agile methodology in-depth review, government edition

Agile Methodology In-depth Review, Government Edition@coteJune 2016

Slides: http://cote.io/agile-overview1

• @cote – Director, Marketing at Pivotal

• Former industry analyst at 451 Research and RedMonk

• Corporate strategy and M&A at Dell

• Former software developer• More: cote.io/podcasts,

http://cote.io, cote@pivotal.io, Register DevOps column.

Hello!

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How we got here

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It’s time to do things differently…

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Private Sector Public Sector

The nature of software is changing, again

Sources: "The New Developer Landscape: Understanding the Modern Software Developer," Al Hilwa, March 2016. See also: "Application Modernization, Service By Microservice," Kurt Bittner and Randy Heffner, Dec 2015, Forrester. See the “The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2016” for popular programming languages.5

Yet how we do software has largely stayed the same

6 Source: “Survey Analysis: How Agile in the Enterprise Stumbles, Evolves, Then Succeeds,” Mike West & Nathan Wilson, Gartner, March 2016.

For the most part, “waterfall” is to be avoided*

Source: RashNull, May 2011.7

8Source: Reddit thread from ~2015. See also for fun discussion of such signs.

* When “waterfall” may be preferred

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• When there is zero uncertainty about what to build and why. AKA: “be careful what you wish for”

• When new software replaces existing software wholesale

• Requirements & budgets are fixed – good luck with schedule

Sources: see discussion in Twitter on this topic.

Waterfall Traps

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• Spending too much time on upfront requirements

• Treating testing as an afterthought and doing too much of it manually

• Finding problems too late in the cycle• Still deploying huge releases manually• Ignoring how users interact with your app

Sources: “Water-Agile-Fall Is A Steppingstone To Faster Delivery,” Diego Lo Giudice, et. al., Forrester, May 2016.

Only 25% of respondents felt that their companies were innovating in agile ways.

Source: Institute for the Future study, April 2015, n=3,600; The Agile Advantage, MeriTalk/Accenture, May 2015; Cutter Consortium, July 2015.

Organizations are held back by an IT agility gap

What is your IT organization's role in business innovation?

87% of Feds say it takes too long to deploy new systems per requirements

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Government Filter

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Things worth pointing out to government people

• “Winning” is making citizens more productive• Move to a person-centric, end-to-end product

approach• Making budgeting “worth it”• When “legacy” means “core systems”• Security• Regulations/compliance

13 Source: conversations with government IT staff; “Delivering Simpler, Clearer, Faster Government Services,” Lindsay Holmwood, May 2016.

Goals/End-State

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Use small batch thinking, at all levels

• Weekly, even daily deploys to production

• Deploy to production each time, avoid waterscrumfall

• Relies on:- Product approach- Small batch oriented

pipeline and process- Cloud native automation

Inception

Hypothesize

Validate w/real use(r)s

Did it work?

Sources: “Good Software is a Series of Little Failures,” Coté, April 2016; The Lean Startup, Eric Ries, 2011. The Lean Enterprise, Barry O'Reilly, Jez Humble, and Joanne Molesky. See also overview of this approach at the IRS from Dec 2015.15

A small batches approach is more successful

“The best way to do this stuff is to get a multi-disciplinary team of people in house – designer, user researcher, developer, content person – you’re talking a team of about twelve people.”

Ben Terrett, former design chief at the UK GDS

“We did an analysis of hundreds of projects over a multiyear period. The ones that delivered in less than a quarter succeeded about 80% of the time, while the ones that lasted more than a year failed at about the same rate. We’re simply not very good at large efforts.”

Large financial institution

Source: “Why Britain banned mobile apps; Interview with Ben Terrett, former design chief at the GDS,” GovInsider, June 2016; "Application Modernization, Service By Microservice," Kurt Bittner and Randy Heffner, Forrester, Dec 2015. For organization structure see “Roles and Responsibilities for DevOps and Agile Teams,” Coté, May 2016. See also “From Aristotle to Ringelmann,” June 2016 on team size.

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How a small batch process works

Build Test/Verify Package repository

VersionControl

InfrastructurePlatform

(IaaS, PaaS, VMs)

ProductionConcerns

(monitoring, scaling, etc.)

Feedback Loop

Specify Code

Development CI/CD Ops

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A cloud platform provides the needed speed, resilience, & standardization

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“PaaS, for us, eliminates entire classes of problems that we just don’t have to think about anymore.”

-Lindsay Holmwood, Head of Development, Australian Government Digital Transformation Office

Sources: "Technical Dive into Cloud Native Application Platforms," Brian Gracely, Wikibon, Sep 2015; "The cloud-native future," Casey West, O'Reilly Radar, Aug 2015; “Get Started on Pivotal's Cloud Foundry Stack,” Coté/The New Stack, Jan 2016; Cloud Foundry overview book.

Cloud native approaches speed up the whole process, more efficiently than previously possible

Source: “Deployments We Can Believe In,” Diego Lapiduz, 18F, June 2015; see also “Barriers to DevOps in Government,” Coté, Oct 2015; Humana keynote, CF Summit 2015; Gregg Otto at CF Summit NA 2016.

18F/cloud.govATO reduction from

9-14 months to 2-3 days

• Humana Cue Apple Watch app:

“Two people built the app and got it into the AppStore in five weeks.”

• Large financial institution on PCF: 145 apps with 2 ops people

• “We get features in days, not weeks, and scale takes minutes, not months.” –Gregg Otto, Comcast

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Practices

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CLOUD & DEVOPS WILL SAVE US!

Don’t worry, we got your happy trees!

