The thousands of developers at the Nationwide family of insurance companies are exemplary practitioners of agile software development. They are led by Tom Paider, who uses a list that he calls the “21 Agile Tea Leaves” to measure how well any one team is doing.
- Whole Team
- Open Workspace
- Daily Standup Meetings
- Big Visible Charts
- Retrospectives
- Customer Collaboration
- Collective Code Ownership
- Simple & Evolutionary Design
- Test Driven Development
- Refactoring
- Continuous Integration
- Automated Regression Tests
- Technical Debt
- Pair Programming
- Sustainable Pace
- Iterations/Sprints
- Iteration Planning Meetings
- Show & Tells
- Frequent Releases
- Release Planning Meetings
- Story Cards w/Acceptance Criteria
Previously, I posted what I called an Agile Dependencies Chart. These two documents are remarkably similar in content. Other than the obvious fact that
Paider’s Tea Leaves is a simple list while my chart attempts to put the items in some semblance of order, the big differences are:
- Paider’s mention of “Technical Debt” reminds me that I ought to add a green “Technical Debt” bubble to my chart upon which Technical Maturity depends. I’d be inclined to also draw a line to it from “Honest Developer Estimates” indicating that honest estimates rely on knowing how much of a debt load is being carried and that the interest and/or principle payments being made on that debt must be factored in.
- My “Early, Frequent Feedback” block should say “Early, Frequent Releases & Feedback”
- My “Automated Acceptance Tests” bubble should say “Automated Acceptance & Regression Tests”
That would bring my chart up to 24 nodes, not counting the four yellow summarizing nodes.
I recently met Mr. Paider at an Agile conference in Las Vegas, where he gave a case-study address about Nationwide’s agile practices. I had the pleasure of chatting with Paider afterwards. He told me he felt it was important to keep his Tea Leaves list down to 21 — that that was plenty. He says he gets people coming up to him all the time and asking, “Well, what about adding (fill-in-the-blank)?”, to which his answer is if your team has the 21 tea leaves covered, they you’re undoubtedly doing (blank) as well.
So, the conversation left me pondering if my chart could be further simplified. When I’m done pondering, I’ll let you know, and I’ll post a new version of my chart. In the mean time, what do you think?