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Workshare Interest in Agile• We realised that lack of a defined process leads to:

• Unpredictability• Repeated errors• Wasted effort

• We were disappointed by: • Slipping schedules• Growing budgets• Poor quality

• We realised we needed to change but investigation of traditional methods showed us that these were not what we wanted.

• We value quality and innovation and we believe that agile methods assist us in practising them.

Workshare Interest in Agile(2)

• The emphasis in Workshare Engineering is on an open culture and facilitating communication and learning.

• Our employees are considered to be intelligent enough to manage their own activities on a day-to-day basis.

• Management focus is on removing barriers to success, coaching and mentoring.

• The agile manifesto values people over process. This aligns agile development with the Workshare philosophy.

Motivation• Workshare corporate values include a heavy emphasis on

quality and teamwork but: Approximately 70% of development effort was spent on bug fixing. Reliance on QA to determine quality. Slipping deadlines No real process. No control

• Almost as fast as specifications could be written down, they became outmoded.

• Communication between Support, Sales, Product Management, Development and QA was often incomplete.

• Unit tests were the exception rather than the rule.

• We were relying on QA to spot errors and defects within the code rather than building quality in.

Motivation(2)

= Release Spike

defects per week prior to XP

• Chaotic process

• No predictability

XP at Workshare• Workshare has been practising XP/ agile development

since February 2001.• We employed American XP consultants, Object Mentor

to help us. • Six senior staff were despatched to their training facility

near Chicago to attend XP Immersion VI.

• Object Mentor programming and business coaches

came back with us for three months, to assist in the

transition.

• They demonstrated the value of XP to the developers,

then coached them in the practices.

XP at Workshare (2)

• Workshare have adopted all of the XP values, principles and practices.

• The members of the Workshare engineering team used the XP values, principles and practices to define their own system.

• We continually try to think of ways to improve and fine-tune the process, refining our knowledge and techniques.

XP at Workshare (3) - The Story Cycle

The World

CustomerPlanningMeeting

ReleasePlanningMeeting

ProductManagement

ReleaseStoryList

ProjectIterationPlanningMeeting

IterationStoryList

Development

QualityAssurance

Sales

SalesEngineers

BizDev

CustomerService

BusinessSign off

STG

XP’s Success at Workshare

• Our original goals for the adoption of XP were:

1. Improve the quality of our products.

2. Better focus on customer and market requirements.

3. Increase communication and teamwork within the Engineering Department.

4. Reduce time to market.

5. Make software development predictable.• We believe that the adoption of agile techniques at

Workshare has been an unmitigated success.

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XP’s Success at Workshare

defects per developer per week

Success Factors"I helped the Workshare team transition to XP earlier this year and one thing that really threw me was how terrifyingly well everyone worked together. They are simply the best gelled day-to-day work team I've seen in about seven years." Mike Feathers of Object Mentor

• Workshare have always believed in teamwork and have always encouraged self-management and empowered our employees.

• The use of external coaches was another major factor in our success. To have an expert on-site is invaluable.

• The change model was explained to us by our coaches so we understood the process of change before we embarked upon it.

Inhibitors to Agile Techniques

• We found no inhibitors to agile methods at Workshare.• This is because we already had an open and honest

culture that is focused on learning and the delivery of quality.

• Other (closed) cultures may not have the same success that we have had.

• The coaches just suggested improvements that might be made. The team were intelligent enough to evaluate them critically and, depending on the result of the evaluation, either accepted or rejected them.

• Changes either become adopted as part of the new system or they don’t.

Success factors at Workshare• Support from Top Management• Big Bang start but slow transition before a return was

expected• A certain level of dissent and questioning was tolerated

– so long as people had the courage to try something and express what worked and what did not.

• Consultancy worked with each engineering team through individual sessions and collectively. The aim being to create a level of ‘trust’ between each team.

• Workshare Teamwork and determination made it work.

Impact of XP on the business• Improvement in the communication of Release Dates• Improvements to beta release programme – lead to the creation of

a Solutions Engineering team.• Escalation and Prioritization of potential stories required sensitive

and specialist management – so a Product Quality team was created to help manage escalations and expectations

• Improved Story definition reduces defects – Strategic Technology team was created to define the more complex stories.

• Defined process – lead to replication of the same process in South Africa .

• The success of XP in Engineering enabled elements of XP to be reproduced across the business eg Marketing – story based planning and Customer Service – morning stand-ups .

Long term goals• The challenge of ISO 9001:2000 certification and GAMP 4

pharmaceutical compliance

• Embracing the best Agile methodologies further

improvements to the process.

• Moving XP into the mainstream – recognition from

regulatory bodies that there are other models than the

waterfall, e.g. Gamp 4 requirements

• Recognition as a promoter of Best Practice in software

development

• Improve quality of everything.

Staying Agile, Being compliant ..

Planning Regression PerformanceUAT Testing

Release

Requirements Test PlanningDevelopment

Planning Game

Integration

Story Testing

Feedback

Functional Spec

User Requirements

Walkthrough / InspectionValidation Procedure

Test Results Source CodeUse Cases

Certified Test platforms

WORKSHARE ENGINEERING PROCESS

Stories Bluesky Pair Programming Pre QA Star Teams QA Scripts Test Platforms Release Reports Release Notes Siebel

Release Procedure

Usability /Test Results

Support Escalation Procedure

Change Control

Future evolution of XP

• Evolution not replacement of agile methods

• Movement of agile methods into the

Mainstream – from set of practices to

methodology ??

• New Paradigm …

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