Scaling the Product Owner Role

At XP Days Benelux 2013 we talked about why and how the Product Owner role is scaled in organizations. You can find my slides here (pdf).
 
[EDIT 1.2.2014]
InfoQ Interview on the topic can be found here.

 

Abstract

 

Come to this workshop to learn how to scale the Product Owner role in order to harness the true potential of self-organizing Agile teams. You will learn by doing, but you will be also hear a real-life story.

 

Using Agile development methods development teams improve their capability to deliver through transparency and predictability. However, this does not bring the outcome companies are seeking if the developed features are not the right ones. The product owner role in Scrum simplifies the interface between business and development. This obviously brings immediate relief in many cases, but in practice, the responsibility of the Product Owner is far too wide for a single person in all except the most simplistic scenarios. Naturally the pragmatic Product Owner works with number of domain experts and other stakeholders. Things in real-life get even more complicated, as organizations have multiple product lines, yet the development should be aligned with the company’s strategy. To add to the challenge, for example embedded system development including own hardware platform development brings additional concerns, such as less flexibility than software development and dependency on external suppliers. To date, the practical information on how to do this remains limited.

 

During this workshop you will will create a framework for scaling the Product Owner role. Continuous customer collaboration at different levels, with different focus, will also be covered. Your work will be guided with a real-life story linking the exercise to reality.

My Hardware and Co-Design talk at Scrum Gathering

Couple of weeks ago I attended my first Scrum Gathering in the city of light, Paris. On the first day I was offered an opportunity to present my Hardware and Co-Design talk. You can find the abstract below, and slides are available here.

Summary

Agile methods are gaining foothold in embedded software development. Embedded software is not developed in isolation, but it has dependencies to hardware development. The system development is facing the demands of ever increasing amount of change and learning. Agile methods aim at helping in these challenges. This talk summarizes authors observations on hardware development teams using Scrum during the past 10 years. Teams have varied in terms of disciplines involved and collocation.

Come to this session to get the practitioner’s view on using Scrum beyond embedded software development.

Description 

Agile software development is getting more and more attention also in embedded software development. Embedded system development on the other hand requires different engineering disciplines working together towards a shared goal. When embedded software development begins using agile methods it triggers a need for change also in other disciplines. Agile development emphasizes continuous learning through experimenting and collaboration instead of following a detailed up-front plan. Agile embedded software team expects different behavior in system co-design.

In addition to the above, product development in general and not only software development is facing the demands of ever increasing amount of change and learning. Change happens in several areas, such as technology, competition and marketplace. This is what agile methods aim at tackling. This implies that new product development in general could benefit from knowledge created on agile development.

This presentation summarizes authors observations on hardware development team members and hardware teams using Scrum and agile methods during the past 10 years. Team configurations range from collocated cross-disciplined team (electronics, printed circuit board, mechanics and embedded software) to globally distributed teams of different disciplines. Several real-life products will be used as examples.

Invasion of Agile Hardware at Design East, Boston

Topics around Agile Development have slowly but steadily been making their way into Embedded Systems Conference program. Couple of weeks ago Design East in Boston had several sessions on Agile Development, but most noticeably 3 talks on Agile Hardware. One of them by yours truly. You can find the slides and technical paper associated with it via these links (slides, technical paper).

Agile methods are gaining foothold in embedded software development. Embedded software is not developed in isolation, but it often has strong dependencies to hardware development. The system development is facing the demands of ever increasing amount of change and learning. Agile methods aim at helping in these challenges. This session summarizes authors observations on hardware development team members and hardware teams working with Agile methods during the past 10 years. Team configurations range from collocated cross-disciplined team (electronics, printed circuit board, mechanics and embedded software) to globally distributed teams of different disciplines. This session will give you the practitioner’s view to applicability of Agile methods beyond embedded software development.

Slides from Agile 2011

Agile 2011 ended in Salt Lake City, Utah a few weeks ago. It was again great to meet the growing circle of friends in agile community. This year my own conference was a bit different as I submitted two talks and participated in the review process for Agile for Embedded Systems Development -track.

Indeed, we had dedicated track for embedded stuff. It was the 10 year anniversary for agile manifesto and this was the first time the embedded got this much attention. The track had quality sessions and averaged around 20 attendees for each session.

