Explaining Agile Projects

Here are some impressions of expressionistic drawings while I explained how we do Agile Projects to some people.

The complete picture

This drawing covers a lot of aspects. Try to find as many as possible:

• Definition of Done
• Iterative cycle of system qualification (testing) and bug fixing (development)
• The need to release multiple software products due to shared components
• V-Model (with a substitution of level "P"roduct with "F"eature)
• 50% buffers
• Parkinson's Law
• Feature Branching Strategy

Single Point of Communication

In organizations without fully implemented Scrum teams there always are victims in the center of all other groups. The poor guys in the middle (old fashioned project managers) are flooded with questions from the developers and testers (left) and instantly have to pull answers from the business guys (right). As a result, they constantly jump from left to right and vice versa.

Agile Process Refinement

This image shows an approach to implement mixed agile processes to an organization:

• Discuss about features on an epic level with top management. Call this FDD for these guys and show them the FDD process - they do not need more details.
• Refine these epic features and create detail feature specifications with the lower management and business people. I call this F++ just for fun. They want to discuss implementation details and user interfaces - in fact, this is where user stories are created.
• Implement Scrum (or better: ScrumBut) for the development and testing team, use task boards, burndowns, dailies, and retrospectives.
• Major goal in this drawing: pull the business guys into the Scrum team and convert them into real product owners.