Lean Agile Principles

Ajit Alwe
Topics Covered
1. Lead Time and Process efficiency
2. Demand (rate of requirement arrival) Vs Capability (development throughput)
3. Strategy to reduce Lead Time
1. Iterative Development
2. Eliminating waste in the work flow
3. Automated Deployment Pipeline
Why Agile?
Total Time worked (Touch Time) = 4 wk
Lead Time/Elapsed Time 21 weeks
Idea
(worked for 2 hrs )
Specification
(worked for 8 hrs )
Design
(worked for 22 hrs )
Development
(worked for 1 Week)
Test
(worked for 2
week )
Deploy
(worked for
8 hrs )
2 weeks
Wait
5 weeks
wait
2 weeks
Wait
4 weeks
wait
4 weeks
wait
Lead Time begins with the initial identification of a customers need and
concludes with the solution/feature delivered.
Wait Time =21 4 = 17 weeks
Why Agile? (Demand Vs Capability)

Requirement Arrival rate - 18-20
3-4
Capability
IT - Development
Release
Throughput
DEMAND
Market/sponsors/cu
stomers/ Product
mgmt.
Rework


Wait for code to move from Sit,
UAT, Pre-Prod to production
Wait time for clarification
Push -8-10
3 months
9-10
Demand Vs Capability

Strategy to balance Demand and Capability Lean Way

Dev
Test
Pull
Capability
IT - Development
Release
Throughput
MURI - Control Variability
Business to have regular planning
meeting with IT, to prioritize the
requirement.
MURA - Prevent overburdening
by applying work in progress
(WIP) limit
MUDA - Reduce rework and
reduce wait time to move code
from dev env to Production env
by automating deployment
pipeline

WIP = 4
SIT UAT
Pre-
prod
Prod
Deployment Pipeline
Modular Arch, Test Driven Infrastructure
Prioritization Policies
Work Item Types Example (with
different Cost of delay)
1. Expedite
2. Fixed Date
3. Standard
4. Intangible Items
1. Production bug fix request
2. Usability improvements
3. Design changes
5. Bug fixes severity wise













Policy decision Rules advantages
1. Permit us to control the logic of decisions without delaying decisions
2. Enable us to promote system-level optimum decisions
3. Make our decisions faster, easier to make, more correct, and more
transparent.
Policies example
1. If a request meets a certain criteria then it
gets a faster class of service on the board
2. Expedite / fast track prerequisites
3. Only 1 expedite request on the whole board
4. At least 4 standard items
5. If total WIP is 12 and we have a policy that
50% will be high priority then we want to
ensure that 6 items are high priority.








Iterative Development

Cadence to collect Feedback
A cadence is something that happens over and over at regular intervals, forming a rhythm or
heartbeat in the project.

Week1 Week2 Week3 Week4 Week5 Week6 Week7 Week8
Backlog Grooming (3 w)
Iteration Planning (2w)
Demo & System Test (Continous)
Retrospective (3 w)
Release (2m)
Identify the bottle neck
Deployment Pipeline (DevOps)
Practices
1. Shared Version Control for all
production artifacts
2. Automated Code Quality Check
3. One step automated build
4. One Step automated
Deployment
5. Automated Unit Test Suit
6. Modular Architecture
7. Automated Integration Suit
8. Automated End to End Test
9. Continuous Integration Server
10. Committing to Trunk/Main
11. Automated Infrastructure
12. Continuous deployment
13. Design to optimize MTRS.
Monitoring of application health
14. Collaboration between Dev and
IT Ops

Our highest priority is to satisfy the
customer through early and
continuous delivery of valuable
software.
1
st
Agile Principle
Inverted Testing Pyramid
Conventional Testing Approach
Agile Testing Approach
Testing is NOT the bottle neck. Architecture will be, if it is not modular and designed for
testability.
1. Modularity makes complexity manageable
2. Modularity enables parallel work
3. Modularity is tolerant of uncertainty

Continuous Innovation

Requirements are assumptions





Build, measure, get real data from customers.
Not by asking what they want but running experiments
on them and gathering what to build next.



Hypothesis- We believe that
[ building this feature ]
[ for these people]
Will achieve [this outcome]
We will know we are successful when we see
[this signal from the market]

Who is our customer?
What pain points do they have related to our product or
services?
How will our product/service solve their pain points?
What features are important?
What is our differentiation from competition?
How are going to make money?
Agile Adoption Incremental and evolutionary Approach

1. Visualize the flow of work(Start with base lining current work flow and wait time)
2. Limit WIP
3. Manage Flow
4. Make process polices explicit
5. Implement feedback loops
6. Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally using scientific method
Agile/Lean in Nutshell











Process designed to optimize the Cycle Time of Single shippable requirement by *learning about wasteful activity and eliminating them.

Waste Categories:
1. Prevent overburdening of the workflow (Muri )
Reducing work in progress by applying WIP limits
by having shorter planning cycles ( deployment , release., retrospective and daily Planning)
2. Control Variability in flow unevenness (Mura)
Reducing batch size by incremental development
Prioritization Policies based on Cost of Delay
Capturing Acceptance criteria for each feature, reduces hidden work and rework
Reduce wait time for getting information by collaboration across the work flow
Reduce Time to detect-find cause-remediate prod. incidents, by designing the System to optimize for MTRF (Mean time between failure)
3. Reduce non-value add activities (Muda)
Incremental feature development
Modular Architecture
Eliminating the failure demand (defects flow) by automating deployment pipeline

* Learning faster NOT working faster.


Requirement Analysis Design Code
Unit
Testing
SIT UAT
Pre prod
Testing
Release
Cycle Time
Automate deployment pipeine
Reducing waste
Agile Origin
We agreed on four things:
1. We agreed at the first level, on the need to respond to change. We agreed that agile reflected our
intent, and permits discussion of heavier-agile methodologies for larger and life critical projects.
2. We agreed at the second level, on four core values, as described in the manifesto.
3. We agreed at the third level (just barely), on twelve more detailed statements consistent with those four values.
4. It was clear we would not agree on the fourth level, detailed project tactics. We did agree that
this was healthy for the industry, and that we should continue to innovate and compete in the
world of ideas, to discover a larger set of agile software practices.
5. With those agreements and the adoption of the term agile, the 17 people created the Agile Alliance.
Questions?
Key Take ways?
DevOps Survey 2014

9100 people
Fast Feedback Premise
The basic premise Faster feedback is shortening the overall business cycle, which beings with the initial
identification of a customer's need and concludes with the receipts of payment for the product shipped or
services delivered.
The overall cycle is composed of many sub cycles ( identification of feature list cycle, Architecture Solutioning
cycle, Development cycle, Test cycle, Release cycle) and repeats itself based on how well the product or service
continues to meet customer's needs. The learnings gained are analyzed with the intent to improve strategy in
the next cycle. The business expands or contracts based on how well it continues to satisfy their need over
time.
Every time the business completes a full cycle, it accumulates raw data about the relationship between itself
and its customers. How fast this data is transformed into learning determines the rate at which the
organization can adapt and change.

Learning is at the heart of a sustained competitive advantage.

Lean/Agile organization are better not because they handle complexity any better consistently strive to
eliminate.

Learning loops also occurs on an individual level. A Company with an average 6 month release
cycle will provide a young engineer with 4 complete development opportunities in 2 years,
whereas a company 2 month release cycle time will provide 12 complete development
opportunities in 2 years.