS Publishing. In advance of that, we'd like to share a little of what it is about with some extracts from the Introduction.

Who is this book for?

The short answer is that this book is for anybody who wants to understand Agile better. That includes those who are brand new to the subject. It also includes coaches like us who value a single book that reminds us of what’s important and is a handy reference to a broad range of Agile concepts. This is the sort of book we would buy and use ourselves.?

More specifically, there are certain groups of people to whom we particularly recommend this book.?

Those new to Agile

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to Agile with a base of knowledge that makes learning and applying any Agile approach easier and more likely to succeed. The important elements are highlighted and reinforced together with examples and stories that help bring it to life.?

Leaders and Managers

Even if you are not involved in the day-to-day work of Agile teams, leaders and managers have an important role to play. Bringing out the best of Agile teams requires different sorts of leadership than you may be used to. This type of leadership will feel uncomfortable and perhaps counter intuitive This book will help you understand why it is important to lead differently and help you work out how.??Of course, it will also help you understand what’s going on in Agile teams, demystify some of their language and behaviour, and help you lead and manage them better.?

Business Stakeholders

Agile teams exist to provide value to customers. In order to provide the maximum value, those customers and other stakeholders need to understand how Agile teams work. Whether you are representing a direct user, or are a conduit to external customers and users, this book will help you understand why Agile teams can be more effective and what you need to do to help them. This will usually involve some changes in behaviour and perspective. This book will help you with ideas and tools that can help you achieve that.?

Project Managers

Being thrust into Agile can be confusing and bewildering for project managers, particularly those who are experienced and skilled. The Agile ceremonies, language and assumptions can be very alien when compared to best practice in project and programme management.?

This book will help you understand how Agile teams work and why they do some of the things they do. It will help you understand how project managers can help Agile teams succeed, and why some things that project managers can expect may not be helpful for Agile teams.?

If you are taking on an Agile role, this book will help you understand what is expected of you and give you the knowledge and understanding to perform it well.

Students and trainers of the BCS Foundation Certificate in Agile

The BCS Foundation Certificate in Agile is an excellent certification that gives a broad grounding in Agile concepts and practices without focusing on a particular method or practice. This book covers the whole syllabus, though isn’t written in quite the same order.

The 2020 version of the syllabus was written by one of this book’s authors and one of its reviewers, so the perspective of the book represents what the syllabus intends to convey.

Agile Practitioners and Coaches

It may sound odd that a book that addresses first principles, and is suitable for novices, should also be valuable to experienced practitioners. However, there are two good reasons why this is the case, and why this is exactly the sort of book we would buy for ourselves.?

Firstly, this book covers a lot of ground to explain the principles and practices of Agile. There are dozens of techniques, ideas, methods and practices described, many in brief detail with references to more detailed descriptions. As such, this one volume contains just enough information to be useful but references a huge body of knowledge that is invaluable to any Agile practitioner.?

Secondly, even experts in Agile practices are not immune to falling into the traps and anti-patterns that we discuss. Having a reminder of the core principles of Agile to hand helps keep us grounded. The discussions on the Values and Principles will be particularly useful to help Agile teams improve.

What to expect?

This book is a mix of fact, opinion, guidance, and stories. Agile emerged as a short website in 2001 with just 68 words describing its values and a further 191 covering the principles.?

We help you understand those values and principles our experience as Agile practitioners and coaches with many years of experience. We have tested our opinions with reviewers, colleagues, peers, and others. We think that understanding what’s behind Agile and what it means in practice is important. That’s why we have devoted so much space and effort to explaining what we think they mean. We have illustrated this with examples of anti-patterns and problems we have experienced and use them to show, not only why it’s so easy to get Agile wrong, but ways that you can avoid making those same mistakes yourself.

We wanted reading this book to feel like a conversation with an experienced Agile coach. One who can explain new things to you, share their experiences, point you towards some good books or references, suggest new ideas and, most importantly, challenge you and make you think. You may not agree with all of our opinions, and you may speak to other Agile coaches who have different ideas. That’s fine. Just treat this as new information to add to your existing knowledge and opinions and perhaps formulate a slightly new and evolved opinion. As you will read, we call this inspection and adaption, and iterative development. It can apply just as much to ideas and beliefs as it can to products or processes.

This book isn’t about encouraging you to use Agile when it isn’t appropriate. But any time you?do?choose Agile, this book will help you execute it well and maximise the value you will achieve. By understanding the principles of Agile, you will also be able to judge when Agile will be appropriate to use and when it is not.

A brief walkthrough

Chapter 1 – The Importance of Agile Today

This chapter explains why Agile approaches are still important today.?

Despite emerging over 20 years ago, the conditions that led to Agile are not only still present but have intensified. Agile has matured beyond its origins in software to many other fields, and modern leadership theories converging with the types of leadership advocated by Agile approaches. Coupled with Agile’s growing dominance in the technology sector, it is clear that Agile is still relevant and the ability to apply Agile well has never been more important.

Chapter 2 – The Origins of Agile

Here we discuss the theories and practices that have influenced Agile, some of which date back centuries. We discuss how non-Agile teams plan and manage their work and tell the story of how the Agile Manifesto came to be created in a ski lodge in Utah in 2001.