Practices: User-centric

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User-centric design

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UK GDS: “Things are just designed to suit the very silos that the project sits in, and the user gets lost in there.”

• “Google is the homepage”

• Opening a restaurant with a single process

• Only 0.1% of people want to share a government service

Source: “Why Britain banned mobile apps; Interview with Ben Terrett, former design chief at the GDS,” GovInsider, June 2016.

��When you

study the user, you find out…

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How much do I owe the IRS?

Source: "Minimum Viable Taxes: Lessons learned building an MVP inside the IRS,” slides , Andrea Schneider & Lauren Gilchrist, 2015.

Before After

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Example approach, The Pivotal Way

27 Source: Pivotal Labs, March 2016. See also “Agile Transformation in the Age of the 3rd Platform,” Al Hilwa , IDC, Feb 2016 (unpublished)

Exploration Discovery

Practices: “Agile”

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After 17 years, “Agile” is not as wide-spread as we think it is – make sure you’re actually doing it

Source: “Town Hall: Agile in the Enterprise,” Mike West, Nathan Wilson, Thomas Murphy, Dec 2015, Gartner AADI US conference.29

Practices: DevOps

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DevOps, the word defines itself(1.)

DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support.

(2.)DevOps is also characterized by operations staff making use of many of the same techniques as developers for their systems work.

Source: “What Is DevOps?,” The Agile Admin, Dec 2011. For more: Effective DevOps, Jennifer Davis, Katherine Daniels, May, 2016.31

Defining DeveOps by practices & goals, part 1

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Defining DeveOps by practices & goals, part 2

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Practices: Coding

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A microservices approach gives you organizational agility, at the expense of architectural complexity

Benefits• Decoupling service

releases, teams• Faster innovation cycles• Composite applications

vs. monolithic apps

Problems• The one about the

murder mystery• Incompatible APIs• You still need other

people to do work

It’s worth solving the problems if you want the benefits…and it’s possible!

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The Application Framework promises

Codebase Dependencies Config Backing Services

Build, Release,

RunProcesses Port

BindingConcurrenc

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DisposabilityDev/Prod

Parity Logs Admin Processes

Source: “The Twelve-Factor App.”

• A set of best practices for developing and deploying cloud-native software.

• Practices translate into platform features and workflow requirements.

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Changing Culture

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It’s not much of an IT department, but I’m sorta attached to it…

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Source: "Strategy, not Technology, Drives Digital Transformation," 2015 Digital Business Global Executive Study and Research Project, MIT Sloan Management Review & Deloitte University Press, July 2015. n=4,800,conducted in Fall of 2014. Government concerns from “The Agile Advantage,” MeriTalk/Accenture, May 2015

Too many competing priorities

Lack of an overall strategy

Security concerns

Insufficient technical skills

Lack of organizational agility

Lack of management understanding

Lack of entrepreneurial spirit, willingness to take risks

Lack of collaborative, sharing culture

No strong business case

Lack of employee incentives

None/no barriers exist

Don’t know

Other (please specify )

43%33%

25%25%

24%22%

17%16%

15%10%

7%3%

8%

What barriers are impeding your organization from taking advantage of digital trends? (select up to three)

Most problems are in the meatware

Government concerns: • Security• Budget• Infrastructure

complexity• Fear of change• Inflexible practices• Lack of collaboration

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Management creates the game

• Leading change management

• Setting, communicating, tracking goals

• Dramatic organization change, gradually

• E.g.: from autocrat to self-directed teams

Sources: Leading the Transformation, 2015; “Management’s Job is orchestrating the ‘why,’” 2015; The Concise Executive Guide to Agile, 2010.40

To change, you must actually changeOr, how t-shirts jump-start digital transformation

“I can’t tell you what having a leader stand-up in front of an organization with a hoodie and t-shirt does to cultural change. It all the sudden makes it OK for everyone within that organization to participate in change.”

-Matt Curry, Allstate

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Fighting bureaucracy self-FUDing - addressing “risk”

1. Bug swarms

2. Useless software

3. Stymied innovation

4. Budget overruns

5. Schedule elongation

Sources: "Software devs' new mantra: Zen dogs dream of small-sized bones," Coté, Feb 2016. “Good Software is a Series of Little Failures,” Coté, April 2016.42

Automating compliance

Source: “OpenControl Overview,” Joshua McKenty, March 2016. “Running Cloud Foundry in a Compliance and Security Focused Environment,” Diego Lapiduz and Bret A. Mogilefsky, 18F, May 2016.43

Dealing with legacy: the stuff that makes all the money

Quarantine

• Low impact applications

• Lacks good testing, risky to change

• Change resistant priorities

Migration Strategies

• Virtualize & re-platform to control costs and maximize management

• API gateways combined with the strangler pattern

• Portfolio management (cf. The Three Horizons)

Sources: “DevOps isn't just about the new: It's about cleaning up the old, too,” Coté, April 2016; The Cloud Native Journey, Coté, 2016; Escape Velocity, Geoffrey Moore, Sep 2011 and "To Succeed in the Long Term, Focus on the Middle Term," Geoffrey Moore, August 2007. 44

Staffing: There is no talent shortage

F100 CTO: “But Netflix has a superstar dev team, we don’t!”

@adrianco:“We hired them from you.”

Source: @blueboxjesse, Oct 2014. See also “There is no talent shortage.”45

Further reading

Free at Pivotal.io Leading the Transformation, 2015 Free at Pivotal.io

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Thanks!@cote | cote@pivotal.ioSlides: http://cote.io/agile-overview

“We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and

helping others do it.”- The Agile Manifesto, 2001

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