Mission Critical Agile

Adopting agile practices for mission critical systems, creating a “insurance policy”:

• sustainable pace
• broccoli planning, using a season beat as well as a heart beat; use the season beat to deploy small releases (to mitigate risks and grow confidence and credibility); synchronize your releases and system integration tests to the season beat, not the other way around
• use the week out of time between any two consecutive season beats to celebrate and reflect on the previous beat and plan the next
• order the product backlog:
  • risk-driven order
  • value-driven order
  • theme-driven order: adopt a key focus or theme for every season beat
• broccoli governance, a.k.a. sociocracy—in fact, holacracy is the fruitful allegation of agile and sociocracy.
• test-driven development—evolve an ever growing test suite guarantees quality (also see Jini Community Pattern Language)
• continuous integration
• continuous deployment
• acceptance test-driven development using Gherkin language to specify acceptance criteria that can be tested automatically.
• vibrant personas
• persona teams
• customer on site
• scenarios define the wish
• gilb p-language
• behavior-driven development
• slash the code base and prune any code—smaller code bases are easier to grasp, contain less bugs; continuously refactor code using an ordered refactoring wish list.
• stable teams
• elegant design—simplicity, efficiency, consistency, completeness, coherence
• identify high-risk areas
• multidisciplinary teams
• cook a team
• pair programming to
  • eliminate code review—there's a ton of objective, scientific even, information on why and how pair programming boosts quality, speed and productivity
  • spread knowledge and principles, patterns and practices
• evolutionary prototype everything
• Use sacred ceremonies like sprint planning meeting, weekly product backlog grooming meeting, sprint review meeting, daily scrum meeting
• Drive the product backlog order by a shallow hierarchy of goals
• trunk only revisions minimizes or even eliminates the effort to merge, synchronize and coordinate branches and eases configuration management
• product owner formally accepts results
• foreign eyes audit quality—use an external party that reviews, audits, scrutinizes the product as a whole.
• Aim for low defect density, defined as the number of SIT (System Integration and Test) found defects per KLOC.
• Set a bug count ceiling and technical debt ceiling and make them come down.
• Define criticality class governs rigour (see http://artisansoftwareconsulting.com/blogs/?tag=agile-development)

Sources

• http://www.tem-sw.com/library/XP%20for%20Large%20System%20Mission%20Critical.pdf
• see sources at broccoli planning
• http://www.niwotridge.com/PDFs/ADC%20Final.pdf
• http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0701010.pdf
• http://artisansoftwareconsulting.com/blogs/?tag=agile-development
• http://www.agilejournal.com/articles/columns/case-studies/313-case-study-war-stories-fighter-jets-and-agile-development-at-lockheed-martin
• http://www.agilejournal.com/articles/columns/case-studies

Other pearls

• yesterday’s weather