Agile samurai pdf download

How to communicate as a team and make everyone a team player. How to build a foundation for any project. How to deliver on time, every time. Increase transparency while decreasing risks. How to keep your customers satisfied. And lots more! What are waiting for? Don't wait another minute to impress your boss, manage your team and keep your customers happy.

Click the BUY button now! Enterprise Agility is practical framework for enhancing Agility and equipping your company with the tools to survive. Key Features Prepare your company to navigate the rapidly-moving business world Enhance Agility in every component of your organization Build a framework that meets the unique requirements of your enterprise Book Description The biggest challenge enterprises face today is dealing with fast-paced change in all spheres of business.

Enterprise Agility shows how an enterprise can address this challenge head on and thrive in the dynamic environment. Avoiding the mechanistic construction of existing enterprises that focus on predictability and certainty, Enterprise Agility delivers practical advice for responding and adapting to the scale and accelerating pace of disruptive change in the business environment. Agility is a fundamental shift in thinking about how enterprises work to effectively deal with disruptive changes in the business environment.

The core belief underlying agility is that enterprises are open and living systems. These living systems, also known as complex adaptive systems CAS , are ideally suited to deal with change very effectively. Agility is to enterprises what health is to humans. There are some foundational principles that can be broadly applied, but the definition of healthy is very specific to each individual.

Enterprise Agility takes a similar approach with regard to agility: it suggests foundational practices to improve the overall health of the body—culture, mindset, and leadership—and the health of its various organs: people, process, governance, structure, technology, and customers. The book also suggests a practical framework to create a plan to enhance agility. What you will learn Drive agility-oriented change across the enterprise Understand why agility matters more than ever to modern enterprises Adopt and influence an Agile mindset in your teams and in your organization Understand the concept of a CAS and how to model enterprise and leadership behaviors on CAS characteristics to enhance enterprise agility Understand and convey the differences between Agile and true enterprise agility Create an enterprise-specific action plan to enhance agility Become a champion for enterprise agility Recognize the advantages and challenges of distributed teams, and how Agile ways of working can remedy the rough spots Enable and motivate your IT partners to adopt Agile ways of working Who this book is for Enterprise Agility is a tool for anyone with the motivation to influence outcomes in an enterprise, who aspires to improve Agility.

If you want to lead your team or organization to succeed but you don't know how to do it, then keep reading Forget about the conventional way of doing things.

Today, consumers change their mind in a flip. Therefore, you need to be ready to adjust to such changes rapidly. Keep in mind that your ability to change will contribute a lot to the success of your product. The agile method of project management is a new way of handling projects by promoting rapid change in the project development process. The agile method was introduced after software developers found it difficult to deliver their products in time when using the traditional approach.

Using this technique, they delivered applications late, and sometimes, their projects were canceled. This happened because of the delays which affected the delivery of products in time.

Following the frustrations faced by software developers, they had to come up with a method which focused more on the product and not the process. They aimed to make sure that a product was in front of the consumers as quickly as possible.

The fast delivery of software products was the only way that developers could understand what the customers wanted and make necessary changes.

This is what led to Agile Project Management. Sure, the method was introduced to benefit software developers, but it can equally be utilized in any organization. The idea of managing projects occurs in every institution. Therefore, using the agile method can be an effective way to guarantee that a project succeeds.

Inside this guide, we have discussed the 12 principles which govern the way a project should be handled. The highest priority of an agile project is to meet customer requirements through rapid and continuous delivery. Also, the change should be acknowledged at all stages of the development process. The agile method also promotes the idea that the project is built around a group of motivated individuals. Therefore, no one needs to be pushed around to meet their daily targets.

Even if you come from the traditional management style and it's your first approach with agile, this book will really explain you all the details of this smart approach. Even if your team has never had an approach with agile method, this book will explain you how to install the right mindset in your team members. So, what are you waiting for? Tired of out-of-touch Scrum training that doesn't work? Discover practical agile delivery techniques to make your software shine.

Has your excitement over Scrum led to nothing but disappointment? Have months of agile training still left your company far short of optimal efficiency? Do you feel like your leaders and developers are speaking a completely different language?

After running successful agile teams on a daily basis, he's ready to share his insights and techniques to help your company reap the benefits of his experience. The Epic Guide to Agile: More Business Value on a Predictable Schedule with Scrum is a comprehensive guide to software-based team dynamics that both leaders and developers can understand. Unlike most agile training that doesn't work in practice, Todaro's step-by-step playbook rises above theory to save you time and money.