Chapter 3 – Projects and Products in Agile

One of the ways that Agile bucks the trends set by traditional development approaches is that it has a product focus rather than a project focus. In fact, not only is the term project not even mentioned in many Agile approaches, we suggest its use can actually be harmful - encouraging an unhelpful focus on tasks and milestones and minimising the importance of responding to change. We explain how Agile delivery is incremental and iterative and how this is how we can deliver more value. The ‘Product Backlog’ is introduced as an important artefact.

Chapter 4 – Understanding The Manifesto for Agile

This chapter, along with ‘Chapter 5 - Understanding The Agile Principles’, is one of the two cornerstone chapters in the book. The Agile Manifesto defines what we mean by ‘Agile’ so, to apply Agile well, it is critical that we understand what is meant by the Agile values to understand how we can apply and reinforce them.

A recurring theme throughout the book is that Agile is difficult to do well and we have seen many teams struggle. Even though they look like common sense, they are not always commonly applied. Therefore, we look at common challenges and anti-patterns we have seen through the lens of each value showing how they can be reinforced or undermined. There are plenty of references and further reading.?

Chapter 5 – Understanding The Agile Principles

Similar to Chapter 4, here we explain and examine each of the Agile principles in turn. We share our perspectives on what they mean and why each is important. We focus on particular words and phrases and drill down to consider them more deeply. This allows a far greater insight into what Agile means and how we can apply it with ourselves and our teams.

Additionally, we unpick the intent behind each of the 12 Agile principles and explore anti-patterns that may prevent you from applying agile as it was intended.

Chapter 6 – Fundamental Concepts in Agile

There are several common themes and concepts that run through the Values and Principles and core behaviours and mindset that enable any Agile approach. This chapter introduces and discusses them.?

They are: Empiricism; The Three Pillars of Transparency, Inspection and Adaptation; Lean approaches and wastes; Incremental and Iterative Delivery; Customer Centricity; and Self organising, empowered teams.

This chapter introduces them and explains how they reinforce the Values and Principles with some examples.?

Chapter 7 – Agile Delivery

Agile teams need some approach to help them apply the values, principles, and fundamental concepts to deliver value to their customers. There are several common patterns and techniques that are present in most Agile methods and frameworks. This chapter shows the delivery approach in a generic way, agnostic of any specific approach.?

We discuss the overall lifecycle; how to get started; how Agile delivery differs from a traditional approach; how to measure progress; getting to the first delivery of value; how to include continuous improvement, how iteration work and how the team behaves and is organised. We introduce some of the other roles commonly found, including some that are specific to a particular method or framework.

Chapter 8 – Agile Practices

Here we discuss and briefly describes a range of practices, techniques, methods, approaches, and other ways of working that Agile teams commonly use. They are grouped into categories covering the following areas: Leadership; Ways of Working; Requirements, Estimation; Prioritisation; Software Development; and Measuring Success. We briefly describe two of the most common Agile approaches used by teams: Scrum; and The Kanban Method.?

Chapter 9 – Agile Leadership

The easiest way to make an Agile team fail is to surround them with poor leadership and management that don’t understand Agile. This chapter will help address that by helping leaders and teams the kind of leadership that will help Agile teams deliver the best results.?

We describe the evolution of leadership and how many management techniques that evolved in early 20th?century manufacturing are still prevalent today. And yet the conditions that Agile teams operate in today are vastly different from the factories or mines. Agile leadership needs to be different. Ironically, we look to a German Field Marshall from the 1800’s for a description of what it should be.

For many leaders effectively leading Agile teams requires a shift in mindset, and we identify and discuss our six Key Leadership Outcomes that leaders should strive for: Servant Leadership; Psychological Safety; Intrinsic Motivation; Trusted, Empowered People; Self-Organising Teams; and Creating Strategic Alignment. Many of these are not unique to Agile leadership and we share stories and references that show these leadership outcomes bring value to many different types of teams. We talk about the importance of creating the right culture and why Agile coaching is a powerful path to success.

Chapter 10 – Managing The Product

One of the biggest differences between traditional and Agile delivery is how the product requirements are understood and managed. In particular how the customer is involved and how teams cope with changes to the customer needs. This chapter looks in detail at how Agile teams understand their customers, manage their product and their stakeholders using techniques such as roadmaps, backlogs, and story mapping.??Some of these techniques have entire books to describe them, so there are lots of examples and references to help bring the ideas to life and point you towards further information.

Chapter 11 – Beyond The Basics

Finally, in this chapter we introduce scaling. We have consciously left it until a chapter title ‘Beyond The Basics’, because we think it is important to properly understand the basics before trying to scale.?

It is also important to only introduce scaling when you need it, so we devote the bulk of the scaling discussion to ways that you can avoid the need to scale, even when you have large products or lots of teams. We show ways you can reduce the drivers for scaling by reducing complexity, decoupling everything, managing the product differently, splitting goals, refactoring, using feature teams and shortening the cycle time. If you really, really want to scale, we also cover that briefly.

A second practice that you should only embark upon when you understand the basics is tailoring a process. An aspect of tailoring is the use of specialist roles or teams that can sometimes be sensible to use.?

We finish by describing in brief some of the more commonly used Agile methods and frameworks, including references to their source to allow you to find the current versions.