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John Deere plows into agile

Tractor manufacturer adopts agile development process in what one analyst calls a 'big
bang' approach

Computerworld - John Deere & Co., has moved about 800 software developers into an
agile development process, and did so in just over a year.
This effort involved recreating the farm equipment maker's software development effort
around new teams that included developers, systems engineers, customer support and
marketing personnel, testers, all working in lose proximity.
This company, which reported $32 billion in revenue last year, replaced its cubicles
with U-shaped pods that removed barriers to team interaction.
The move to agile came "after some serious introspection in our development
organization," said Tony Thelen, the director of the Intelligent Solutions Group, part of
the company's enterprise IT operation.
There are a lot of companies that are moving to agile -- Forrester Research
conservatively estimates that 38% of businesses, from small to large, now use the
development methodology.
Many large firms move to agile incrementally, said Forrester analyst Tom Grant. John
Deere's approach, the "big bang" rollout, is less common, he said.
In many ways, Thelen said the company's software development had been "mirrored to
the way we develop tractors and combines and construction equipment."
John Deere was using waterfall-type development processes, where the requirements
are set and then the coders get to work to produce a deliverable. Agile processes
emphasize close collaboration and iterative development.
Thelen said the demands of the business required a faster development pace.
Deere's goal was to improve the most important aspects of its development efforts --
speed, innovation, quality, customer focus and teamwork. Agile met each of those
needs, Thelen said.
The company moved to agile development in Sept. 2010, and by last year had it fully
deployed among developers.
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"Breaking work down into smaller increments helped us with some of the quality
aspects," said Thelen. "The incremental reviews of the work allowed us to put more
eyes on the software code more often."
Assembling teams based on the project to be delivered and sitting everyone together
"was extremely beneficial for teamwork and also for collaboration around what it really
means to focus in on what a customer wants and needs," said Thelen.
Thelen's software development organization produces everything from Web site
updates to systems that run on tractors.
Some of the work involves building systems that keep tractors traveling straight, within
one inch of a set path, without the customer having to the touch the wheel.
Deployment of software developed using the agile process may take as quickly as a
day for a Web site. New software for a tractor display, for instance, is being produced
about twice a year but the goal is to get that to eight times a year.
"We want to be able to deploy at any time that's required - we are trying to have
successful builds every day," said Chad Holdorf, the group's agile coach.
Deere is also deploying new software, a project management platform made by Rally
Software, to help align its development effort. It will help "give us more visibility to the
bigger things that are happening" and track multiple projects, said Holdorf.
Forrester's Grant said agile adoption is happening across the board in all industries,
even in highly regulated ones.
Many of these organizations will have numerous agile experiments going on
simultaneously, but at John Deere, "it's more of a determined investment," said Grant,
who is familiar with the company's effort.
The approach taken by John Deere is valid, says Grant, and the large deployment
helps to meet resistance that may arise during an incremental rollout as well as
improve coordination, said Grant. "If there is any institutional inertia there is a much
better chance of overcoming it," he said.
The case for agile development has been made, and it came at the worst possible time,
in 2009 during the recession, said Grant. The economy forced people to think about the
way they were innovating, he said.
Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government
IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on
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Twitter at @DCgov, or subscribe to Patrick's RSS feed . His e-mail address is
pthibodeau@computerworld.com.


It's not the coding that's hard, it's the people
The still-risky business of software development