Perfect for any sized business or level of experience, you'll get to the crux of each Scrum issue to have your team running sprints more efficiently than ever. In The Epic Guide to Agile, you'll discover: Personal examples and anecdotes to tackle problems at their source Effective ways to introduce agile and Scrum into your organization with the right pilot team The exact system to achieve productive sprint planning sessions The typical issues that can doom your product and how to conquer them The best technical environment setups to support your software project groups and much, much, more!

If you like real-world examples, no-nonsense teaching, and clear communication, then you'll love Dave Todaro's extraordinary and practical guidebook. Skip to content. Doing Agile Right. They will also have in mind the big testing picture and never lose site of load testing, scalability, and anything else the team could be doing to produce high-quality software. We talk more about the mechanics of agile testing in Section 9. That is why a good PM will go to the ends of the earth to remove anything standing in the way of their team and success.

Part of this means continuously planning, replanning, and adjusting course when necessary Chapter 8, Agile Planning: Dealing with Reality, on page It also means setting expectations upward and outward to the greater project community: getting status reports to stakeholders, forging rela- tionships within the company, and shielding the team from outside forces when necessary.

In fact, the hallmark of a good agile PM is the ability to disappear for a week and no one be the wiser. Someone passionate about usability would be deeply interested in understanding what the customer needs and then collaborating with the rest of the team to figure out how best to meet them. Fortunately, many of the practices used by usability experts dovetail nicely with the spirit of agile software delivery.

Focusing on value, rapid feedback, and building the best product you can for your customer is something both the UX and agile communities have in common. They will build and design features as the code gets written instead of trying to design everything up front and getting miles ahead of everyone else. If you have the luxury of getting someone steeped in usability on your project, consider yourself lucky.

They can bring a lot of useful experi- ence and knowledge to the project and really help out in the area of analysis and user experience design. They are all part of the development team and treated just like anyone else on the project. Scrum has a role called scrum master, which is kind of like an agile coach and rock-star project manager all rolled up in one.

Agile coaches can be very helpful in getting new teams going. For a good book on coaching, check out Agile Coaching [SD09]. Let your testers know that developers are going to be expected to write a lot of auto- mated tests. They do—just by someone else wearing that hat on the team. Look for Generalists Generalists do well on agile projects because agile requires people to follow through and own opportunities from end to end.

For program- mers, that means coders who can walk the entire stack front end to back. For analysts and testers, that means being comfortable doing analysis and testing. Generalists are also comfortable wearing many hats. They might be coding one day, doing analysis the next, and testing after that. The plan is going to change, and you are going to have to adapt and change with it. Team Players Who Can Check Their Egos at the Door It sounds like a cliche, but agile works best with folks who can act as an ensemble and check their egos at the door.

Not everyone likes the role blurring agile brings. If there are no predefined roles on agile project, how does anything ever get done? So, testing is something the team will do. How much testing and in what capacity is up to the team to decide. What if everyone just wants to sit around and write code? I will think about this more. You now see how roles blur on agile projects, why we would ideally like our teams to be co-located, and how, when finding people for your team, you are going to want generalists and people who are cool with dealing with ambiguity.

You are now ready for what is perhaps one of the most important steps in kick-starting your agile project and an area that most agile methods are completely silent on —agile project inception. Turn the page, to Part II of the book, and find out how to set your project up for success from the start and make sure you have the right people. We are all in agreement then. The assumption of consensus where none exists is what kills most projects.

And the only way to get this is to ask the tough questions. One of the many things Keith taught me was the importance of asking the tough questions at the start of any new engagement or sale. Start Your project End Too late!

Ask tough questions here You see, in the beginning of any new engagement or project, you have a lot of leeway in the questions you can ask with little to lose. You want to take the same approach when kicking off your agile project. You want to ask all the scary questions up front. And one tool for help- ing you do that is the inception deck. We used it often at ThoughtWorks to cover an area of project initiation that agile methods like Extreme Programming XP and Scrum were silent on—project chartering.

It was in this spirit that Robin Gib- bons created the original inception deck: a fast, lightweight way to dis- till a project to its very core and communicate that shared understand- ing to the greater team and community. By putting the team through a series of exercises and capturing the output on a slide deck usually PowerPoint , we can collectively get a Report erratum this copy is P1. The right people for the inception deck are anyone directly involved in the project.

