Scaling Agile Peer Conference

Agile Finland arranged a nice peer to peer conference around Scaling Agile. Venue was Life Science Center in Keilaniemi, Espoo. First of all I have to say that facilities were excellent. Top floor sauna with a sea view.

Participants had been pre-selected and there were people from eight companies. All the participants were required to write an experience report about how they had scaled agile or transformed the organisation into a more agile form. The seats were arranged so that everyone could be in eye contact with all the others and discussion was very easy. 

The day was packed rather full. We started already at 8:30 in the morning and finished around 17 o'clock in the evening. As we agreed not to share too much about each others practices and processes publicly, I won't get into details. But some interesting topics/practices I dare to share were the 24 h hackathon, group Backlog and a team building event where people had to self-organize into teams. Also, a topic that was common to almost all the participants was the Product Management. That's the not-so-trivial interface between business and development. Maybe that's the unicorn of Agile. ;)

I'd like to mention a very interesting facilitation technique called Open Season. Everyone had four cards: green, yellow, red and blue. Green indicated that you want to start a new discussion thread. Yellow meant that you still want to add something to the current topic. Red meant that you need to speak right away and blue that this is boring and let's move on. Red and blue were never used, but otherwise the conversation worked very well! Actually you can find a rather elegant guide on how to arrange a peer conference from this blog entry. I think we followed it very closely.

My best take homes were definitely the new contacts. Hopefully we can grow even more agile together! Also it was nice to get to know how other companies have been scaling agile. And by the way, if you ever think of arranging a conference like this, think no more. Do it! It will be great.

Planning Releases

I believe I was just getting the hang of this Scrum thing and I thought I could do some decent Scrum Mastering. But now the things have changed slightly and I need to jump "over the fence". For a bit over a month I've been working as a Product Owner and a Release Train Engineer. I can see that it's actually a lot easier to identify missing Product Owner as an impediment than to actually be the Product Owner and try to live up to the requirements of the role. There just doesn't seem to be enough hours in the week to constantly keep the Backlog in order and think about all the details. But maybe that's exactly the point. No-one is able to know everything in the complex world of software development and that's why letting go and giving the team the space they need comes rather naturally.

But then something about planning Releases. In Scrum everything happens around the Scrum team. Team forecasts what they can achieve during a Sprint and that's it. Achieved velocity, "yesterday's weather", helps to forecast what can be expected in a longer run if the backlog has been refined into a decent degree. But there's usually no mentions about what to do when you have multiple teams, multiple products, a bit of legacy and all in all a more complex situation than just complex.

I think Scaled Agile Framework offers nice way to see this from a higher level. Scaling to the level beyond teams and Sprints, I see Releases as a good logical logical next step. Also it seems like a good idea to set some higher level goals (or Objectives) that can be then divided into Stories when the actual work starts. Of course there will be some uncertainty associated with these goals, but I think they should be treated more as commitments than just some initial guesses that will be reformulated right after the first Sprint. Still, I don't support big upfront planning or waterfall. I just think that a bigger enterprise can't live without ability to plan ahead for longer than just two weeks.

Anyway, the actual planning of the Release is a complex task on its own. As the Release Train Engineer I wanted to arrange a so called Pre-Planning where all the teams share their initial plans and everyone gets some indication about what is to be expected. Then there will be time to work the plans out until everyone (or at least most of people) are happy with them. Then we can have can simply agree that this is the plan that we try to implement. And if it needs to be amended along the way, so be it. But the train will take off and only the future will show what's going to happen. ;)

Scan Agile 2013

On November 11th I participated in the Scan Agile 2013. That's the biggest Agile conference in Scandinavia.

It was awesome! There were plenty of interesting presentations by different agile gurus. Brightest star was Dean Leffingwell who concentrated mostly on the Scaled Agile Framework (or shortly SAFe). Interestingly he was giving a lot of thought on XP practices. I had not realised they were such closely connected with the framework. I'm huge fan of both Scrum and SAFe and it was very inspiring to meet Mr. Leffingwell in person. As a matter of fact I was such a fanboy that I asked for his autograph. :)

(On the next day I participated in another session hosted by Nitor Creations where we sat around the same table. Discussion topic was Scaling Agile.)

There were four separate tracks and one could leap between the different tracks depending on personal preferences. The next talk I watched after Dean Leffingwell was by Arto Miekkavaara. He represented NeuroLeadershipGroup which is an organization founded by David Rock. I've been aware of the SCARF model for quite some time, but a little refreshment never hurts. 

Next I watched a presentation by Neil Killick. It was about the currently very popular NoEstimates. I have to admit that I didn't really understand everything about this. But the main deal seems to be that instead of estimating in non-dimensional Story Points that describe both the size and complexity, we aim to split the work into such pieces that are of same size. That way the number of stories becomes the measure of velocity. Interesting topic never the less.

Even if Leffingwell had the keynote, I think maybe the most inspiring presentation was given by Andrea Tomasini. Good stuff about the Anatomy of an Agile organization delivered with a great passion. Thank you Andrea, I really enjoyed your spicy speech!

Most of the other talks were about processes and frameworks, but Janne Sinivirta went deeper into the actual work. He educated the audience about Lean Architecture. Yes, I believe architecture is needed. (Maybe it's because I'm SAFe fanboy...)

As a conclusion I'd say Scan Agile is a conference worth participating and gathered a lot of familiar faces from different agile circles here in Finland. Again next year? If possible, yes!

In the near future I will keep on pushing the Agile transformation in our company. (Or maybe push is not the correct word. Coaching and collaborating on the issue would be closer to truth.) I will also need to try the role of a Product Owner. Kind of like a jump to the other side of the fence to see if the grass is greener there. Interesting times ahead!