Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

Note: the 2013 Asia-Pacific Software R & D team Management Summit (hereinafter referred to as MPD Conference), hosted by MSUP, was held in Beijing and Shanghai on June 15 and June 22, respectively. Some programmers from Grape City attended the meeting in Shanghai.

The biggest benefit of this MPD software workshop training is that the trainer guides you to understand why, rather than telling you what to do directly. In fact, as long as you know where the goal is, you can get there no matter how you go.

Casual Baidu, we can understand that the definition of project management is "to achieve or exceed set requirements and expectations under limited resource constraints". In a word, it forms the iron triangle of project management, the demand is the scope, and the resources include time and cost.

Is this "definition" that has been passed down for many years correct? Motorola's Iridium plan, which plans to launch 77 satellites, achieved its goal "successfully" with only 66 satellites launched. It can be described as a cost project. The filming of the film Titanic was delayed many times and exceeded its budget, so it was a complete failure.

But what happened? What seems to be wrong? The satellites launched by the Iridium project are now fully furnished, while the Titanic is still the world's box office myth.

What's wrong with it?

Value is ignored in the iron triangle of our project management.

This is it. Our goal is to create value and achieve win-win results.

OK, the goal is here. There are many ways to reach the goal, and everyone will find a way. Agile has many schools and practices to help people achieve this goal. To understand what others do, the most important thing is to understand why they do it.

To create value, the first question is what is valuable. In other words, how to get valuable needs.

From a client? Customers always want faster carriages.

Customers often do not understand the requirements, but some of these unclear requirements are even the key to affect the entire structure.

From the planner of product staff? No one can say that the following design is more popular with users on the web.

From leaders, business consultants, operations teams?

It doesn't seem quite right.

Agile project management says real feedback from the market. To get real feedback from the market, we need to deliver valuable software continuously and early. Gain new value through market feedback.

If you do a good job at this point, it should belong to the major Internet companies. Release new features to the market every week or even every day to collect user feedback and responses, in addition to users' active feedback, but also include click rate, pageviews, user stay time and other access records. Quickly remove worthless functions based on feedback and enhance valuable functions to create more value. (when it comes to removing functionality, or even shutting down a worthless project, this is the charm of Agile, which not only allows projects to create value quickly, but also allows projects that cannot create value to fail quickly. Personal point of view: making a project that is bound to fail quickly can save a lot of resources and bring even higher value to the system! But this point is often overlooked. Think that Agile must lead the project to success. Think about the Iridium project. If it had been discovered earlier that it had no value, the world would have been different, at least Motorola. )

It sounds beautiful, but it is difficult to contact our reality. We can't immediately release new features to the market, we can't remove worthless features at will, and it's even difficult for us to get value information from the market. Sounds frustrated. Fortunately, however, we know what our goals are, we can do everything we can to collect user feedback, and we can influence some decisions through our voices to make what we do more valuable. This in itself is a win-win situation and should be gradually accepted.

Back to the point, continuous delivery is good and powerful, but it brings new problems. How to ensure the quality of delivery, if the software delivered to the market is not available at all or almost unavailable due to quality problems, it is impossible to get correct feedback. Agile answer, continuous integration, test-driven development.

Not to mention continuous integration, we did a good job. Whenever and wherever it comes up, test-driven development is a controversial topic because it doesn't seem so agile. What if writing a test script slows down a series of questions? How to ensure the quality of the test script? What if the test script creates an extra amount of work for the change? Wait. In fact, this is also the question in my mind. The usual answer is that test-driven development is worth the effort! Well, again, the goal is there, and there are many ways we can choose to achieve the goal of high-quality continuous delivery. Strengthen code review and do automatic test coverage for key functions and key modules. It even includes leaving some bug but fixing it in time after getting feedback from the user. Although theoretically not as effective as test-driven development, we can find a balance between investment and income according to our actual situation, and we are less likely to fall down even if we take a small step.

To sum up, the "iron triangle" of agile projects:

More emphasis on value and quality.

Of course, quality is very important, but the higher the quality, the better. For example, the recruitment website does not work for an hour or two, and the securities trading system does not work for an hour or two, the impact on users is certainly not the same. Therefore, the quality requirement depends on the background of the product and demand.

It can not be ignored that there is no mention in the Iron Triangle, but it is a vital link in Agile project management-people.

Value is created and served by people, and many agile practices revolve around people, trying to find a universal way to maximize human energy. Such as planning games, forming self-organizing teams, information disclosure and transparency, and collective commitment to goals. All are to mobilize the enthusiasm of the team and eliminate the factors that may affect the contribution of team members.

For agile practice, there are all kinds of weapons, and all kinds of martial arts are the essence of wisdom of famous masters. However, if you only know the moves and do not know the purpose of the moves, it is easy to be knocked down with one move.

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