This includes customers, stakeholders, team members, developers, testers, analysts—anyone who can materially contribute to the effective execution of the project.

A typical inception deck can take anywhere from a couple days to about two weeks to build. Upon completion, teams like to put it up on the wall in their work areas to let it serve as a reminder about what they are working on and why. And of course, the questions and exercises presented here are just the beginning. You are going to think of other questions, exercises, and things you are going to want to clarify before you start. Ask why we are here. Create an elevator pitch.

Design a product box. Create a NOT list. Meet your neighbors. Show the solution. Ask what keeps us up at night. But talking about them, and what we can do to avoid them, can make them less scary.

Size it up. How much will it cost? And what kind of team are we going to need to pull this off? Teams face thousands of decisions and trade-offs every day. By the end of this chapter, you and your team will have a clear under- standing of what the goal of the project is, will know why you are build- ing it, and will be able to communicate clearly and quickly to others.

Why are we here? To safely track and monitor work activities on the construction site Before any project team can be really successful, they need to under- stand the why behind what they are building.

To get a feel for how North Amer- icans lived, worked, and played with their vehicles, he and his team drove a Toyota Sienna through every U. For that reason, you will find a center tray and fourteen cup holders standard in every Toyota Sienna. If you drive any place with a strong cross wind, the new Sienna is much more stable and easier to handle.

While the chief engineer might have been able to read about these issues in a marketing report, he would not have gained the new level of appreciation and understanding he now has by going and seeing these things for himself. Going and seeing is about getting your team off their butts and out into the field where the action is. For example, if you are building a permit system for a construction company out at the mine site, go to the construction site. Hang with the safety officers.

See the trailers. Observe the cramped conditions, flaky Internet connections, and confined spaces your customers work in. Spend a day at the site, and work with the people who are going to be using your system day in and day out. Get engaged, ask questions, and become your customer. It can be something really simple and focused for your project.

Unlike [the current paper-based system] our product [is web based and can be accessed any time from anywhere]. Some thought it was to reduce the number of pages on the invoice to save paper.

Others thought it was to simplify the invoice and thus reduce call center volume. Still others thought it was an opportunity to run targeted marketing campaigns in an attempt to up-sell customers on products and services. All were good answers, and any of them would have warranted a project in their own right. But it was only through much dis- cussion, debate, and understanding that the true goal of the project emerged—which was to simply the invoice and reduce call center volume.

The venture capitalist VC you have been trying to get in front of for the last three months just walked into the elevator, and you have thirty seconds to pitch the idea for your new fledgling start-up. Success means fuel for your venture. Failure means more Kraft dinner. They are also great for concisely defining new software projects.

A good elevator pitch will do a number of things for your project. It brings clarity. It forces teams to think about the customer. It gets to the point. Like a laser, the elevator pitch cuts through a lot of cruft and gets to the heart of what the project is about. This clarity helps set priorities and greatly increases the signal-to-noise ratio of what really matters. The Elevator Pitch Template For [target customer] who [statement of need or opportunity] the [product name] is a [product category] that [key benefit, compelling reason to buy].

Unlike [primary competitive alternative] our product [statement of primary differentiation]. Names are important because they communicate intent. Writing a good elevator can be hard work—but so worth it. This is the big one. It is where we are really justifying the expenditure of money on our project. There are a couple of ways you can do the elevator pitch with your team.

You can print the template and have everyone take a stab at filling it out themselves before bringing everyone together. Or, if you want to save a few trees, you can just beam the template up onto the screen and tackle filling it out as a group, going through each element of the template one section at a time. Process permits safer! Where you need it. When you need it. Software is sometimes a necessary evil for companies.

Rather than take on all the risk and uncertainty that comes with large projects, many would rather walk into their local Wal-Mart, whip out the credit card, and simply buy whatever it is they need.

While shrink-wrapped million-dollar software packages on supermar- ket shelves might still be a long way off, it does raise an interesting question. If we could buy our software off the supermarket shelf, what would the product box look like? And more importantly, would we buy it? Both are good things for teams to be aware of while delivering.

How Does It Work? You absolutely can. And I am going to show you how in three easy steps. For example, say we were trying to convince a family on the merits of purchasing a mini-van. We could show them a list of all the features. Or we could show them the benefits of how the mini-van would make their lives better. Features Benefits horsepower engine Pass easy on the highway Cruise control Save money Anti-lock brakes Brake safely with loved ones Be sure to convert any features into benefits!

