Practical Experiences of Agility in the Telecom Industry XP 2003 conference Jari Vanhanen Helsinki University of Technology Software Business and Engineering Institute Jouni Jartti and Tuomo Kähkönen Nokia Research Center

Background of the Study  Agility is perceived important in the case company  A research project was started to  increase and transfer knowledge of agile practices inside the company  provide support material for projects aiming at agility  A tentative list of agile practices was compiled based upon literature  22 practices that seemed to be relevant  mostly XP practices  This study was part of the research project  finding out the current state in the company  validating the tentaive practice list Agility the ability to adapt to changing situations appropriately, quickly and effectively

Research Method and Questions  Three projects out of seven selected for the study  selected because they were claimed to be the most active in using agile practices  two semi-structured interviews per project  Research questions 1.Which agile practices were used in these projects? 2.What experiences were reported on the use of those practices?  Analysis  quantification of the adoption level of agile practices  qualitative experiences Adoption Level 3 considerable use 2 moderate use 1 minor use 0 practically no use

Case Projects  Used processes were not based on any published agile methodologies, except in project C (partial adoption of some XP practices)  Use of agile practices was more emergent than planned  Working in a way that feels natural, and has worked before

The Most Adopted Practices  Measure progress by working code  weekly deliveries to the customer  short feedback loop  Developers estimate task efforts  in all cases developers at least refined the original estimates  Limited documentation  apprenticeship-style training was successful for transferring knowledge  Team develops its processes  in all cases the whole team could affect the process  process development was led by the project manager or organization

The Least Adopted Practices  Pair programming  only pair debugging  Testing  unit testing found too hard  writing tests first not even tried  conventional testing methods used instead

“New” Practices  Technical authority  technically competent project manager  able to make decisions more quickly  more courage to remove control elements from the process  Team continuity  core personnel, e.g. lead architects, remains same over the years  less technical documentation required  survival of the architecture

Emergence of Practices vs. Managed Adoption  Positive  developers consider emergent practices useful  Negative  wasting effort, ”re-inventing the wheel”  some practices are neglected  unfamiliar practices  practices that are harder to adopt  Lack of agile testing practices in the projects was interesting  they are considered crucial as a basis for other agile practices  Was this the reason for the rather low adoption level of some other agile practices?

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