You can find my slide decks via the links below:



Embedded Testing Cycle - the First 3 Years, Markku Åhman and Timo Punkka

James Grenning presented the embedded test-driven development (TDD) cycle already in 2004. Whispers on the hallways of conference hotels tell that somebody is actually implementing this idea. However, there are only few documented implementation details available. Schneider Electric’s fire security team has been implementing TDD cycle as an integral part of the development process for 3 years. Come to learn from their real-life experience and mistakes in automated testing at different levels: unit testing, acceptance testing using simulation, and in real target hardware.




Agile Hardware and Co-Design, Timo Punkka

Agile software development is getting attention also in embedded software development. Embedded system development on the other hand requires different engineering disciplines working together. When embedded software team starts using agile methods, it affects also other disciplines. Agile development emphasizes continuous learning through experimenting and collaboration instead of following a detailed up-front plan. Agile embedded software team expects different behavior in system co-design. This talk discusses reasons and ways to adapt agile development to co-design of system development.



Lots of other presentations, including all other embedded track presentations, are available via the conference program site.

Embedded Agile, ESC2010, Boston

Here are the slides and technical paper from my talk on Embedded Agile at Embedded Systems Conference 2010, Boston.

I had a good time at the conference. Hope you can find the material useful!

Abstract. New product development (NPD) is getting more and more challenging. Change happens all the time in all dimensions, including own organization, technology, competition, and marketplace. Agile development is targeted at working in a turbulent environment driven by continuous learning. Originated from software industry, its applicability to embedded system development has been analyzed over the years. In this paper, I present some observations on implications of embedded system development to agile development. I introduce findings on frequent releasing, automated testing, co-design including non-SW development and quality systems like ISO9001.

See you in Grenoble

I'll be in Grenoble, France November 22.-24.11.2010 to attend Agile Grenoble.

If you happen to be around, get in touch.

See you in Boston

I'll be attending ESC 2010 in Boston in a couple of weeks. You can catch me speaking about embedded agile on Tuesday 21st. You can find me somewhere in the conference throughout the week. Let me know if you're around.

Only few seats left in Agile Finland Seminar

Agile Finland is organizing yet another seminar. It takes place March 4th in Helsinki. This morning there was only some twenty seats available.

Yet Another Agile Seminar in Finland

It seems to be the time for another Agile Finland Seminar. It is organized by Agile Alliance, Reaktor Innovations, and F-Secure. Guys have set out to break the old record for short notice:

On October 14th, 2006, I sent an email to the AgileFinland Yahoo! group about the next Agile Seminar taking place only 9 days later. Guess what? Everything went well even with such a short notice so this time we decided to improve and give you an even shorter notice.

At the time of writing this there are 84 seats available. Go get yours...

Agile2007: Embedded Agile Discovery Session

On Wednesday at Agile2007 conference James Grenning and Dan Pierce pulled together a discovery session for Agile and Embedded. The room was packed with people with experience on applying agile methods to embedded software development. Well, packed in this context means just over a dozen in a conference with 1150 attendees. Anyway. You really should sign up to Yahoo Agile Embedded group to follow the work of others. There are some remarkable people in this small community.

The discussion had two main topics. First, why embedded agile is getting foothold in the industry as slowly as it is. Several items were identified and the discussion is continued in Yahoo group. Second, that's correct, what else, but agile testing. People had different levels of practical experience, but the main theme was that it is important and it is definatelly possible. On the topic of safety critical embedded software and agile methods, the verdict was that this is not a problem. Safety critical embedded software actually SHOULD be developed using agile methods.

90 minutes was way too short time for anything concrete, but at least the event proved that agile embedded community exists. Thanks to James and Dan.

Jack Ganssle was also present and he posted about the conference in his Break Points column at embedded.com.

The Agile 2007 conference catered mostly to PC types, but some embedded heads showed up.

That post also made it to the latest Carnival of Agilists. This edition of Carnival of Agilists also mentions Atomic Object's approach to mocking the embedded world.

Agile embedded gets some visibility.

Seminar on Agile and Embedded in Helsinki

At ELKOM07 fair in Helsinki, Finland, Tieturi organizes a free 4h mini seminar on Agile and embedded system development on 5.9.2007. While it's free you still need to register.

Does eXtreme Development Exist?

I spent last week in Washington D.C. participating Agile2007 conference. The conference program was overwhelming with over 300 events. However while we have many implications to agile embedded systems development the agile embedded community is still small. So next time you see an agile conference ad, sign up!

