0 7 4 0 - 7 4 5 9 / 1 8 / $ 3 3 . 0 0 © 2 0 1 8 I E E E JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 | IEEE SOFTWARE 109

Editor: Jeffrey C. CarverUniversity of Alabamacarver@cs.ua.edu

PRACTITIONERS’ DIGEST

Trends in Agile UpdatedPerspectives from the Practitioners

Rafael Prikladnicki, Casper Lassenius, and Jeffrey C. Carver

THE AGILE CONFERENCE is the largest global conference on agile software development, catering par-ticularly to practitioners. Agile 2017 (www.agilealliance.org/agile2017) had 2,200 participants. Here, we report on three keynotes and the second year of an IEEE Software conference initiative.

Lessons in LeadershipIn the first keynote, David Marquet, author of Turn This Ship Around,1 shared his experience as the (former) commander of the nuclear subma-rine Santa Fe. He discussed how he realized that a single point of com-mand was dangerous and limited the efficiency of submarine operations.

Marquet’s experience is similar to the reality faced by organizations and managers that are trying to em-power teams to be more autonomous and flexible, thus becoming more ag-ile. For this reason, he talked about self-organization, leadership, and engagement at every organizational level. These are well-known prin-ciples in the agile manifesto and are crucial for agile teams’ success.

He defined intent-based leader-ship as characterizing an organiza-tion in which

• people are proud of being part of something bigger than themselves,

• people know and contribute to-ward the organization’s goal,

• people are leaders at all levels,• people feel inspired because

decision and control flow down to all levels of the organization, and

• organizational success is on ev-eryone’s shoulders.

Marquet also presented the in-teresting concept of blue work and red work. Blue work is cognitive work, decision work, and leader-ship work. Red work is execution, doing the physical work, following the processes, and performing com-pliant work. He suggested that you can characterize an organization by identifying who’s doing blue work and who’s doing red work.

In traditional, industrial-age or-ganizational design, the need ex-ists for only a small number of blue workers. Most organizations (mainly those that still maintain the command-and-control mind-set) have a few blue workers at the top who decide what everyone else will do. Marquet advocated for in-creasing the number of blue work-ers by pushing blue work further down the organizational hierar-chy. In his view, bots, algorithms, and robots increasingly perform the red work, ultimately reducing the need for red-work jobs. By making

and encouraging more blue work-ers, organizations will build more leaders because more people will do cognitive work and be involved in decision making. These organiza-tions will change from mostly red to mostly blue.

A video of Marquet’s keynote is at bit.ly/PD_2018_Jan_1, and he discusses this keynote in a podcast at bit.ly/PD_2018_Jan_2. His website (www.davidmarquet.com) has more information about this topic.

Adopting Continuous DeliveryJez Humble, known for his books on continuous delivery2 and lean enterprise,3 presented a keynote about continuous delivery. He first discussed common objections orga-nizations have to introducing con-tinuous delivery, including, “We’re regulated,” “We’re not building web-sites,” “We’ve got too much legacy,” and “Our people are too stupid.” He believes that the real reasons for re-sistance are poor organizational cul-ture and poor product architecture. He described how organizations can overcome the obstacles to adoption.

Humble used several real-world examples, including cloud.gov, HP firmware development, and the NUMMI (New United Motor Manufacturing Inc.) car plant, to convey his main point that most or-ganizations can likely benefit from

PRACTITIONERS’ DIGEST

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adopting agile practices and contin-uous delivery. But obtaining those benefits can require organizations to make a difficult cultural change and perform an architectural refactoring of existing systems.

A video of Humble’s keynote is at bit.ly/PD_2018_Jan_3. Additional presentations by Humble on continu-ous delivery and other topics are at bit.ly/PD_2018_Jan_4.

Overcoming Your Inner CriticIn the third keynote, Denise Jacobs talked about how people can over-come their own inner criticism.4 This topic is particularly important for

agile teams because they’re expected to self-organize and because the team members are expected to be empow-ered. However, these expectations are sometimes blocked by the individual team members’ inner criticism.