See the difference? So, step 1 in creating your product box is to sit down with your team and customer and brainstorm all the reasons why people would want to use your product.

Then pick your top three. Step 2: Create a Slogan The key to any good slogan is to say as much as possible in very few words. Did you feel the emotion that came from these slogans? Now relax. Just get together with your team, time-box your slo- gan brainstorming to ten or fifteen minutes, and have some fun exercis- ing that creative part of your brain.

Remember, no slogan is too cheesy. You are almost there. With your three compelling reasons to buy and your irresistible catchy slogan, you are now ready to bring it together.

Product Name here Cool picture Best slogan here Benefit 1 Benefit 2 Benefit 3 For this exercise, imagine your customer walked into your local soft- ware store and saw your product box sitting there on the shelf. And when they picked it up, it looked so compelling that they instantly bought ten copies for themselves and their friends.

Now quick, draw that box! Just use flip chart paper, colored markers, papers, stickies, and whatever you can get your hands on. Shout out your slogan. Show your customers the benefits. Spend fifteen minutes designing the best product box you can. By creating a NOT list, you will clearly state what is in and out of scope for your project.

Doing this will not only set clear expectations with your customer, but will also ensure that you and your team are focusing on the really important stuff while ignoring everything else. This is a great section because it reflects the reality about most soft- ware projects. They could be many things to many people—which is exactly what we want to avoid.

The beauty of this visual is how much it communicates at a glance. By listing the big ticket items in scope on the left, out of scope on the right, and then unresolved on the bottom, everyone can get a clear picture at a glance of where the boundaries of our project lie. Good neighbors can be your best friends. They are there when you lock yourself out of the house.

They are there when you need that power tool. And it feels pretty darn good when you help them set up that wireless home network. You could have heard a pin drop in the room. It was going to replace it entirely. It was only because we threw up the NOT list that we avoided a major expectation reset at some later point in the project. Believe it or not, you have neighbors on your projects too. Only instead of keeping a spare key and lending you power tools, they manage data- bases, do security audits, and keep your networks running.

By meeting your neighbors, you can build relationships up front that will give big dividends down the road. One of my biggest was as a team lead at Thought- Works while we were doing some work at Microsoft. The team was doing agile. We were regularly delivering working software, and life was good.

Then near the end of the project something strange started to happen. Groups and people I had never seen or met suddenly started coming out of nowhere and making ridiculous demands of me and the team. Who were these people? Where did they come from? And why were they so intent on messing up our schedule? Overnight, our nice little project community went from a small team of six to something much bigger and vast. With your team, get together and brainstorm everyone you think you are going to need to interact with before your project can go live.

Donuts because as you are telling your neighbor how much you appreciate having them around, their bodies will be rejoicing with the taste of pure sugar, and so they will associate you with sweetness. But the ultimate tool for great relationships with your neighbors is sincerity. To truly make your neighbors feel appreciated and valued, you gotta mean it. They will see through insincere flattery in an instant.

But genuine appreciation and sincere thanks will go miles to winning them over. And you and your project will pros- per more for it. Your project manager, or whomever on the team is going to take lead on building Report erratum this copy is P1. What if they are unavailable or are just too busy to answer these types of questions about the project? For you have just discovered your first major project risk. Without an engaged customer, your project is in trouble before it even begins.

And that without it, you are already stalled whether you like it or not. MASTER: You need to clearly, and forcefully, explain to your customers what it is going to take to make this project a success.

Their involvement, commitment, and engagement are required. This may not be the time for this project. Perhaps they really are busy and simply have too much on their plate. If this is the case, tell them that you will be here for them when they are ready. Until then, you have other customers to serve. Can you feel it? Can you see what is happening here? With each passing inception deck exercise, the spirit and scope of the project are becoming more clear.

Enough context already! When will we get down to business and start talking about how we are going to build this thing? And the answer is right now. So, turn the page, and get ready to start making it real. In these sections of the inception deck, we are going to start getting more concrete with our solution and start putting some stakes in the ground.

Even if you suspect everyone is on board with your solution, put it up there for all to see anyway. Worst case, you will reconfirm what everyone knows. Best case, you save yourself a lot of pain by not betting the farm on something that turns out not to be true. You just get together with the technical folks on your team and talk about how you are going to build this thing.

You draw architectural diagrams, play what-if scenarios, and generally try to get a feel for how big and how complex this thing is. If there are open source or proprietary frameworks or libraries you would like to use, you can socialize those because some companies limit which open source tools they allow. A team strong in databases will naturally want to do most of the heavy lifting in SQL, while a team strong in object-oriented design OO will want to put all the complexity in there.

