adapting agile afei - 2-15

Copyright © 2015, Intellyx, LLC

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Adapting Agile:The Missing Link

Jason Bloomberg

President

[email protected]

@TheEbizWizard

About Jason Bloomberg

• President of Intellyx

• Advise companies on their digital transformation initiatives & help vendors communicate their agility stories

• Write for Forbes and Wired on Digital Transformation

• Buy my latest book, The Agile Architecture Revolution

Copyright © 2015, Intellyx, LLC2

The Mission Priority

• Complex, dynamic policy environment

• Global environment in turmoil

• Threats proliferating, especially technology-centric

• Incessant change impacting government technology ecosystem


Agility is Absolutely Essential

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Today’s Context for Change


AgileDigital

Transformation

What is Digital?

End-user/citizen preferences & behaviordrive technology choices

Range of technology touchpoints is exploding


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What about Transformation?

Internal organizational change is necessary to maintain focus on the end-user in today’s

digital world


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What is Digital Transformation?

• End-user pressures driving technological and organizational change in public & private sector

• Enterprises rethinking:

– How they serve citizens/end-users

– The role IT plays

– How they build & manage teams

– How they innovate


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The End-to-End Digital Challenge

• Digital technology begins at the end-user touchpoint

• Web & mobile apps include numerous third-party services

– Generally run in cloud

• Apps connect to back end databases & systems of record

– In cloud & on premise


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What is Agile?

Organizations must capitalize on disruption to achieve greater innovativeness and resilience in the face of digital transformation priorities


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The Agile Manifesto

Manifesto for Agile Software Development

We are uncovering better ways of developingsoftware by doing it and helping others do it.Through this work we have come to value:

– Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

– Working software over comprehensive documentation

– Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

– Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items onthe right, we value the items on the left more.


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Context: Software Development

• Focus on small teams that crank out code

• Iterative, self-organizing, collaborative

• Focus on creating working software


Well-run Agile development means producing a lot of good software

quickly

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What about Architecture on Agile Projects?

• We don’t need no stinkin’ architecture!

• Architecture lumped in with documentation (less is more)

• Architects slow down developers

• Architects produce artifacts that aren’t Agile

– Lead to extra work


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Widespread belief that Agile and Architecture don’t mix

Create Minimum Viable Architecture

• All documentation, artifacts, diagrams, etc. are means to an end

• Don’t architect more than the stakeholders want

• Problems:

– Shortsighted

– Leads to legacy issues

– Limits agilityCopyright © 2015, Intellyx, LLC13 P

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The Overbuilding Paradox

• How do stakeholders know what flexibility they will require?

• How generalized should code be?

• How do you build resilience into software?


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Why Agile Software Architecture isn’t Agile

• Agile movement focuses on working software

– Focus on getting the software to meet its requirements

– Get all roadblocks out of the way

• Agile-built software is coded to be fit for purpose


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The Goal of Agile Software

• Requirement to build software that responds to changing requirements

• Inherent flexibility vs. rapid development & deployment

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Instant Legacy

• Difficult to upgrade

• Systems are inflexible

• Impossible to replace

• Difficult to customize

• Challenge to integrate

• Expensive over time


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Fit-for-Purpose Often Means Brittle

• Agile software built intentionally with only today’s needs in mind

• Planning for unexpected contingencies contrary to Agile approach


Brittle software leads to brittle organizations

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Resilience

• The ability to respond quickly and efficiently to negative change in the business environment

– Managing risk

– Bouncing back from adverse events

– Disaster recovery

• Tactical business driver


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The opposite of brittleness

Resilience is Government Priority


Business Agility

• Responsiveness

– Tactical value

• Resilience

– Risk mitigation

• Innovativeness

– Strategic value

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Ability to respond to change in the business environment and leverage change for competitive advantage

Different Meanings of “Agile”

• “Agile-with-a-capital-A”

–Software development that follows the Agile Manifesto

• General meaning of “agile”

–Business agility as property of an organization


Iconoclastic vs. Dogmatic

• The point to Agile is to be less dogmatic about creating software

• Too many Agilists are dogmatic about Agile

• Defeats the purpose!


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Agile is inherently iconoclastic

The Lesson of Scrum Buts

• Statements of the form:

– “We want to follow Scrum BUT retrospectives are too difficult SO we won’t do them.”

• Important part of Agile

– Responding to change over following a plan!

• Problem: not always a good idea

– “We want to be iterative BUT it’s too much trouble SO we’ll do all our development in one massive sprint.”

• How do you tell which is which?


Extending the Agile Manifesto

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

– As a system of people & technology, the enterprise is more about people

• Working software over comprehensive documentation

– Technology must actually work to enable agility

• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

– Slice across the silos

• Responding to change over following a plan

– Architect for change


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Scaling Agile for the Enterprise

• Enterprise Architecture context

– Organization, process, technology, and information

• Legacy context

– Existing applications, middleware, systems of record

• Business focused, iterative, get stuff to work, iconoclastic


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The Rise of Agile EA

Understanding the Business Agility Driver

• Architects must recognize and identify agility drivers

• Stakeholders may or may not identify drivers as such

• Business drivers always connect to mission priority


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Enterprise Architecture Challenges

• Insufficient business scope

– Buried in IT department

• Lack of executive mandate

• Excessive focus on documentation

• No business agility context


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Digital Can Breathe New Life into EA

• Driven by EAs

– Now “Directors of Digital Excellence”

• Facilitate digital reorganization

• Increased focus on end-user/citizen

• Drive business agility end-to-end


Center of Digital Excellence (CODE)

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Introducing “Meta” Thinking

• Remember, we’re architecting for change

• Agile architect doesn’t think about the thing, but about how it changes

• Metaprocesses

– Processes for creating, managing, changing processes

• Metapolicies

– Policies for creating, managing, changing policies

– In other words, policies for how to do governance


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Change-Case Agility Model

• Questions for your analysis

– How much flexibility does your software need?

– What features will be needed?

– How resilient must infrastructure be?

– How dynamic will your data be?

– Etc.

• Must perform analysis at the meta level to avoid overbuilding


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Establishing Feedback

• Feedback from each iteration is essential to Agile Architecture

• Ad hoc at lower levels, data-driven at higher level

• Move from manual to automated feedback loops as part of DevOps cadence


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Continuous Business Transformation

• With Agile EA there is no to-be architecture

– Not in the physical sense

• Instead, the focus of the architecture is expecting and supporting ongoing change by specifying technology that is inherently flexible & resilient

• Architects must begin at the Meta layer


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Shifting the Center of Gravity

Center of gravity is software

Center of gravity is the end-user


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The Agile World

The Digital World

adapting agile afei - 2-15

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