A common failure mode for organizations attempting to adopt an Agile style of software development occurs when an attempt is made to “Scale Agile”. Suddenly, the organization finds that there are scheduling problems between teams. Delivery team members suddenly find that they are required to serve on several teams at once. Dependencies surface, and teams find it difficult to come together in a common cadence to produce working software in a continuously delivered fashion. Many times, these issues become so grave that the organization reverts back to the Waterfall model that they came to hate, but at least understood.

This session explores Agile scaling concerns, and places particular emphasis on an architecturally significant distinction in the software to be created, and the components produced to allow the software to be created. That distinction revolves around cross cutting platform concerns versus product feature creation concerns. We will examine the distinctions and explore solutions that should help your organization get past these issues when it comes to portfolio management, by paying attention to extrinsic versus intrinsic value metrics.

Over the last decade, eXtreme Programming practices like User Stories, Evolutionary Design, Test-Driven Development (TDD), Behavior Driven Developer (BDD), Refactoring, Continuous Integration and Automation have fundamentally changed software development processes and inherently how engineers work.

Having experienced various benefits from XP practices on our J2EE stack, our team started to apply these practices to extract, transform, and load (ETL) and Data Analytics side of our product. Unfortunately, there is very little guidance available in this context, esp. for the SAS Platform. Right from finding the unit testing framework to structuring the code to designing our modules and setting up a Continuous Integration builds, our team had to figure out everything, the hard way.

Join us to understand the challenges we faced during this process and how we resolved these challenges.

Long before the Agile revolution for software development began, industry had learned that efficient production of goods required intense attention to quality, teamwork, and continuous improvement. These themes of Lean Manufacturing (which was further refined into the Toyota Production System) were never part of the original formulation of the Agile Manifesto, and are rarely mentioned as part of the traditional Agile/Scrum recipe for teams transforming to the new “Agile” mindset.

The reality is that the traditional Agile/Scrum recipe is actually a “dumbed down” version of the Toyota Production System, and makes it easier for organisations to grasp and start from. However, if organisations really want to achieve the goal of producing the software they need in a fashion that leads to High Performance Teams and Sustainable Engineering, they will need to understand the principles of Lean so they can incorporate them into their unique process. This session teaches the basics of Lean, and demonstrates how they apply to Agile development.

This is a collection of real time case studies of failed projects. It is an autopsy of these failed projects studying why these projects failed and how application of agie principles could have saved them.

It is also a study into the organizational culture, behavioral attributes and the people issues and how agile addresses them.

And finally it is a study of why doing a few projects with agile is not sufficient. How complete organizational transformation into agile practices is necessary for long term success for projects, processes and people.