Computerworld - The data about software development is sobering. Many projects end
up over budget and behind schedule, and one study puts the failure rate at one in five.
The path to better projects may be for software developers to become better people. A
recent conference on agile development had "new age"-sounding sessions such as "An
Introduction to Non-Violent Communication for Agile Coaches," "Fear Driven
Impediments" and "Collaborating with Non-Collaborators."
The stakes involved in getting software projects right can be huge. Development
projects costing millions of dollars can become such a mess that businesses turn to
people such as Billie Blair, an organizational psychologist and president and CEO of
consulting firm Change Strategists Inc., to untangle the disorganization.
In nearly every case, Blair said the source of all project dysfunction is the project
manager.
"Anything that goes awry in a company," said Blair, "can always be traced back to the
manager."
Often enough, the project manager isn't ready for the job. Engineers, IT professionals
and highly skilled technical people can be appointed project managers under the
mistaken belief that if they have good technical skills, "then it follows that they will be a
good manager," said Blair. Businesses and organizations don't always recognize that
management is a skill in itself, she said.
Project managers have to deal well with people, embrace conflicts and not run from
them, know how to assist people in sorting things out, and be compelling, said Blair.
Engineers and IT professionals "are wonderful at what they do and their skill set, but
generally those managing skills are not there and they have to acquire them," she said.
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The people part of building software appears to be getting much more attention thanks
to agile software development, which emphasizes communications, collaboration, rapid
production of code and frequent feedback. It's a less rigid approach that requires a
more flexible person at all levels, and not just at the manager level.
That is in contrast to some traditional development methods, waterfall in particular,
which calls for getting all the requirements upfront and then moving through the
development process one phase after another.
With traditional methods, "it's only at the end that you discover that you have a real
problem," said Todd Little, a senior development manager for Landmark Graphics
Corp., which makes applications for the oil and gas industry.
With agile development, you are constantly delivering working software at each stage
of the process "that's available for discovery," and "each time you are closing in on
reducing the overall uncertainty of the project."
To help accomplish that, Little focuses on the workplace culture, emphasizing highly
collaborative teams.
When dealing with project problems, "very rarely are they technical challenges; almost
always, the challenges are with people," said Little, who was chairman of the Agile
2011 conference in August, where the sessions mentioned above were held.
The Standish Group surveys software development for a study it releases every two
years. Its most recent survey, released this year, collected data on 10,000 projects.
It found that 37% of the software development projects in its study were successful,
meaning that they came in on time and on budget and that the users accepted them. It
categorized 42% of the projects as challenges. These were projects that had problems
such as being late, being over budget, or not having everything users wanted. The
remaining 21% were failures, meaning they weren't completed or were rejected by the
customer.
But the success rate of projects improved by 5% from two years ago, said Jim
Johnson, the chairman of Standish. That may be due to more agile projects, as well as
the types of projects undertaken during the recession, including fewer ERP
installations.
Johnson offers caveats to the report's finding. Project failure, for instance, can be a
good thing.
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"If a firm doesn't have any failures they are not pushing the envelope," said Johnson,
who cites Apple's development history, which includes failures that nonetheless have
helped spawn successful products.
Johnson said an important key to a successful project is having a strong executive
sponsor.
"People don't make decisions very quickly, and I think that's the death knell for
projects," Johnson said. The reason the agile process works so well "is because it
creates velocity" that leads to fast decisions.
Also key, said Johnson, is project optimization, or focusing on what's important. "Too
many of them grow out of control, and you really need to focus on the real high-value
items and work on those, and I think that's one of the things the agile process does," he
said.
Ben Blanquera, who led agile development as vice president of IT at Progressive
Medical in Columbus, Ohio, and is now a consultant, said the "premise with agile is you
can break these things up to what is the smallest piece, the most viable product."
"The notion here is fast feedback," said Blanquera, "there has to be rapid iteration."
Standish's categorizations are debated.
The danger with the "challenge" definition, said Little, is that many of the projects that
were delivered late or had less scope than originally intended "were nonetheless
successful in the eyes of the business."
Agile has its own issues as well.
Barry Boehm, the director of the University of Southern California Center for Systems
and Software Engineering, said agile is good at getting a project fielded early and
evolving it as necessary, but it does have "some failure modes."
One problem with agile is what's called "easiest first" or "technical debt," which
basically means that a developer, in the interest of pleasing users and customers, may,
for instance, put everything in main memory "and the thing performs like a flash and the
users love it" until eventually nothing fits in main memory anymore "and you have
something that is an architectural breaker."
Developers may hold off putting in security features until a later point in the
development, when they have already put in so many insecure features that there is no
way to work security into it later, Boehm said.
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Agile is good for smaller projects, and ones where the requirements are rapidly
changing. It also works "in an organization where people feel comfortable or
empowered," said Boehm.
Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government
IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on
Twitter at @DCgov or subscribe to Patrick's RSS feed . His e-mail address is
pthibodeau@computerworld.com.