Draw enough pictures to show everyone how you are going to build the system, set expectations around the risky areas, and make sure everyone is on board with the technical solution.

Estimates can be overly optimistic. Customers can and do continuously change their minds. There always seem to be more things to do than time and money allow. And these are the project risks we know about! Why Talking About Risk Is Good Talking about project risk is one of those things that most people would rather skip when starting projects.

No one wants to look like Chicken Little, running around saying the sky is falling. But talking about risk is a great way of letting people know what you need for the success of your project. Take co-location, for example. To someone in facilities, who has never worked on a software project before, not having everyone sitting to- gether may not be such a big deal. As the founder of the Bloomberg financial company and the mayor of New York, he has had to navigate some pretty shark- infested waters.

In Bloomberg by Bloomberg [Blo01], Michael explains his favorite technique for handling risk: 1. Write everything down that could possibly go wrong.

Think really hard about how to stop those things from happening. Then tear it up. Get used to it. For the rest, just take it as it comes. This is your chance to take a stand and ask for what you need. The time to talk about risk is now—at the beginning. If you have any issues or have seen any showstoppers, now is the time to air them. If you heard some crazy talk over the course of doing the inception deck, this is your chance to call it out.

There is something good about sharing and discussing your fears with others. Use it. Identify Those Risks Worth Sweating Get together with your team including your customer and brainstorm all the possible risks you could see happening on your project.

Losing our lead programmer in a hot job market, however, could hap- pen. So, we will want to take steps to ensure that knowledge is being shared and no one becomes too specialized in one area.

But for now, pretend the team has already done the estimates for the project, and here we are just presenting the results. Think Small You may not have heard of him, but Randy Mott is kind of a rock star in the Fortune world. He did the same thing at Dell, allowing Dell to quickly spot rising inventory and offer discounts on overstocked items.

Randy obviously did a lot of things right to help companies like Wal- Mart, Dell, and HP get to where they are. But one of his self-proclaimed secrets was the insistence that no development cycle take longer than six months Figure 5. There is always one more thing to add or one more feature to be included. And before long costs escalate, estimates are thrown out the window, and the project collapses under the girth of its own ever-expanding weight.

Anything longer he finds too risky. He just realized he had been burned enough times to know that if he wanted to deliver something really big, he needed to break it down into smaller, more manageable pieces.

Randy and agile sing from the same song sheet when it comes to sizing up IT projects: the smaller, the better—preferably six months or less. Set Some Expectations About Size Sizing it up basically involves looking at your estimates and coming up with a rough plan for your stakeholders.

You have to factor in user acceptance testing UAT , training, and anything else you need to do before going live.

But all you are really doing is giving them a best guess of how big you think this thing is and whether it can be done in a reasonable period of time. You have a couple of options when it comes to presenting your plan. You can put a stake in the ground and say you are going to deliver by date. Or you can commit to delivering a core set of features and be more flexible on the date. Note: Under no conditions can you let your customer think the plans you are presenting here are hard commitments.

They are not. They are simply unvalidated high-level guesses that can be vetted only by building something, measuring how long that takes, and feeding that information back into the plan. Budgets and dates tend to be fixed. Scope regularly seems to increase with reckless abandon. And quality is always 1. Yet these forces are often in conflict. Giving in to one means taking something away from the others.

If left unbalanced for too long, the force of one can overwhelm a project until it finally breaks and snaps. Something has to give. The question is what? Agile has a way of taming these wild and dangerous forces, and I am going to leave you in the capable hands of Master Sensei to show you how. Together, you will study which forces are in play on our projects, the trade-offs they force us to make, and how you can use their power for the good of your project.

Tweet this. The requirements you do gather will change. There is always more to do than time and money will allow. Those are the facts of life. But you can deal with those facts and more by becoming a fierce software-delivery professional, capable of dispatching the most dire of software projects and the toughest delivery schedules with ease and grace.

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Explore a preview version of The Agile Samurai right now. Faced with a software project of epic proportions? Tired of over-committing and under-delivering? Enter the dojo of the agile samurai, where agile expert Jonathan Rasmusson shows you how to kick-start, execute, and deliver your agile projects. Combining cutting-edge tools with classic agile practices, The Agile Samurai gives you everything you need to deliver something of value every week and make rolling your software into production a non-event.