Why go Agile? What's in it for me?

Once the urgency for creating a new offering or a product settles down and we've gone pre-alpha, alpha, beta, GA and what not, the team finally gets some time to think and evaluate- Now what? We've just laid the ground work for our dreams, how do we make it a reality?

Scalability, resiliency, new offerings based on customer feedback, diversification, support and maintenance become very important. And this is no longer restricted to the product alone; teams want to grow, learn new things and work towards making success a habit. In my experience, this is the right time to "Go Agile". There are infinite well written articles, certifications for Agile over the internet, however my team wanted to hear directly from me - "Why go Agile? What's in it for me?" This article is my take on the same topic.

Highlights:

1. Why go Agile? Focus areas, Agile Manifesto, Key Agile Values, What’s in it for me?
2. Agile Framework - Agile Scrum framework, Story Point estimation techniques, Statuses
3. Sprint ceremonies and their value adds - Backlog grooming, Sprint Planning, Standup, Sprint Review, Retrospective

Why go Agile?

Let's look at the simplest business plan, for any new idea- we need to answer only 2 questions to plan our next steps

1. Does it work?
2. Does it make money?

Based on the above answers we either go back to the drawing board or keep iterating to make the product a success. Agile allows us to make this success common and sustainable.

Focus areas for Agile - Product Development, Customer Empathy, Speed, Flexibility and Embracing change

Why does it work?

• Fail fast, recover faster
• Quality embedded
• Predictability- speed to market, clarity on roles and responsibilities
• Faster releases, happy customers
• Clear priorities
• E2E Ownership- Estimation, predictable delivery
• Decision making- Informed
• Motivated team
• Recalibration

Agile Manifesto

"The Agile Manifesto is a document that identifies four key values and 12 principles that its authors believe software developers should use to guide their work. Formally called the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, it was produced by 17 developers during an outing on Feb. 11-13, 2001, at The Lodge at Snowbird ski resort in Utah."

Here's my take on the 12 principles

Key Agile values

These key values really help in quick prioritisation and consensus building. Let the team know that as TPMs we are here to support and help the team move forward in an efficient manner.

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Responding to change over following a plan

What’s in it for me?

The million dollar questions still remains -

The idea sounds promising but what's in it for me?

I've tried to answer the question from different perspectives - how Agile impact engineers, Product/Program Managers, Team leads and Engineering Managers. These in turn automatically make the customer, executive leadership happy.

Added benefit with Agile adoption is human personality improvements. I've seen people gaining confidence at expressing their thoughts. Continuous feedback from the customer/team make people aware of their surroundings and they tend to strive for more.

Agile Scrum Framework

There are different type of Agile frameworks- Scrum, Kanban and Extreme programming (XP) being the popular ones. For lightweight, team-based approach to agile, Scrum framework fits best-its easy to adopt and provides a way of constant feedback and quick resolution.

Below is a typical Scrum cycle starting from a Product vision --> Objective and Key Deliverables (OKRs) --> Epics and then the going into the iterative sprint cycles. Planning, stand-ups, review and retro are some of the key sprint ceremonies- refer to "Sprint Ceremonies and their value adds" section for more details

Estimation

An important part of the Sprint planning exercise is estimation and the most common estimation technique used in a sprint is Story Point. Let's see what makes a good user story first.

Story-

In software development and product management, a?user story?is an informal, natural language description of features of a software system.

Story = As a [persona], I [want to], [so that].

Writing user stories ensures that we think from the perspective of a user and therefore writing a Definition of Done (DoD)/ User Acceptance Criteria becomes easier. Adding tasks, subtasks and ordered steps to a user story are some of the good practices.

Story Points-?

• Unit of measure?
• Estimate of the overall effort that will be required to fully implement a user story
• Relative in nature, single point of reference
• While assigning a story point, think in terms of - Amount of work to do, DoD (Definition of Done), complexity of the work, risk or uncertainty in doing the work and dependencies.

Teams gradually figure out what works best for them and adopt accordingly. The cheatsheet below is a good starting point. Another option is to assign a number (from the Fibonacci series) to a particular story and then see how the other stories fare compared to this one. You can also try T-shirt sizing - Small - 1,2, 3; Medium - 5, Large - 8, XL - 13 and above

Statuses

Reporting becomes an important aspect of creating visibility. Sprint success can be measured in terms of Say:Do ratio, Story points being the unit of measure. However, when we want to report in terms of monthly, quarterly goals, statuses are the easiest way to go. I prefer to have a 1:n mapping between an Objective and epics with Key Deliverables being the DoD for the epics.

Sprint Ceremonies and their value adds

Scrum heavily relies on the sprint ceremonies and the value each of them generate. Drivers and attendees can differ based on the type of organisation. Most popular sprint ceremonies and the value adds are listed below

I've had the privilege of leading Agile journeys for multiple teams across different organisations and it has always been very rewarding. Every team has its own set of challenges thereby creating different learning opportunities. Agile adoption is a journey and it should not be time bound- it needs to be iterative and experimental, just like the methodology itself. If you are reading this, let me know in the comments the unique experience that you've had while adopting Agile.

Suggested reading :

• Why use Agile? here
• Personality enhancements: here?
• More at ScrumAlliance, Agilemanifesto , SmartSheet ?
• User Stories link
• Sprint ceremonies: here