What practices make you agile?

Here at Redgate we strongly believe that Agile and Lean are the right principles to use when building software products and we’re continually striving to do this well. Part of this involves ensuring we’re regularly inspecting, adapting and sharing learning between teams.

At the Level Up conference in Duxford, I helped facilitate an event for the teams to explore what great looks like for agile-lean at Redgate.

Agile-lean desired outcomes

Before the session we looked at both the 12 principles of Agile Software, as defined in the Agile Manifesto, and the 7 principles of Lean. From these we defined the following outcomes any software development team at Redgate should be striving for:

Adaptable

Teams change process and plans based on feedback and the latest information; they continuously improve.

Quality is built in

Teams pay attention to technical excellence and recognise good design enhances agility.

Transparent

Goals, plans, progress etc. are visible to all stakeholders (both internal & external)

Focus on business value

Teams satisfy users by delivery of valuable software; they track and measure how it’s being used — it doesn’t end with pushing a release!

Focus on users

Teams understand their users and their problems / needs

Working software, continuously delivered

Teams regularly deliver “just enough” working software at a sustainable pace

Collaborate

Teams communicate proactively and effectively across functions as a team, empowering each other to do their best work.

Waste is eliminated

Teams practice the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — e.g. defer commitment, MVP etc.

Retain valuable learning

We learn from each other and we have mechanisms to ensure we don’t forget what we’ve learnt.

The session

At the session we asked the attendees to identify the practices that:

· They currently use (green post-its)

· They have used in the past (blue post-its)

· They have heard of, but never used (pink post-its)

And then finally we asked them to vote on the areas that they most wanted to learn more about / get better at.

It’s worth noting that it was perfectly acceptable for the same practice to appear in more than one outcome, all these outcomes are intertwined and many practices can help you achieve more than one outcome.

Every outcome had a good number of post-its with all the colours represented on it. What this highlighted is that we have a wealth of experience in the company that we could probably be making better use of, either in things that they’ve used before successfully or lessons they’ve learned from any unsuccessful attempts. There’s also a great appetite for learning and experimenting with different practices — evidenced by the number of pink post-its.

Here’s a sample of the output.

What’s next?

For the Dev Leads this is a useful insight into where we currently stand and what areas we should focus on as part of our objective to “Establish the product division as a centre of excellence for agile-lean development practices”. Whilst it does provide some insight, we’re aware that not everybody was in the session, so we’ll be combining it with other sources of information to help us determine what actions we want to take.

We also expect this information to be useful to the guilds and Quality Coaches — there could be ideas in there for sessions to run, or it could help alert people to the fact that others have already practised a technique and might be willing to share their experiences and learnings.

And finally, but most importantly, we’re hoping an individual will use the information as inspiration for things to try in their teams. Who knows what they might learn — and share at the next Level Up event!