Agile &: Adapt to Context

Saturday, February 15, 2020

(Product) Expand: delivery life-cycle options

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Expand

"Unanticipated bottlenecks appear"
"Eliminate the next bottleneck just before it derails you" - Kent Beck

Agile option

The main incertitudes and risks are already addressed, but we still have unexpected problems & bottlenecks. One good choice to start could be Agile (Scrum-based or Scrum-XP style) life-cycle. We still have important requirement & solution risks so:

Inception and Transition are not very small
Solution spikes and Proven Architecture Milestone [DA-PAE] are highly recommended

How can we advance to a more streamlined process & life-cycle?

Lean principles could help us to adopt lean. One of these principles uses work standardization to reveal impediments and improve. We will "standardize" the work & the understanding at the iteration/sprint level using some well-known iteration level agile practices. The team members:

will have the same view of the work
will collaboratively solve the problems & improve

The impediments will be observed by more eyes and (better) solved by more (collaborative) people. If the team members will work in isolation from one of the others (poor collaboration) ~ each one will have a different process & different problems to solve. The improvement will be slow or non-existent.

Important: one of the main purposes of such iterative, Scrum-like development is not to repeat this process forever but to reveal & remove impediments and improve.

Lean option

The same idea for revealing and removing impediments could be used with the Lean lifecycle. We should visualize the work (~ Kanban), get a common understanding of the workflow and use it as a base for improvement. Collaborative work and collaborative improvement are applied also in the lean case. We could consider a lean alternative in these cases:

often delivery, smaller releases (e.g. less than one week), maintenance
difficult look ahead, incertitude: we cannot prepare a buffer or work items for one or more iterations

Note: if the pre-conditions are met, Lean could be the dominant approach in Expand

Other options

The first releases could be hybrids between Exploratory Lean Startup and Agile or Lean

we still have to deal with some high incertitude aspects

Continuous Delivery Agile, Continuous Delivery Lean - if we already have optimized the work, we need often delivery and we have a stable team
Exploratory Lean Startup - for significant business/technology product changes (see Explore)

Next sections

Life-cycles options for Extract

References

Explore, Expand, Extract paper diagram ordered/received from Kent Beck

[B-Beck] – Product development triathlon

[DA-LC] - Full delivery lifecycles.

https://disciplinedagiledelivery.com/lifecycle/

[DA-PAE] Disciplined Agile - Prove architecture early

https://disciplinedagiledelivery.com/prove-architecture-early/

(Product) Explore: delivery lifecycles options

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Delivery lifecycles versus product lifecycle

Explore

"the risky search for a viable return on a viable investment"- Kent Beck

What we have to do in Explore is to solve the incertitude about WHAT and HOW:

Do we know what & how to build?
What we build is useful to potential customers and is required by the market?

We will have to experiment and validate our experiments from technical and business points of view. Here an example that suits the development of a complex product:

Use the Exploratory Lean Startup life-cycle to start product development
This first stage could end - in the happy case - with an MVP - Minimum Viable Product
Solution spikes (prototyping, experiment) practice is extensively used