 Agile Manifesto talks about individuals and interactions over processes and tools. And I think that's a great inclusion. Agile is a social experiment. And over the period of time, what I have felt is that these interactions have been addressed quite a lot. However, the eye in the individual is still remaining to be addressed properly. So that's where we're kind of today filling in the gap. And I would like to talk about the transformation in the light of an individual today. So that is the setting, the context here. So I'd like to begin by, quote, to know is good, to live is better, and to be, that is perfect. So that's the opening punch. And we really want to be, and as Diana mentioned today in her keynote, fluency is something that you do without thinking. So it's kind of getting into the bones, not at the surface level, right? And going further from here, so just to expound upon what really can get into the bones. First of all, we have values, principles, and practices, just kind of gloss over the kind of dictionary meaning. Values are something that is very important to an individual. And to be able to, when an individual acts or behaves, they really come out from the core heart or the inner part. So those are the values which kind of come ahead in the express in terms of behavior. Secondly, what are principles? Principles are kind of the glue, which helps you translate the values into action. And finally, you have the practice, which is the actual application of your values in your day-to-day action, right? So just to talk about examples. Yeah, so if you take a quick example, a lot of us practice unit testing as a practice. We use unit testing as a practice. Now if we ask ourselves what is the value that we are actually after, it's really feedback. What we're trying to gain there is feedback, different kinds of feedback. That's one of the values that we want from unit testing. And the principle that we're trying to hear meet is basically fail fast. We want to get faster feedback so we can fail. So if you try to take unit testing as a practice, what is the real value and the principle behind it is something like this. Let's take another example. Why do we write self-documenting code? We write self-documenting code so that we have declarative expression. Why do we care about declarative expression? We care about declarative expression because we want our code to be communicative, right? I mean, that's the reason we use a higher order language. Else we would be writing code in zeros and ones, right? It's about declarative expression. It's about communication. But you get it through declarative expression, right? So there's a couple of quick examples. Let's take something else, right? How many people here have heard the term MVP before? Quite a few people. That's the new fashion these days, if you will, right? MVP stands for minimum viable product, right? And if you think about the essence behind the MVP, what is it about? Why do I care about an MVP? Is it so that I can go through the build measure learn cycle quickly? That's a means, right? The value that you really care about is validated learning. And just doing this does not mean you're going to get validated learning. So is MVP really a practice or a ritual? I'll talk about an example I recently came across in a company where they used this term called MVP very, you know, it's like the most fashionable thing today, right? Everyone should be doing MVPs. So you're like, OK, what is MVP? And they say, well, our first release is an MVP. How long is your first release? Six months. So you're building an MVP for six months. Yes. Perfect. I mean, you get the idea that what MVP is, you're going to try and take a small subset of it and do all of that stuff. But isn't that too much of building and very little of learning? So as a ritual, you've got all the words, the vocabulary, the terminology going very well. But when it comes to realizing the real value, it's a question mark. So you can do a little better than that, right? So if you think about how to improve from there, let's say we build a mini version of what we envision and we try and quickly put that out there, right? This is kind of trying to validate your most important hypothesis, right? And now you're talking about something more deeper, something more meaningful with regards to MVP. We could go further down and we could say, you know what? I don't even need that fancy application. I can simply have a Google Doc and I can validate my business idea, right? That gives me validated learning and quickly, if I can move through that cycle, I am thinking, I am believing, I'm being what the idea behind an MVP is. But we can do better than that. What is better than that? Can I have audio on this? Audio? So about a year ago, we had an idea. So my name's Paul Howell. I'm going to talk about a specific technique that my startup has used to conduct really realistic, really effective user tests of our ideas. So about a year ago, we had an idea for a social purchase sharing app where you would stream out what you're buying to your friends and they would share back with you what they were buying and it was going to be great and it was going to be a social networking take on product reviews. And being a lean startup, we mocked it up. Static prototypes, we got it in front of a lot of people. And they said, you know, I'm not going to use it, but I could see how other people might use it. And then we heard that again and again. And we said, well, why wouldn't you use it? And they said, because I don't know which of my friends would actually use this. And it made sense. It's a social application. And if they don't see the real faces of their friends that they can emotionally connect with, they can't actually grok what it's going to be about. So I said, all right, we need to make this a more realistic test than what we've done. And we drilled down on the most important interaction on the site, which is when someone does a purchase and shares it on Facebook and it appears in their friend's news feed. And we're interested, would people actually click? Would they care? So we thought about how can we make this realistic? Do we have to build the whole thing and build this pretty serious sized app to do this? Or could we fake it really well? We decided to try to fake it. And the technique we used was a grease monkey script. So if you're not familiar with grease monkey, it's just a simple little JavaScript that can change the way a website appears. So here's an Amazon product page. After I installed grease monkey, it now pops up every time I go there a little yellow