Abstract: Are you - or worse, your bosses - starting to doubt this Agile thing? Are your software teams proficiently delivering every two weeks and yet it just doesn't seem to make much of a difference to the bottom line?
Most organizations begin their foray into Agile with software development and that makes sense - after all, the Agile Manifesto focuses on “working software.” Unfortunately, though, this is often also where the Agile journey comes to a grinding halt. Management confines Agile to a small box labeled “Delivery,” puts a lid on it, and everything else continues as usual. Development teams in such an environment may produce more software, faster and with better quality, but the expected impact on the organization often fails to materialize because the business value of the produced software doesn’t increase correspondingly.
In this workshop, we’ll take a closer look at why Agile shouldn’t end with “working software.” The most commonly used Agile frameworks don’t provide much guidance on how to manage risk and ensure the creation of organizational value, so we will draw on insights, tools and techniques from other domains to identify crucial, high risk assumptions, test our hypotheses, and measure outcomes. We’ll combine presentation and activities to explore how we can get past the “feature factory” focus and apply the Agile mindset beyond delivery to produce better business outcomes and organizational impact.
Learning Outcomes: - Explore how Lean Discovery and experimentation can expand the scope of Agile’s “inspect and adapt” learning loops beyond software delivery
- Identify and examine the riskiest assumptions with tools like Assumption Mapping and Impact Mapping
- Learn how to use the power of iteration and feedback to validate critical assumptions with testable hypotheses
