MN Practical Agility July Meeting
At the MN Practical Agility user group earlier this month, I had the chance to present a very short Lightning Talk on Distributed Agile, and to participate a bit in the fishbowl discussions. It was a great opportunity for me to stretch by speaking in public. I thought I did okay, though I certainly have room for improvement in developing my public speaking abilities (thankfully, TechMasters is helping me with this).
I and a couple of other participants had the opportunity to learn more from Mary Poppendieck after the event. She had some wonderful insight into applying Agile and Lean to software development. It was a great opportunity to learn more about using Agile principles from an expert in a small group setting, and I had a few important takeaways I wanted to share.
Building the right thing
The big takeaway I had from this conversation is to ask the right questions when developing software. Asking if you are building the right thing should be the first questions asked. This approach will let you know rather clearly if your software development effort is meeting its goals.
One of the most important aspects of Agile and Lean is to align the amount of effort applied in developing software with the business value that is derived from that effort. Asking whether you are building the right thing will lead to further questions; Do customers like the solution (and why)? What are the reasons they are using the product, and are those needs met in the current product? etc.
Agile principles align well with finding the answers to these questions, but the questions must be asked often. It was reinforced in me that it is healthy to continue having these conversations with customers all through the process. As Agile is about uncovering impediments to effectively shipping software, this continued dialog is healthy if framed in the right context.
Building the thing right
Asking whether things are being build right gets into many facets of the application of software processes within the organization. What methodology or processes are being used? Are they effective at achieving their intended goal? What could be changed to make things more efficient?
Ultimately, the main metric of project success is shipping effective software. While this concept is simple, the many details of ensuring effective software is delivered are of course infinitely complex and difficult to do well. To me, this explains the mixed bag state of our industry today, and reinforces in me why we need to follow more adaptive principles to be more effective while everyone can enjoy more the creative process of software development.
The gathering was a great opportunity to learn more from so many local experts. I am looking forward to future meetings of this group.
