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 Women in Technology and ThoughtWorks co-hosted 'Agile - not so common sense' on Monday 7th November 2011 at City Tower, Piccadilly Plaza in Manchester. This was our first networking event in the North West region and it was different from our usual events as it had a more technical focus. The formal part of the evening started with a brief welcome from Women in Technology's MD, Maggie Berry and then we heard from our keynote speaker - Luke Barrett, Managing Director at ThoughtWorks Europe. Since their founding in 1993, ThoughtWorkers have been stirring up the status quo – they pioneered a new approach to software in collaboration with other experts beginning in the late 1990s called “Agile”.
Based on a track-record of overwhelming real-world successes, they’ve been leaders and evangelists for the evolution and adoption of these Agile methods within enterprise. And the Agile methodology – predicated on practices of collaboration, iteration, feedback, transparency - is now widely acknowledged as a key contributor to software productivity and excellence.
KeynoteLuke began his presentation with a brief history of the software development process and the subsequent development of Agile. Statistics from the Standish Gray Study show that traditionally only 7% of code in the average application is always used and 45% of code is never used so there can be a huge amount of waste in the traditional development life cycle.
Luke mentioned The Agile Manifesto, written about 10 years ago which shows better ways to develop software are always being uncovered. More information about these can be found here.
Agile is about approaching a development project in bite size chunks that everyone can understand - pieces of work that the business can see value in and pieces of work that are 'estimatable' by the delivery team. Tasks have to be prioritised by value, technology complexity and MMF - minimal marketable features (i.e. a feature that is of deployable or releasable quality).
The idea at the heart of Agile is test and refine, test and refine - it's not about throwing away analysis, design and testing but it is about having quicker iterations of work so that code can fail faster if needs be and so that if something isn't working, that development can be stopped sooner rather than later - the tight feedback cycle enables this.
Luke discussed that The Scientific Instrument Company in Canada did some research on their development projects looking at successes before and after implementing Agile. There was an 83% improvement on the number of cumulative defects (which were reduced from 2,270 to 381), and a 61% improvement on projects costs once they were working in an Agile way.
Forrester Consulting assesses the Total Economic Impact (TEI) of ThoughtWorks on client projects - the studies are conducted on behalf of ThoughtWorks to help IT professionals make better, more cost-effective decisions regarding the selection of development approach and partners. TEI systematically looks at the potential affects of technology investments across four dimensions: Cost - impact on IT; Benefits - impact on business; Flexibility - future options created by the investment and Risk - uncertainty. More information can be found here: http://www.thoughtworks.com/tei
Luke recommended, that if the audience were interested in statistics, it's worth looking up Michael Mah and his metrics for the Agile community from QSM associates: http://www.qsma.com
Agile is a broad church but discipline is important - TDD, CI and refactoring are required as minimum core practices. Finding and engaging the right stakeholders is also very important when working in an Agile environment. Scope management is also extremely important - Agile isn't a way to make continuous changes at no cost and business expectations must be managed in this space - they can't have whatever they want at no extra cost.
Behavioural and cultural change is very hard to achieve as people resist change. Luke shared a diagram - the 'J curve' - that shows an initial dip in productivity levels that is associated with a team adapting to new behaviours. Once they get used to a new way of working - Agile - their productivity increases from the base starting level.
Businesses see Agile in different way - some see it as a curiosity and some see it as a strategy. Luke believes there are three different ways of working with Agile: Operational - there are pockets of Agile projects with companies seeing 'how it goes'; Portfolio - a conscious decision has been made about how Agile is used and Strategic - they're looking at Agile beyond IT.
Panel Discussion and Q&AAfter Luke's presentation there was a panel discussion and Q&A session chaired by Reshma Shaikh, Lead Consultant at ThoughtWorks. The panellists included Luke, Chrissie Auton, Agile Coach at Shop Direct, Gemma Cameron, Software Developer at Laterooms.com, Liz Douglass, Senior Consultant at ThoughtWorks and Antonia Phoenix, Head of Software Development at ReThink Recruitment.
Profiles of all of the speakers and panellists can be found here.
Some of the key comments to come from the discussion and Q&A were:
- It requires discipline to roll out Agile - it's a misconception that there aren't any rules.
- Collaboration is at the heart of Agile - you agree to work as a team.
- More information about Manchester Girl Geeks can be found here.
- Software development is an art and a craft - that's a message that needs to be shared with the market to attract future talent into the industry.
- Pair programming improves the quality of the code developed.
- There's a huge importance of testing to Agile.
- An attitude to development is much more important than the actual development language that's being used.
- With regards to increasing the number of women working in IT, the importance of having female role models in organisations is very strong.
- An example of a good Agile project is structured with a strong project manager and test lead. The project won't have any technical debt, there will be well engaged customers and regular contact with the product owner.
- An example of a bad Agile project will be a team that doesn't have much team discipline and the quality of the code will be sacrificed.
The evening was well attended and finished with networking with the last guests leaving at almost 10pm.
We hope this will be the first of many events in Manchester!
Should you wish to speak to a member of the ThoughtWorks team in more detail about available roles please contact Katie Partridge by email kpartrid@thoughtworks.com or Arthi Viswanath by email aviswana@thoughtworks.com or call 020 7497 4500.
If you have any questions at all, please don't hesitate to contact Maggie Berry on 020 7422 9214 or mberry@womenin.co.uk.
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