More than XP. More than one day.

The Agile community has traditionally focused on delivering “Working Software” over “Extensive Documentation”.

Outside of the IT department, no one cares how the software is written as long as the job gets done. Outside of the IT department, “The Business” cares about generating revenue and reducing costs.

This is really a case study about how we took a waterfall project with three month releases that was driving the business and turned it into an Agile project with waterfall development that delivered monthly releases. Crucially, the project became business led and is now used by the Sales team to generate business.

The IT development process is old style waterfall with developers on different floors and continents. Traditional paper based functional specifications are used rather than stories. TDD is not in use. The developers do not pair. There is no face to face contact with the developers… Yet the project delivers most of the value of an Agile project due to the programme management and investment approach… The missing/most poorly understood tools in the Agile toolkit.

The tools approach we adopted:
Real Options.
Feature Cards ( A mixture of Feature Driven Development and XP Stories ).
Scrum Backlog.
Semi-Automatic Functional Regression Testing (using Excel) that takes 1 man hour per cycle.
Theory of Constraints.
Niel Nickolaisen’s Customer Differentiating / Mission Critical Model.
Analysis as a tool to determine Takt time.

Once I’ve presented the short Case Study. I will run a Game to show how the project works.

Afterwards, the group will break into small groups to discuss what is more important…. The IT Investment Strategy or the Software Development process. We will wrap up with an accellerated goldfish bowl to extract the learnings of the session.