2. Blaine Wastell
Program Manager
Microsoft
Session Code:

3. Session Objectives And Takeaways
Session Objectives:
Learn how p&p uses agile techniques
Learn the experience from practitioners using agile process
in over a dozen projects
Why is agile important and what is unique about
p&p’s perspective?
Understand the challenges and techniques used to scale
agile in a distributed team environment
Key Take-aways:
Walk away with an understanding about what has worked
well and consistently
Walk away with justification for using these practices in your
(customer) teams

4. Our Ivory Tower

5. Future Project Lifecycle
Understanding the Problem Building the Solution Describing the Solution
FINAL
CTP Release
Flow Vision & Scope M0
Weekly code & guidance drops
Guidance
Release
Project Code & Guidance Code
Research
Planning Development Release
Media
Release
Candidate architecture
User Stories
Effort
Planning Code Development Testing Guidance Development Media & Marketing Dev Final Production & Release
NOTE – Team stays together after code release to build media and guidance based on code. A project is considered
DONE when all of the features have been released

6. Conchango Diagram

7. Customer Connected Engineering
Communication
Breadth: Codeplex communities
Depth: Customer Advisory Boards
Think in terms of stories not features
Software from the customer perspective
Frequent checkpoints with customers
Using frequent drops to the communities
Customer workshops
Advisory meetings

8. Planning and Estimation
Be date driven
Maintain prioritized
story backlog
Choose initial t-shirt size
Play the planning game
Monitor velocity
Plan for iteration zero

9. Low-Fi Iteration Planning: Warm

10. Hi-Fi Iteration Planning: Still Warm

11. Team Formation
Program management
Dev lead + developers
Test lead + testers
Technical Writer(s)
Domain experts (SMEs)
Core teams with consistent members
Consultants available
But it’s about what you do, not job titles!

12. Team Tasks… The Game
What do you do on the team?
Product Portfolio
Business Customer
Arch
PdM
Dev
PgM
Design and Test
Risk Assesment
Coding

13. Distributed Teams
This is the
reality of software
development today
Maximize communication
Join project kick off iteration
More formal story management
There is only one team not local and remote
Everyone participates in daily stand-ups
Frequent on site visits
Time zones harder to manage
than distance

14. pig > chicken > cow

15. Quality

16. Quality – Done (Feature Level)
A story is done when:
The acceptance criteria are agreed upon
The team has a test/set of tests (preferably automated) that prove
the acceptance criteria are met
The code to make the acceptance tests pass is written
The unit tests and code are checked in
The Continue Integration (CI) server can successfully build the code
base
The acceptance tests pass on the bits the CI server creates
No other acceptance tests or unit tests are broken
Documentation is written for the feature
The customer proxy signs off on the story

17. Process Agnostic Practices
Unit testing (tests are assets not liability)
Test-Driven Development (TDD)
Continuous Integration (CI)
Acceptance testing (automate what makes
sense)
Iteration planning
Daily stand-ups
Retrospectives
Sustainable pace
You don’t have to be agile to get benefits…

18. Challenges
Too many cooks
Rewarding teams
Team continuity
Teams should feel empowered and encouraged
to address their challenges within the team
Learn from us!

19. Come see the p&p space

20. Questions?

21. Related Content
Microsoft patterns & practices
msdn.microsoft.com/practices
Codeplex communities
codeplex.com/Project/ProjectDirectory.aspx?
TagName=patterns%20%26%20practices

22. Summary
Agile is not a silver bullet
p&p successfully uses Distributed Agile
Find ways to connect with your customer early and often
Continuous integration gives confidence to respond to
change
Agile works because of short delivery cycles and constant
improvement
Where possible work with someone that successfully
applied agile on a previous project

24. © 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Windows, Windows Vista and other product names are or may be registered trademarks and/or trademarks in the U.S. and/or other countries.
The information herein is for informational purposes only and represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation as of the date of this presentation. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should
not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information provided after the date of this presentation. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS,
IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.