Agile session Alt.Net London

So to start the conference I chose to take part in a session about agile development and processes. I think mainly because I wanted a refresher on some of the points and to see if I could contribute. It’s nice to see plenty of people there new to Agile as I was at my first open conference. Learning the basics of the process, and making a good start. I was also interested to see how people had developed from their initial attempts at introducing Agile to their shops.

At one point there was a lot of talk about how we estimate, and I was surprised to see that everyone had assumed estimating in hours and half days. Assigning some time to points and then estimating with points. I wonder what happened to estimating by points representing complexity. At uSwitch, when we introduced planning meetings and planning poker, we started with 5 points to a day. This was mainly to get developers used to the idea of estimating in points and as a team. Over time in teams where this method had remained, they have naturally loosened the tie between the points and the number of hours they represent when estimating. They still use the rule to define how much capacity they have in a given iteration, 5*Devs* 10days = capacity.

For me and my teams, we’ve moved this to the next logical stage of entirely decoupling estimation points from time and tying them to the complexity of a task. Has this gone out of fashion and no one told me?

I think I’ll break this off into a separate post on estimating

Crystal and full project breadth

Ian Cooper shared with the group the method or agile flavour he’s using with his current team, it’s called Crystal and sounds interesting. It sounds like the emphasis of crystal is the continuous improvement and customisation of the process to your team and project’s needs. A quick bout of googling tells me that the following has not much directly to do with Crystal. From what I’ve been able to gleam (and it’s not much) Crystal is primarily focused on improving methodology frequently, aiming to minimise it’s weight.

The main point that Ian brought up that caught my attention was the move from the pure priority prioritisation to a more whole system or breadth approach with incremental refinement. Purely working of stories by priorities, apparently leads to systems that have a lot of work and attention spent on apparent high priority sections while those features and functions that the client may deem as a lesser priority are essentially neglected, typically tacked on the end of the project. This can lead to seemingly unfinished projects (my conclusion).

The three thirds approach that Ian described seems to encompass the entire system with increasing levels of ‘focus’. The first phase is the ‘Walking Skeleton’ this is just enough of the entire system to get something going from a technical perspective, this might take up most of the ‘framework’ stuff that one has to do to get a project going. Many people likened this to an iteration 0, which doesn’t deliver much or any business value but is necessary to build something you can demonstrate.

The next phase delivers the ‘First Business Value’ taking the walking skeleton and adding enough to actually add to what the business has, making a contribution.

Here is where my notes get a little woolly and I wish I wrote this post while I was in the room! The final phase adds all the other features, improves on the initial business value, works on feedback from the client on the second phase, and perhaps includes changes to requirements.

From the weakness of those last two paragraphs, I think I’m definitely going to do a little more research, so check back for a bit more bulk in later posts.

This notion of increasing the focus with subsequent iterations really did intrigue me, and I’m definitely going to see how I can apply it to our next project.