2017 Agile Development Cheat Sheet

Based on recent studies about agile development. The goal here is to have a starting point and references for people to study Agile development related practices in 2017.

Index

1. Scrum
2. XP
3. Kanban
4. Scaling Agile
   4.1 Scrum of Scrums
   4.2 Nexus
   4.2 LeSS
   4.4 SAFe
5. Agile vs Legacy
   5.1 Gartner BiModal
   5.2 To speed IT (McKinsey)
   5.3 Cinefin
6. Product prioritization techniques
7. Facilitating retrospective
   7.1 4L's
   7.2 Mad, Sad, Glad
   7.3 Sinking boat
8. Spotify Agile Model
9. References

1. Scrum

• Simple
• Transparency
• Inspection
• Adaption
• Iterative and incremental
• Product Backlog
  • Grooming
• Sprints
  • Sprint Goal
  • Sprint Planning
  • Sprint Backlog
  • Sprint review
  • Daily Scrum
• Definition of Done (DoD)
• Members
  • Scrum Team
  • Scrum Master
  • Product Owner
  • Stakeholders (chicken)
• Monitoring
  • Burn down chart
  • Cumulative work

2. XP (Extremme Programming)

• Engineering oriented
• Continuous Integration
• Pair Programming
• Test Driven Development
• Small releases
• Planning game
• Spike development
• Collective code ownership
• Metaphors
• Coding standards
• Sustainable pace
• Simple design

4. Scaling Agile

• Multiple frameworks/tools
• Simplest to most complex

4.1 Scrum of Scrums

• A.k.a meta Scrum
• One representative from each team
  • Scrum master?
• Daily scrum with all these representatives
  • Sync everything in that meeting
  • completions
  • next steps
  • impediments
  • on behalf of the teams they represent

4.2 Nexus

• Augment scrums
  • One new role
  • Expanded events and artifacts
• Life cycle
• Nexus
  • Unit
  • 3 to 9 Scrum teams
• One extra team
  • Integration team
  • Responsible for all integrations
  • Members from Scrum teams can be part of Nexus team
  • Nexus work takes precedence as impacts more people
• Product backlog
  • Should be detailed enough before teams can start working on it
  • Dependencies must be identified and preferably resolved
  • Backlog distribution should be made to minimize dependencies
• Daily Scrum
  • Nexus daily occurs first
  • Identify dependencies and integration problems
  • Use it as input for Scrum daily so teams can plan their work accordingly
• Influences technical architecture
  • Architecture can simplify synchronization and scaling problems

4.2 LeSS

4.4 SAFe

6. Product prioritization techniques

• Right technique depends on goal
  • Internal vs External
  • Quantitative vs Qualitative
• Kano (questions)
• QFD (house)
• Opportunity cost
• Buy a feature (game)
• Story mapping
  • Map following business flow order
  • Activities
  • Backbone
  • User tasks
  • Slices releases and development strategy
• MoSCoW
  • Must
  • Should
  • Could
  • Won't
• Prune Tree (meh)
• Speed Boat
  • Pain driven
• Financial analysis

7. Facilitating retrospective

• Like a negotiation
  • Separate people from the problem
  • Interests and not positions
  • Objective criteria
• Opportunity to:
  • learn
  • build trust
• No blaming
• Everybody has to participate
• Try not to favor extroverts and HIPPO (highest paid person opinion)

7.1 4L's

• Liked
• Learned
• Lacked
• Longed for

7.2 Mad, Sad, Glad

• Mad
• Sad
• Glad

7.3 Sinking boat

• Variation of speed boat prioritization technique
• Sail (good stuff)
• Anchor (bad stuff)

8. Spotify agile model

• Pillars:
  • Autonomy
  • Direction
  • Community
• Squads
  • Cross functional
  • TA - Testing automation
  • QA - Quality assistance
• Tribe
• 1 Tribe -> N Squads
• Chapter
  • Same role
  • Cross squads
• Guilds
  • Same role
  • Cross tribes
• Squads/tribes structure reflect communication requirements
• Heavily based/dependent on software architect
  • Release train (leaves no matter what)
    • Feature flags
  • One click deploy
  • Continuous integration
  • Limited blast radius and partial rollout
• Culture
  • Mistakes are not punished
    • Otherwise people hide them
  • Failure recovery > failure avoidance
  • Blame is not handed off to other people
    • Squad who builds it, owns it
  • Optmize for value
  • Measure impact and not output
  • Data > opinion
• Health check
  • Systemic problems
• New ideas
  • Think it
    • PR Story
    • Metrics (what does success looks like?)
  • Build it
  • Ship it
  • Tweak it
  • Repeat

9. References

• Scrum Guides
• https://foldingburritos.com/product-prioritization-techniques/
• Getting to Yes
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming_practices
• Scaling Agile @ Spotify
• http://jpattonassociates.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/story_mapping.pdf
• https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/scrum-of-scrums/
• https://scrumorg-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/drupal/2016-09/NexusGuide%20v1.1.pdf?nexus-file=https%3A%2F%2Fscrumorg-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fdrupal%2F2016-09%2FNexusGuide%2520v1.1.pdf