Pragmatic Approach to Agile Practices

To ascertain delivery assurance in software projects, it may be useful to ask the following questions:

• Are we working on the right thing?
• Are we doing it right?

A team and/or an organization that answers these questions convincingly shall feel confident in their progress.

• “Are we working on the right thing?” might include:
  • Problem Definition
  • Adaptive Planning
  • Scope Management
  • Change Management
  • RAID (Risk, Assumption, Issue, Dependency)
  • NFR (Non-Functional Requirement)

• “Are we doing it right?” includes:
  • Practices (Safety nets)
  • Quality Assurance
  • Review and Feedback
  • Governance
  • Metrics Reporting
  • Communication Plan

On many occasions, even though we all agree that we want to follow all the practices and processes, we might have to be pragmatic in customizing the practices/processes without compromising the delivery assurance.

To achieve that, one of the approaches that had helped me in my experience was to categorize the projects using certain complexity factors. They are:

Based on the values we choose for our complexity factors, we may arrive at different sets. 

For simplicity, let us consider a small company/business unit. A sample categorization might look like:

<sample data>	Budget	Time	Client (Potential)	Team Size	Technical Complexity
Small	<100K	2-3 weeks	No visibility on Future work	<5 people	Not much
Medium	Between 100K & 500K	4 to 12 weeks	Slight chance of work	5-15 people	Some customization
Large	>500K	> 3 months	Clear Visibility	2 or more teams of >10 people each	Research/study to do

Then, using this above sample categorization, if we arrive at a guideline for the delivery practices/processes, it may look like:

	Large	Medium	Small
Sprints / Iterations	Yes	Yes	No
Sprint Length	2 weeks	1 week	No
Milestones	Mandatory	Preferable	No
Communication Plan	Yes	Yes	No
Metrics
Release Burn-up	Yes	Yes	Yes
Sprint Burn-down	Yes	Maybe	No
SPCR	Yes	Maybe	No
Cycle Time	Yes	No	No
Velocity Chart	Yes	Maybe	No
Defect Turn Around Time	Yes	No	No
Spill Over Defects	Yes	No	No
Business Metrics	Yes	Yes	Yes
Engineering Practices
Unit Test Coverage	Yes	Preferable	No
Functional Automation	Yes	Optional	No
Usability Testing	Yes	If the project is UI intensive	No
UX Review	Yes	If the project is UI intensive	No
Code Review	Yes	Yes	No
Performance Test	Yes	Preferable	No
NFR Review	Yes	Yes	Yes
Continuous Integration	Yes	Preferable	No
Continuous Deployment	Yes	Optional	No
Staging / Performance Test Environment	Yes	Preferable	No
Project Management Tool	Yes	Simple Spreadsheet	Simple Spreadsheet
Metrics Tracking Tool	Yes	Simple Spreadsheet	Simple Spreadsheet

As usual, there are different opinions in the Agile World, in dealing with practices/processes. Here I’d just shared an approach that worked for me. 

Best Regards

SK