Crystal Clear applied:the Seven Properties of Running an Agile Project (reprint)

The author Alistair Cockburn, Crystal Clear's 7 success factors, is very well written.

The focus of agile methods, we can refer to, too excited so reproduced.

Original: http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=345009

Property 1. Frequent Delivery

The single most important property of any project, large or small, agile or not, was that of delivering running, tested cod E to real users every few months.

The advantages is, so numerous, it is astonishing, the any team doesn ' t do it:

The sponsors get critical feedback on the rate of progress of the team.

users get a chance to discover whether their original request is for what they actually need and to get their discoverie S fed back into development.

developers keep their focus, breaking deadlocks of indecision.

the team gets to debug their development and deployment processes and gets a morale boost through accomplishments.

All of these advantages come from one single property:frequent delivery. In my interviews, I has not seen a period longer than four months the still offers this safety. The months is safer. Teams deploying to the WEB may deliver weekly.

Delivered running, tested, and usable code at least twice to your user community in the last six months?

Property 2. Reflective improvement

The discovery, took me completely by surprise is, project can reverse its fortunes from catastrophic failure to Success if the team would get together, list what both was and isn ' t working, discuss what might work better, and make thos E changes in the next iteration. In the other words, reflect and improve. The team does not has to spend a great deal of time doing this work-an hour every few weeks or month would do. Just The fact of taking time out of the helter-skelter of daily development to think about what could work better is Alrea Dy effective.

Did your get together at least once within the last three months for a half hour, hour, or half day to compare notes, Refle CT, discuss your group ' s working habits, and discover what's speeds you up, what slows are down, and what are might be able To improve?

Property 3. Osmotic communication

Osmotic communication means that information flows to the background hearing of the team, so that they pick u P relevant information as though by osmosis. This was normally accomplished by seating them in the same. Then if one person asks a question, others in the "can either tune in or tune out, contributing to the discussion O R continuing with their work.

Several people has related their experience of it much as this person did:

We had four people doing pair programming. The boss walked in and asked my partner a question. I started answering it, but gave the wrong name of a module. Nancy, programming with Neil, corrected me, without Neil ever noticing the she had spoken or that a question had been ask Ed.

Property 4. Personal Safety

Personal safety was being able to speak when something was bothering you, without fear of reprisal. It may involve telling the manager of the schedule is unrealistic, a colleague that she design needs improvement, or Eve N letting a colleague know that she needs to take a shower more often. Personal safety is important, because with it's the team can discover and repair its weaknesses. Without it, people won ' t speak up, and the weaknesses would continue to damage the team.

Personal Safety is an early step toward trust. Trust, which involves giving someone else power over oneself, with accompanying risk of personal damage, was the extent to Which one is comfortable with handing, the power. Some people trust others by default, and wait for be hurt before withdrawing the trust. Others is disinclined to trust Others, and wait until they see evidence this they won ' t be hurt before they give the Trus T. Presence of trust is positively correlated with team performance (Costa 2002).

Property 5. Focus

Focus is first knowing, and then has time and peace of mind to work on it. Knowing what's on comes from communication about goal direction and priorities, typically from the executive sponsor . Time and peace of mind come from an environment where people is not taken away from their task to work in other, Incompat Ible things.

Do all the people know, what their top and priority items? is they guaranteed at least-a row and both uninterrupted hours each day to work on them?

Property 6. Easy Access to Expert Users

Continued access to expert user (s) provides the team with

a place to deploy and test the frequent deliveries

Rapid feedback on the quality of their finished product

rapid feedback on their design decisions

Up-to-date requirements

Researchers Keil and Carmel published results showing how critical it was to has direct links to expert users (Keil 1995).

Surveying managers who had worked both with and without easy access to real users, they write

... in one of the paired cases, the more successful project involved a greater number of links than the less successfu L Project .... This difference is found to is statistically significant in a paired t-test (P < 0.01).

Their-led them to a specific recommendation: "Reduce Reliance on Indirect Links." In the other words, get real access to real users.

Does it take less than three days, on the average, from the time you come up with a question about system usage to when an Expert user answers the question? Can you get the answer in a few hours?

All very nice, but how do many users, and how much time?

Even one hour a week of access to a real and expert user is immensely valuable. The more hours each week this an expert user was available to a team and the more advantage they can take of that proximity. The first hour, however, is the most crucial.

Property 7. Technical environment with automated Tests, Configuration Management, and frequent integration

The elements I highlight in this property was such well-established core elements that it's embarrassing to has to Menti On them @ all. Let us consider them one at a time and all together.

automated testing. Teams do deliver successfully using manual tests, so the can ' t be considered a critical success factor.

However, every programmer I ' ve interviewed who once moved to automated tests swore never to work without them again. I find this astonishing.

Their reason have to does with improved quality of life. During the week, they revise sections of code knowing they can quickly check that they hadn ' t inadvertently broken Somethi Ng along the. When they get code working on Friday, they go home knowing that they would be able on Monday to detect whether anyone had B Roken it over the Weekend-they simply rerun the tests on Monday morning. The tests give them freedom of movement during the day and peace of mind at night.

Configuration Management. The configuration management system allows people to check in their work asynchronously, back changes off, wrap up a parti Cular configuration for release, and roll back to the configuration later on when trouble arises. It lets the developers develop their code both separately and together. It is steadily cited by teams as their most critical noncompiler tool.

frequent integration. Many teams integrate the system multiple times a day. If they can ' t manage that, they does it daily, or, in the worst case, every other day. The more frequently they integrate, the more quickly they detect mistakes, the fewer additional errors this pile up, the F Resher their thoughts, and the smaller the region of code, have to is searched for the miscommunication.

Evidence:collaboration Across organizational boundaries

There is a side-effect from attending to personal safety, amicability within the team, and easy access to expert users:it becomes natural to include and stakeholders into the project, as well.

Reflection on the Properties

I Don ' t believe that no prescribed procedures exists that can assure this projects land in the safety zone every time.

Nor, with the exception of incremental development, does I show up on a project with any particular set of rules in hand, Ev En though I have my favorites. This is what Crystal Clear is built around critical properties instead of specification of procedures.

A Crystal Team works to set the seven properties into place, using whatever group conventions, techniques, and standards F It their situation. The conventions may vary by project and by month. New techniques get invented with each new technology (and usually go out of style again a few years later). These seven properties, on the other hand, has been applied on good projects for decades.

My intention with Crystal are to not invade the natural workings of individuals on the project where possible, and to allow The most possible variation across different teams when still getting those diverse projects into the safety zone. To allow variation, I must remove constraints. Removing constraints means finding broader mechanisms that provide a safety net. The ones I choose to rely on is these:

people is by nature good at looking around and communicating.

They take initiative if provided with information.

They do better in a environment that's safe with respect to personal and emotional safety and particularly freedom from Personal attacks.

they do their best work if they can satisfy their need for contribution, accomplishment, and pride-in-work.

The Crystal Clear safety net is built on those things.

Personal Safety gives people the Personal courage to share whatever they discover.

osmotic communication gives them the greatest chance to discover important information from each other and does s O with very low communication cost. Reflective Improvement gives them a channel to apply feedback to their working process.

Easy access to expert users gives them the opportunity to quickly discover relevant information from the user (s).

Frequent delivery creates feedback to the system ' s requirements and the development process.

the technical development environment including automated tests, configuration management, and frequent integration allows people to safely make changes to the system, synchronize the multiple minds that is in motion at the same time , and get feedback on the system ' s intermediate stages quickly. Focus allows the team to spend their energy well on the most important things.

Crystal Clear applied:the Seven Properties of Running an Agile Project (reprint)