Agile XP - Agile when speed is important, practice these things
Joseph Sisto
PMO Director, Agile Transformation Leader, Partner to Business and IT Teams
Agile XP. For some people XP is frightening. XP stands for "Extreme Programming." XP is not always appropriate to use. However, you can employ Agile XP when there are a lot of changing requirements, and you don't have a fixed time frame. I have been working with an amazing team that has managed to triple its delivery velocity over the last 5 months. I wanted to share a few tips and tricks we used for that.
First, we are using paired programming. I get a lot of feedback on this, but when you pair up programmers, you get a productivity bump. Both get assigned stories, but you get to leverage the knowledge of the Senior programmer on the junior one- and you don't get that with individuals in development. Ed Yourdon- the famous Software Engineering thought leader, said that some programmers have 3 to 5 times more speed capabilities than others. I found this to be true...and we have leveraged that knowledge.
Second, deploy smaller bits of functionality more often. You have heard this a lot.. For our team, we moved from one to two software builds and deployments per week to three to four per week... and we lowered our bug count and risks doing this.
Prioritize your work every day, not just on sprints. At the end of our daily stand-up meetings, we review priorities of the day for 1 minute together. This has proven highly effective.
Fourth, we invested in more and more test automation and code production automation. We took our top engineering talent within the team to build this out over the last 5 months, and it has paid off, repeatedly, and helped avoid late nights and weekend work.
Keeping this article short, we also implemented more frequent rewards and praise, putting recognition into each of our ceremonies, added peer recognition, and also added more celebrations- with the business included so that can describe the impact of our work back to the engineers. This has proven to be a great morale booster.
Agile XP is not for everyone, but it can add a lot of speed to your development cycles, and it took us several months to hit our productivity bump... but it was worth it!