Agile &: Process Alphabet: Continuous Improvement

Draft Version

See also Process Alphabet

Intro

Development context is constantly changing.
Technology is constantly changing.
Competition is constantly improving.

Continuously improving and adapting is a survival concern.

A base for continuous improvement:

collaborative work
retrospectives
life-cycle awareness.

Retrospectives are fundamental for improvement. Collaborative work is fundamental for both improvement & retrospectives.

What should be expected from a method/process approach

Continuous improvement goal must be explicit & fundamental
Improvement base should be up and running
Support for improving WoW with guidance for

Eliminating Waste

Core Agile Practices
Adapt to Context: selecting life-cycles, practices, shaping the rolling wave

Explicit goals for Evolving WoW (short, medium and long-term)

We need the base for improvement and then opportunistically change the WoW: learn new practices, tailor the process by shaping our information rolling wave.

Continuous improvement in Scrum

Continuous improvement goal
It is explicit, in the definition, but with too few support in the content

Continuous improvement base: Collaborative work
Scrum help teams to start working collaboratively but does not provide real good engineering practices or guidance. Iteration level meetings are a start for teams that do not collaborate but are too simplistic and too few for professional work.

Continuous improvement base: Retrospective
Scrum has retrospectives but it will be better if the impediments will be also a goal of the team and not only for Scrum Master.

Guidance for improving WoW
There very few and too generic, as selecting one problem to solve from the last retrospective. Mainly are just a few lines of text.

Continuous improvement in XP

Continuous improvement goal
It is explicit, but not “in the title”.

Continuous improvement base: Collaborative work
XP is based on collaboration. Collaboration with the customer it is supported by several practices, while development is based on pair programming. Anyway, there is no guidance for pair programming alternatives.

Continuous improvement base: Retrospective XP retrospectives are a kind o Cinderella. They use retrospectives, but they often forgot to mention it in method descriptions

Guidance for improving WoW
XP is good for learning about Core Agile Practices (see Process Alphabet dedicated section) and about principles related to improvement, but there are no options for life-cycle and for core-practices alternatives (excepting few “corollary practices”). Here are some of their principles:

Definition: “It means continuous awareness, responsiveness to feedback, and openness to improvement”
Barely good enough: “The cycle is to do the best you can today, striving for the awareness and understanding necessary to do better tomorrow. It doesn't mean waiting for perfection in order to begin.”
Optimize the whole: “Micro-optimization is never enough. To improve our results, we must look at the whole situation before deciding what to change”

XP has no adapt to process guidance and no concrete goals for evolving WoW (excepting the Core Agile Practices).

Continuous improvement in DA

Continuous improvement goal
It is explicit, and there is associated guidance.

Continuous improvement base: Collaborative work
DA offers more non-solo work practices (beyond pair-programming) and guidance.

Continuous improvement base: Retrospective
It is explicit, and the responsibility is associated in the right way with the whole team.

Guidance for improving WoW
This is the most of DA content, guidance for choosing and improving the WoW process goals decisions points, and guidance for Core Agile Practices.

How to … my custom process

Continuous improvement goal
Make this goal explicit.

Scrum users: Inspect & Adapt is a good thing but is too vague and too few to be used only on Iteration Reviews and Daily Meetings. Use Disciplined Agile guidance with concrete goals and options. Here the explicit goals: Identify improvements, Share improvements, Support teams, Organize Communities of Practice (CoPs), Organize Centers of Excellence (CoEs), Govern improvement.

XP users: XP guidance about Core Agile Practices is great, but in DA you can find also some missing core practices such as Architecture Envisioning, Look Ahead Modeling and Planning, Model Storming. Also, as in the case of Scrum users, the DA concrete improvement goals will help.

Continuous improvement base: Collaborative work
You will need good coverage for all fundamental collaborative practices: intra-team, inter-teams, and collaboration with stakeholders.

Scrum users: you need to complement the Iteration and Daily Meetings with Pair Programming and the DA practices for collaborative Looking Ahead and Just-In-Time clarifications. For stakeholders collaboration, you will need to complement Product Owner with Active Stakeholder Participation and eventually with On-Site-Customer. Inter-teams knowledge & experience sharing could be done with DA Communities of Practice (CoPs) and Centers of Excellence (CoEs).

XP users: as plus versus Scrum, XP has Pair Programing and has additional practices for the collaboration with stakeholders. Anyway, XP does not address well the Retrospectives. For retrospectives and inter-teams collaboration, I have the same recommendation from DA guidance as in the case of Scrum.

Continuous improvement base: Retrospective
It must be explicitly defined as an improvement meeting with a Whole Team approach.

Scrum users - The remove impediments responsibility should be extended from the Scrum Master to the whole team. Also should be considered DA idea to invite the Product Owner in the Retrospective and also consider DA associated guidance.

XP users should consider the DA guidance about this subject that is neglected in XP.

Guidance for improving WoW – What you need to improve your WoW?

Core Agile Practices
See Process Alphabet: Core Agile Practices

Use XP and DA guidance

Adapt to Context guidance
See Process Alphabet: Adapt to Context

Use DA guidance

Explicit goals for evolving the WoW

Scrum users: again, Inspect & Adapt for Iteration and Daily meeting is useful but is too few. Should be used the DA concrete goals for Evolving the WoW.

Here are some of the DA guidance subject of interest (you will recognize some of the process alphabet topics):

How will we collaborate within the team?
What lifecycle will we follow?
How do we explore an existing process?
What processes/practices will we initially adopt?
How will we identify potential improvements?
How can we reuse existing practices/strategies?
How will we implement potential improvements within the team?
How will we capture our WoW?
How will we share effective practices with others within our organization?
What digital/software tools will we adopt?

References

[SG2017] – Scrum Guide - https://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum-Guide-US.pdf
[XPE1] – Extreme Programming Explained First Edition, By Kent Beck, Addison-Wesley, 1999
[XPE2] – Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, Second Edition, By Kent Beck, Cynthia Andres, Addison-Wesley, 2004