Tag Archives: agile methodologies

Auxiliary Agile Frameworks – Dynamic Systems Delivery Method, Agile Unified Process, Behavior Driven Development

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– Back to the Agile Practice Guide (all) –

We’re looking at the Agile and Lean frameworks from the Agile Practice Guide from the Project Management Institute and Agile Alliance.

We’re looking at this because as you go along your Agile journey, you’ll find many core methods, and people may call themselves an Agile team and use only one or two of these methods. That’s often fine as long as we’ve got the core Agile practices as part of that – things such as the whole team approach, daily doing stand-ups, retrospectives.  Many teams will have some of these core methods and sometimes even some of these auxiliary methods that they’re practicing as an Agile team or an Agile company.

This one we’re going to look at is the Agile auxiliary methods of Agile Unified Process, DSDM or Dynamic Systems Delivery Method, and Behavior-Driven Development.

Check out the video and article below, now!

Dynamic Systems Delivery Method

Dynamic Systems Delivery Method or DSDM was designed to add more rigor to the rising iterative methods of the 1990s. It’s most known for its emphasis on constraint-driven delivery, which sets Cost, Quality and Time in the beginning and then uses formalized prioritization of scope to meet those constraints. In other words, it’s meeting up with the Agile approach of having fixed time, where we’ve got our fixed time boxes of two to four weeks depending on what your team has arranged or has agreed on and then a set time frame for delivering the product. The cost might be fixed as well, and the quality – we always want high quality and that needs to be fixed within an Agile team. However, we can adjust the scope as we go along. And as we iterate with our product, yes, sometimes that product will change and the requirements might change when a customer sees it and just has a little bit of feedback based on what we’ve been developing.

Agile Framework DSDM Constraints

Eight principles guide the use of DSDM. We focus on the business need, and there are many different ways of doing this within Agile. The product owner represents the customer, and we’ve got reviews of the product every two to four weeks so the customer can see, feel and touch it and make sure that we’re on the right track.

We’ve got delivering on time, collaboration, never compromising quality, and building incrementally from firm foundations. We’re making sure that we understand what the main feature and the main product is going to be, as part of our feature-driven development (that you might recognise) and then building incrementally – building those features out from those firm foundations.

We’ve got developing iteratively. So making sure our customer can see it by performing those reviews at the end of our iteration. This means a customer can see what’s going on and make sure that we’re on the right track and adjust if necessary.

We’ve got communicating continuously and early – that’s part of our daily stand-ups that you might recognize, and we’ve got demonstrating. control, using the appropriate techniques and prioritization of scope.

We’re making sure that the product owner is involved and making sure the customer is involved in prioritizing the scope that they want to see, and we develop what’s most valuable to them.

Next, we’ve got Agile Unified Process or AUP as well. The intent of AUP is to perform Iterative Cycles across seven key disciplines and incorporate the associated feedback before formal delivery. So someone using AUP will have these disciplines within a release:

We’ve got the model implementation, testing deployment, configuration management, project management, and the environment. All of these are the disciplines of AUP.

But the principles guiding those disciplines are: we want to make sure that the team understands and has clarity and knows what it’s doing. We want simplicity with what the team is doing- so we don’t want complex things just for the sake of doing that.  We want agility – so the ability to adjust and change quickly if needed. Focusing on high-value activities, of course we’ve seen that many times with the Product Owner getting involved prioritizing that backlog of the highest value activities for the customer. We’ve got tool independence, so things can function on their own if necessary – if one item goes down, it doesn’t bring the whole thing down. We’ve got tailoring to fit and situationally specific.

Lastly, we’ve also got Behavior-Driven Development as one of our auxiliary methods to Agile. This is another simple way of defining these stories or the features from the Customer’s point of view, and it’s a great way to define those when you’re performing collaborative user story creation. So when the whole team is getting together, creating that user story based on all the different inputs from the tester, the developer, the designer, the product owner, we make sure everyone has an input into that so that it’s a wholly created card from the customer’s point of view.