box that shows competitors' prices. So it's specific to one page, and it alters that page. So I went on renacoder.com, described what I wanted. And I found a guy in the Philippines was willing to build their script for $40. We sent our $40 across the ocean. And a few days later, sure enough, back in the script. And it's pretty simple. There's the whole thing right there. You just drag that into Chrome or to Firefox. And it wakes up every time it gets on its target page. So every time we went to Facebook, it would wake up, and it would run itself. So the next thing we do is our standard procedure. We post an ad on Craigslist. Say we're running a social media focus group. We bring people in. Say, what's your favorite social media site? And invariably, they'd say Facebook. They'd say, great, why don't you log into Facebook? That's a great idea. And up would pop their news feed. And they're feeling totally in control, seems very realistic. Their news feed pops up, and the grease monkey script runs, and it inserts fake content into their feed. And it's using their real friends' names and faces. So it's pixel-perfect real. If we'd built the whole thing, it wouldn't have looked any different than that. And so then we sat back and said, well, are they going to notice this content that our app would normally insert into their feed? And sure enough, no prompting. They were like, wait a minute. My friend, Michelle, bought a Lady Gaga album. My friend, Charlie, bought an iPad. And they noticed. And they reacted very strongly. I hated it. This is how Facebook is going to hell. It used to be about friends. And now it's about commercial stuff. I remember back in the day, we would share poetry. And now I hate these ads. And we did it 50 times. And there were three people who liked it. So it was a very different reaction than when we did the initial prototypes. And it really wasn't that hard to do. It was a $40 script. So that's my main point. Don't think that you just have to do with paper. You can do something better. So one thing to explain about grease monkey, it only works on the computer that you're testing on. So it's good for one-on-one. We couldn't really change that. I'm going to pause now. You get the point. So this is taking the whole MVP idea to almost another level. And I would argue that in spirit, in value, this is actually getting you directly over there without actually really having to build anything or trying to do anything fancy. So MVP doesn't really mean that you have to build something to get MVP, to get validated learning. It's about focusing on validated learning and how quickly can we get there. So that's just a quick example of thinking at these levels and how we want to help all of us to start focusing on the values rather than getting caught up in the practices. While the rituals, the practices are important, you really need to dive straight into the values. And so we're going to take a few more examples. And we're going to turn it into a workshop, which means we want participation from your side. And let's try and take a few more agile practices and see if do we really do them as rituals or is there ways to really get to the core of the value behind them. So let's talk about stand-ups. Do you want to talk about stand-ups? Yeah, well, we always go to the stand-up. How many of you really go to the stand-up and ask these three stereotype questions? What did I do yesterday? What am I going to do today? And what are the problems that I'm facing? And your stand-up is done. How boring is that? Every day, you come in at work and ask these three questions. Do you feel ritualistic about this at some point? Why am I doing this? So is this really? It's funny. One of the speakers before, at some time, I just popped in and they were talking about, we've done this. We've scaled it at the entire program level. And this is just working really. And we ask these three questions. I'm like, oh, my god, where are we heading? So let's make this realistic. What I want is I want seven volunteers. I want seven volunteers to come in here, please. Come in quickly, seven volunteers. It's not going to be too hard. Good. Can we have someone from the back, please? Yes, thank you. Go ahead. One more, one more. Last one more person. We need seven. Thank you. Thank you. You're going to be the scrum master. Whoever shows up last is the scrum master. All right, what these guys are working on, they're working on a dinner project. You guys are working on a dinner project and you're going to do your stand-up today. What are the three questions you're going to answer? What did you eat last night? What do you plan to eat tonight? And are there any roadblocks? So while these guys do this, I want the rest of you to observe the body language and what's going on over here. My name is Karthik. So Karthik, I just want to know from the entire team what you all ate yesterday. And what do you plan to eat today? Are there any problems we are having? Just to take care of your health, that's about it. You see, we have got an important meeting coming up next week. And I want to ensure that all of you all are fit and fine, OK? That's the only reason. So let's be assured. OK, I'll start. So what I had yesterday, I really had very boring dinner. I had rice and dal, very old dals. So today I was really looking forward to have something nice. But I haven't thought about what it is, but I really want to have something really nice and fine dining perhaps. Bottlenecks or roadblocks, I was just thinking, OK, how long it's going to take today? So will the restaurants be open by the time I get back home? So that could be possibly the bottleneck. Maybe the, you know, I would say that and the traffic. That's pretty much it. Cabbage and potato yesterday. No meat for me. Roadblock is that Navratras are going on, so no meat. And the plan is to have dinner here today. I'm not a native of this place. So I had yesterday Rava Idli and Rava Dosa. And today the roadblock, which I see is that I, whether I'll be able to find the same way for the same restaurant or not. It is a roadblock for today currently. I had a rice ball with some tangy sauce, which was really terrible. And I don't know if I again end up with the same thing tonight. I don't know, it's a roadblock, but it's terrible. Yesterday I had a chapati with cauliflower. Tonight I don't know what my wife is preparing. Actually, it could be same. The roadblock is I had to go back to home. I don't know the traffic. It'll be the Bangalore traffic is the real roadblock to reach home actually on time. So what I had yesterday is the Idli. I think the