Jacobs believes the key to success is to identify this criticism’s source and, more important, what triggers this criticism. Her call to action is for people to fire their inner critic and get rid of the evil voices in their head. She encourages people to be inspired, be clear, tell everyone what you want to do, and take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves.

The full video of Jacob’s keynote is at bit.ly/PD_2018_Jan_5.

The Practitioner Conference Outreach InitiativeAt Agile 2017, IEEE Software had the second installment in its practi-tioner conference outreach initiative to increase the magazine’s visibility and recognition among practitio-ners. In collaboration with the Ag-ile Alliance (www.agilealliance.org), Software chaired the Future of Agile Software Development track. Here we report on two of the track’s eight presentations, which drew more than 600 participants.

Needed: Business Analysts and Systems EngineersIn “Do We Still Need Business An-alysts and Systems Engineers? Now More Than Ever!,” Amy Silberbauer from IBM discussed the importance of business analysts and systems engineers for coping with the chal-lenges that organizations and agile teams face. Because a project is more than just a single feature, business analysts and system engineers are im-portant for moving from an initial idea to a “wow” feature. The business analyst’s role is to bridge the gap rela-tive to business needs, problems, and specifications. The system engineer’s role is to bridge the gap in the design and the details of how requirements are implemented in the code.

Silberbauer believes that busi-ness analysts and system engineers are the new sheriffs in town, who wear many hats. They must have a significant skill set to be customer advocates, designers, architects, en-gineers, and orchestrators.

Silberbauer’s slides are at bit.ly /PD_2018_Jan_8. More information on this topic is at bit.ly/PD_2018 _Jan_6.

AB

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OR

S

RAFAEL PRIKLADNICKI is an associate professor at the

Computer Science School and the director of the Science and

Technology Park (Tecnopuc) at the Pontifical Catholic University

of Rio Grande do Sul, where he also leads the MuNDDoS research

group. He’s the chair of IEEE Software’s advisory board. Contact him

at rafaelp@pucrs.br.

CASPER LASSENIUS is a professor of software engineering

at Aalto University. He’s also on IEEE Software’s editorial board.

Contact him at casper.lassenius@aalto.fi.

JEFFREY C. CARVER is a professor in the University of Alabama’s

Department of Computer Science. Contact him at carver@ cs.ua.edu.

PRACTITIONERS’ DIGEST

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 | IEEE SOFTWARE 111

More Than AgileIn “Integral but Insignificant: Why the Future Needs More Than Agile to Be Successful,” Mike Griffiths ex-plained that organizations need more than just agile practices to execute a successful project. Organizations should adopt a multidisciplinary, context-sensitive model using leader-ship concepts, emotional intelligence, plan-driven development approaches, and industry-specific knowledge. All processes carry execution weight, whereas knowledge is weightless. So, teams should learn a lot while im-plementing a process that’s as light-weight as possible.

Griffiths suggested that current scaling frameworks such as SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) and LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) suffer from “Agile Myopia” (believing that agile

is the answer to everything) and the “Buffet Syndrome” (when presented with an array of processes, choosing too many). As a solution, he intro-duced an elastic model that suggests only the most effective approaches for a project’s characteristics.

More details about this presenta-tion are at bit.ly/PD_2018_Jan_7. For more information, contact Griffiths at mike@lendinganswers.com.

AcknowledgmentsWe thank the Agile Alliance and IEEE

Software for the opportunity to collabo-

rate on the practitioner conference out-

reach initiative.

References1. D. Marquet, Turn the Ship Around!

A True Story of Turning Followers

into Leaders, Portfolio, 2013.

2. J. Humble and D. Farley, Continuous

Delivery: Reliable Software Releases

through Build, Test, and Deployment

Automation, Addison-Wesley Profes-

sional, 2010.

3. J. Humble, B. O’Reilly, and J.

Molesky, Lean Enterprise: How

High Performance Organizations

Innovate at Scale, O’Reilly Media,

2015.

4. D. Jacobs, Banish Your Inner Critic:

Silence the Voice of Self-Doubt to

Unleash Your Creativity and Do

Your Best Work, Mango, 2017.

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