Jim Highsmith is a person that has brought together agile community and general product development. I have followed his work and writings closely. He has brought work of people like Stefan Thomke, Preston Smith, and Donald Rainertsen (Reinertsen & Associates) to my knowledge. The latter two co-wrote the book Developing Products in Half the Time. In the panel discussion about agile manifesto there was a Q if the panelists believed that values of manifesto are applicable to development outside SW. (This is what tried also!). Highsmith mentioned a pure HW team that they successfully coached based on eXtreme Programming techniques. In that particular project there was no SW at all!

While browsing for the links, I found out that there is a new book out from Preston Smith:

Flexible Product Development: Building Agility for Changing Markets. It's on top of my wish list.

Conference Programs Announced

Several agile conferences have their programs out.

Oresund Agile 2007
Copenhagen, 11-14 June

XP2007
Como, 18-22 June

Agile2007
Washington D.C., 13-17 August

At Agile2007 Dan Pierce and James Grenning are giving a talk "Embedded Agile - Issues and Practices". Should be valuable, as these two gentlemen have been talking about and practicing agile development in embedded domain for a long time. Of course lots of other interesting stuff as well, 5 days with 8 or more tracks...

What does it mean to be agile?

OK, the ESC2007 Conference is over. Many of the classes and especially Peer Roundtable discussions at the conference, Beer Roundtable discussions at the bars after conference hours, and long flight hours with a colleague, woke several questions, among them:

-What does it mean to be agile?
-When is an organization/team considered agile?

In his review (pdf) Dr. Pekka Abrahamsson showed the software life-cycle support of different agile methods. We know that Scrum does not have any engineering practices described in detail, but focuses on project management. That's why it has been adapted also outside software development. It is simple. This is why majority of the so called agile adaptations at least say they follow Scrum. As have we; we have used it with cross-disciplined embedded system development teams to develop a complete embedded system as fast paced iterative development. I have also written in my paper how I saw reflective iterative development as a tool itself for figuring out what practices you need. This said I share Simon Baker's post

Are you missing the point?

As long as you share the underlying values of agile development, and keep the obvious practices like short iteration, demonstrable progress and retrospectives, you are going to figure out the rest of it - or die trying or at least you figure out the need for something and can start looking. If your survival anxiety in your current environment is high, but you have juniority prevailing in your team, you can still gain a lot from practicing "just" Scrum. Scrum puts the basic structure in place with its simple rules and in my experience this is an immediate relief to chaos. This does not mean that it is easy. It will make everything visible; good and bad and needs a lot of discipline and nurturing.

With this approach, you being now out of the chaos and anarchy, it is time to bring in the engineering practices. Our case has shown that they are needed. We have experienced with eXtreme Programming (XP) practices; collocated team, pair programming (development), test driven development, coding standard, metaphor, and so on. We have seen the value in them, but not been able to actually master them in firmware or embedded system development in order to put the discipline into using them. Still we feel that we gain from practicing Scrum, and agile development as learning-driven thinking. This is the very reason why we still keep learning more skills and practices.

Are we agile? I do not know.

If your environment is functioning and open minded, and you have master mind developers in your team, why not go full blown XP right away? We have manifested that those practices are of high value, but they are hard for beginners. We now have also hard evidence to support the effectiveness of these methos (see for example the AGILE-ITEA project, run by the same Dr. Pekka Abrahamsson btw). It may be that with this approach you find out that you need some project management practices from Scrum. Who knows.

I wrote in my original paper about agile firmware development that lot of the agile programming practices for firmware development need innovative thinking. I think last week at the ESC2007 I met some of the people capable doing this. In the front line James Grenning from Object Mentor and Mike Karlesky and Greg Williams from Atomic Object. They have put these engineering practices into full use (also) in low end firmware projects. They are also willing to share their knowledge by publishing their tools as open source, and having discussions about the methods. Maybe we even become clients of these guys some day... Furthermore during the classes and discussions I got the feeling that a fair amount of people are actually practicing.

We have just scratched the surface, but after last week I believe that it is time to put some serious effort into agile programming practices, and actual firmware development. After all that is where we started this journey. It just kind a slipped into system development.

Are we agile after adapting these practices? I do not know.

ESC2007

Embedded Systems Conference 2007 in San Jose, California, is having some interesting events. James Grenning is giving several sessions and people from Atomic Object are coming to tell about their low level system agile testing methods.

The best news is that right after my vacation (still have some three to four weeks to burn) I'm going to attend the conference with a colleague. Talking about nice return to work! I'll try to have energy to write something about the conf'.