san marco schreef op 19 mei 2015 15:15:
Hans Aerts, vice president software development and agile coach at TomTom will talk about SAFe, Scrum and Agile in embedded software development at the Bits&Chips Software Engineering conference.
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Aerts: In 2012, Agile/Scrum was already used for years in TomTom, but could use some re-vitalization. Ideas within the organization on what to improve/strengthen were in line with the concepts found in the SAFe methodology. These ideas included:
Rigidity in
3 months release iterations and 3 weeks sprints
Time and Quality fixed, variation is in Scope (
no too early spec freeze)
Strong focus on quality,
move away from "full feature, full bug""Branching is evil": regular and frequent (not yet continuous) integration supported by a large set of automated tests
Clear "Definition of Done", (
binary decision, no 90%-done)
No buffers on the critical path, no management by commitment, no milestones
...
Driven by heads of development of the various Product Units
External consultants hired to support deployment ~400 engineering staff trained
Rally introduced for managing features and user stories and for estimating and
planning iterations and releases...
We defined roles in line with SAFe, and stopped all other roles. Also we simplified the organizational structure (SAFe like) with clearer decision processes and
feature/code ownership. There is no project organization anymore.
InfoQ: Since there is no project organization anymore, how do you manage product development? What are the major decisions points, and how are these decisions taken?
Aerts: Most teams have now implemented Agile Release Trains, led by a chief scrum master, for managing product development. Release dates are fixed, quality is fixed,
scope is variable. Scope is determined by the teams via decentralized planning, using fixed iteration lengths and team velocity measurements. Every sprint the teams show fully integrated, working software to key stakeholders.
Once per release, an Innovation and Planning sprint allows for estimating and release planning, innovation, education, and infrastructure work. ...
Aerts: The idea of throughput is part of the Theory of Constraints of which the guiding principle is that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. By focusing on throughput, we will reduce work-in-progress in each individual link, and thus optimize the result of the entire chain. ...
Custom Systems is a project organization delivering Connected Navigation Systems to multiple customers, often with a very traditional "waterfall" approach to systems development,
on multiple platforms, often developed in parallel to our software application. As a result we do projects with not only fixed Time and Quality, but also with a fixed Scope. And
without a stable platform at least in the earlier sprints, it is difficult to define a useful Definition of Done knowing that test automation has also not (yet) been realized on the target platform under development.
InfoQ: What has the adoption of SAFe brought TomTom so far? What do you expect that the future will bring?
Aerts: The GO600, the first product of the latest generation of portable navigation devices, was introduced in 2013.
Delivery took 140 days with the best quality ever. Since then we observe comparable improvements in other product development teams.