With BDD, we’ve got “Given” some initial context, “When” an event occurs, “Then” ensure some outcomes. So given this system is in this mode, when this happens then we want that to happen. And that’s just a nice way to describe it so everyone is on the same page.

Those are some more of the auxiliary methods of the Agile and lean frameworks.

– David McLachlan

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Crystal – The Agile Practice Guide

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– Back to the Agile Practice Guide (all) –

These are the Agile and Lean frameworks from the Agile Practice Guide, from the Project Management Institute and Agile Alliance.

We’ve already looked at the core methods involving Scrum, Kanban, eXtreme Programming and Feature Driven Development, and these are frameworks you’ll usually find at least one of in an Agile team.

But there are many auxiliary methods to Agile as well, and some of these will be scalable methods to scale across an enterprise or an organization, not just within one team. It can now be across business teams as well.

Now we’re going to look at Crystal as part of our auxiliary methods.

The Agile Framework of Crystal

Crystal was introduced by Alistair Cockburn in his book “Crystal Clear”, and it was created at IBM in 1991, long before the term Agile was even imagined. Crystal is an Agile framework now, and it’s focusing on individuals and their interactions. This is one of the core Agile principles, and doing this is opposed to (or more than) “processes and tools”. This is the first agile principle.

As it notes it is not a set process but it’s more of a guideline for team collaboration and communication. We’ve got three core beliefs – firstly:

Technologies change techniques.
As you’ve seen, depending on what technology you’re working on or what product you’re developing you may need to adjust the technique that you’re using to develop that.

Cultures change norms.
The culture of an organization will have an effect on the norms that you have within your team.

Distances change communication.
That’s why in an Agile team we recommend the “whole team approach” – all co-located in the one place so you can just look over your shoulder and say “hey Joe, can you help me with this?” instead of sending an email or making a telephone call and not getting a reply.

Crystal is designed to scale and it realizes that each project may require a slightly tailored set of practices based on its size and its complexity. It has a few core values and a few common properties. From a Crystal point of view its core values are focusing on people their interactions, the community, their skill sets, talents and communications.

Then the common properties are frequent delivery (very traditional for Agile), reflective improvement (think of your retrospectives – asking what went well, what didn’t go well, what still puzzles me, and what have I learned?) and putting that back into the process, improving every iteration of two to four weeks.

We’ve got close communication, so that’s the whole team approach – everyone in the same place, nice and easy. Personal safety, when you feel safe as a team it’s much easier to be to be honest about what’s going on and to make honest responses to the product or to the development cycle. It’s much easier to improve as well.

We’ve got focus and easy access to expert users – usually through the Product Owner from the whole team approach, someone who represents the customer or the customer themselves. We’ve got technical environment with automated tests, configuration management and frequent integration – that’s our continuous integration core practice within Agile as well.

So you can see why all of these things match up so closely with Agile and fit with it so well, even though it may not necessarily be one of the most core practices, its methodologies definitely are part of the core methodologies.

But Crystal is also designed to scale. We realize that each project may require a slightly tailored set of practices, and this is what it means. We’ve got the sizing framework within Crystal and it’s based on a few things – the life of the project, the money of the project, discretionary money and the comfort level of the project, and then the number of people involved. So maybe we’ve got only one to four people it’s nice and small, maybe there’s a lower level of money involved, maybe it’s a short project life cycle as well this is Crystal Clear. As you can see, it goes all the way up to Crystal Red just depending on the sizing of all of these things – the people, the money, the comfort level and the number of people involved and based on those you can size and scale up the Agile approaches. We’ll see we’ve got things like Scrum of Scrums and many other scaling frameworks that can be used in larger projects or scenarios.

And that is the Agile auxiliary method of Crystal.

– David McLachlan

– Back to the Agile Practice Guide (all) –

Get the Leadership Card Deck or the Five Minute Lean Book:

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- or - Have the Leadership Cards delivered for your next meeting

 

Want to learn about Lean? Get the book "Five Minute Lean", by David McLachlan - a wonderful book that blends teaching of the tools, culture and philosophy of traditional Lean with a modern-day Lean parable. You can get the whole book on Amazon here and enjoy your own copy.