Wednesday, January 9, 2002
6:30 p.m.
Advanced Technologies Integration, Inc., Edina, MN
Notes by Kyle Larson and Pam Rostal
The meeting began with introductions – names, current position, agile experience or goals. Attendance was 22 or so, with about 11 going for drinks afterwards.
Customers assigned to a
development project must be appropriately qualified. This means that the following three attributes must be aligned:
· Capability (intimate knowledge of both the users and the system’s role in their jobs)
· Authority (ability to win upper management support and supply resources when needed by the project)
· Accountability (responsibility for the success of the project, which translates into personal investment in project success)
Kyle Larson, founder of the
group, mentioned that two attendees had requested announcement time:
·
Pam Rostal (pmrostal at attbi.com) requested a show
of interest in use cases and use case reuse.
· Bernie Thuening (bthuening at mn.rr.com) advanced the idea of employing an agile methodology in the conduct of a project to produce software for a non-profit group. One of the two non-profits he mentioned was MAP, the Management Assistance Program, which helps small businesses get started. He has sent e-mail to the Agile_Experience_Group Yahoo!Group to assess interest.
Then, Kyle requested that someone take leadership of the meeting, a role for which Mary Poppendick volunteered. Starting with Mary, the initial approach was to go around the room with each person describing a situation where customers had been involved, either to the betterment or the detriment of the project.
Mary’s experience at the government agency involved coming into the last five months of a 7-year project that had a non-negotiable government-imposed deadline. Her first task was to identify the users (often not the same as the sponsor or owner of the project). The development team delivered a partial implementation of the production system on time, and then did weekly builds thereafter. Because development was basically occurring on a production system, Mary spent a great deal of time with the managers whose groups were using the system, and who were therefore highly invested in its success. For more information on Mary’s thoughts, see http://www.poppendieck.com/projects.htm.
Kyle Larson worked with a dot-com whose principals acted as customer proxies, but were rarely available because they were traveling around the world seeking financing. Because of their frequent contacts with possible investors on these trips, the principals, who knew what they wanted to deliver, frequently modified the vision behind the project. When they were available to answer questions about priorities and directions, the development team queried them to understand the reasoning process behind their decisions, using that information to build a set of guiding principles that directed development efforts in the principals’ absence.
Dale Schumacherworked on a project that increased dramatically in size from a small number of developers and suggested that lack of documentation and communications hindered their progress as the size exceeded 20 developers. The question was asked whether the size of a company is inversely related to customer involvement. A number of counterexamples were provided, suggesting that it was not size but maturity that played a role in customer participation. More mature organizations had found they could not succeed without active customer involvement and therefore ensured that it would happen. Dale’s project enforced a team structure that included consultants, business people, end users, and IT personnel.
Shveta Mehtani worked for a 3500-developer company in India that was rated CMM level 5, and required that the customer supply a business liaison to work with the development organization. The IT group delegated an analogous role to one of its members, and these two were tasked with keeping communication channels open via e-mail, phone, and video-conferencing. The IT go-between knew exactly when the budget was at risk because they attended daily meetings and could revise priorities based on up-to-the-minute information. It was noted that upper management support was required to ensure that the IT go-between would be available.
The danger with this approach is that the wrong liaison may sabotage the project’s success if he/she does not represent all of the users. It is also important that other viewpoints beyond the Enterprise viewpoint be represented; in particular, the Operations group should become involved early in the project since it won’t be long before it has to support it.
Because priorities can be reset frequently, they are often focused on short-term gains, sometimes at the cost of long-term markets – for example, product developed for one customer becomes rigid with their customizations, and then the second customer’s project must almost start from scratch. The maxim: Manage expectations on agile projects that refactoring will be required.
A case was mentioned in which multiple business owners sponsored the project, but had divergent requirements. It was noted that the project team structure must ensure that someone would require the business owners to negotiate priorities before development continued.
Special thanks to Advanced Technologies Integration, Inc. for providing the space,
refreshments, and support.
Next months topic is the SCRUM agile development method and will start with a short overview presentation by Shveta Mehtani. Also present will be a developer from a local company that is using SCRUM. We will be particularly interested in how SCRUM addresses customer involvement, tying back to previous discussion threads.
See the new book, Agile Software Development with SCRUM, by Mike Beedle and Ken Schwaber and the websites http://www.controlchaos.com/ and http://jeffsutherland.com/ for more information on SCRUM.
The meeting will be held on Tuesday, February 12, 2002, from 6:30 to 8:00, with the traditional bar run afterwards for those interested, at Advanced Technologies Integration, Edina, MN. Directions below.
The Agile Experience Group meets and collaborates to share experiences, suggestions, and ideas about moving software development efforts towards more agile, more lightweight practices. Extreme Programming (XP), SCRUM, Crystal, FDD, and ASD are agile approaches. See www.agilealliance.org
We meet in the Twin Cities, Minnesota area and are a special interest group (SIG) of the Object Technologies Users Group (OTUG). See www.otug.org.
To get meeting announcements, subscribe to our low-volume list server by sending an email to:
Agile_Experience_Group-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
or subscribe from the web at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Agile_Experience_Group/
Meetings are held at Advanced Technologies Integration (ATI, www.atico.com), in the Centennial Lakes center, NE corner of France and 494, Edina, MN.
Advanced Technologies
Integration, Inc.
3600 Minnesota Drive
Suite 500
Edina, MN 55435
http://www.atico.com/about/about_map_popup.html