Idli battle is already left. It is very light for dinner to have very light food. And that's why, and also the Idli battle is left. That's why today also the plan is to prepare Idli itself if not Dosa. Let us see whether it will be boring for my family. But that is my plan. The issues are every day my family complains me that every day you prepare the same food. The issue with me is I don't get time to prepare a different variety of the food since I am a working woman. Thank you team for your time. I have noted down all your notebooks. And we'll meet today at 3 PM. Individually I'll call each one of you and we'll resolve the issue. But you won't waste this time right now. Thank you so much for your time. Scrimmaster doesn't give updates. All right, I want you to just hang in here. Thanks for the wonderful stand up. What did you guys observe? What did you guys observe? Anything you want to share about the stand up? Was there real value in the stand up? Look to me like a status update. I didn't see any value out of this stand up. The reason being is that everybody discussed impediments but nobody asked how we can solve those impediments. And Scrummaster was behaving like a team leader or something like that. He was interested in his team's updates. Neither he gave his updates. OK, so that's good points. Any other observations? Yeah, we will go there. Team members were not team members. They were not taken to Itai Chaza. They were taken to Scrummaster as a manager. And they were divided by a huge place of empty space, really. Hi, so I think they were not pretty sure what they're going to do next. They were like, OK, they know what they have done. But what are their plans? That was pretty dicey. And nobody was very confident. I noticed that while they were all working on the same thing, they weren't a team. They weren't all trying to achieve the same goal. They were all performing the same tasks. So there wasn't an actual thing they were all driving for together. Like, hey, how are we going to make dinner together today? Oh, well, I'm going to get this, and then you're going to get that, and then, anyway. That was just what I noticed. Ritualistic way of doing a stand-up. A lot of teams, this is a good starting point. Let's not take it in the wrong line. It's a good starting point. But you need to do better than that. I mean, people have highlighted some things that they observe, and we can improve on that. So let's give it another try. We'll do take two. This time, we want to be genuinely interested in what people are doing, and if we can help each other. If we can really work like a team and be genuinely interested in each other's lending and help, or whatever. So do you want to do another quick stand-up? So guys, they mentioned we have a very important meeting coming up, so we all are going to be a part of a big process. So we have a very important project also. That's one of the core reasons. So just let's be form a circle. OK, so what I want you all to do, we need to plan out that we don't have anything, like, which is out of the way and can cause disruptions during the upcoming important project. So let's see how we have planned out food items since yesterday, and we can just think about it. And if anyone has any issues, we can just take care of it. Why do you want to do it again today? I'm not doing it. I can do it. Just take two, OK? OK. It's a scenario that we have a very important project coming up, and we need to plan out. So I have got some solutions. Maybe I'll have some solutions. We can all discuss as a team how we can take it forward. Yeah, but that time, we did not have those issues so much. But I've got recently a big mail coming in from management, the value of the project and all. Let's give it a shot. Let's go around. Give it a shot, right? This time, what you need to focus on is let's keep the three-question format that we have. But try and be genuinely interested in what other people are saying, and if you can actually help, right? Let's give it another shot. Same answer, sir. Same question. Same answer. But can it be different? We're saying we'll keep the same questions, but can we see any difference? So I had Rava Idli in Rava Dosa yesterday. And I'm not a native of this place. Do I love South Indian food? So my friend took me yesterday. Unfortunately, he's coming late today. So if you can give me solutions, how to move ahead? I mean, that would be great. Otherwise, I think that is what I'm seeing as an impediment for today. But I don't know the name of the restaurant. I have forgotten that. No, it's just not all similar. I'm planning to cook Maggie. You want to join me? I mean, I'm staying in 6-2 when you can join. I'm at home. So I am going to prepare an Idli only, not Rava Idli, but it is going to be the Rice Idli. If you want to join them, you know, inviting you. Yeah, I'd say, again, I'm telling the same thing. I think today I'll stack up with the traffic in the evening. So any suggestion to reach home in a better location? So we can have dinner at the restaurant. Go home, you mean, to say? Yeah. I mean, I think it's just playing in 5-8 minutes. OK, fine. I think that's a good idea, I think. We can try it out, actually. Join you, too. Guys, I'm planning to order some light sandwiches today evening. I would really love that each one of you would join us. We can have a nice time out around there. OK, observations. I think this time this was more like, you know, you have a problem statement you're kind of trying to get to a solution out there. And I could see a lot of people participating into it, into a theme which is already said then. As a relative context to the first session, it was a barred, it's like a Q&A kind of a thing. Everyone was trying to prepare what to answer for those three questions. Probably that was in the top of their mind. That's the difference I could notice this time. So how long did it take? Do you think we could optimize this? Could it be better in terms of the time taken? I also noticed a few people skipped their turns. That's interesting. Is that not violating the rules laid by the scrum gods? They're nothing to offer to the gods. So they just skipped their turns. But this is supposed to be bad, right? Skipping turns. Everyone's supposed to give their part of the update. Fantastic point, right? That's what we're kind of driving to. It's not that you have to answer the three questions. Every single person has to answer the three questions. As long as, as a team, you are understanding how to help each other in making progress. You have some kind of a game plan for today. I think it's good enough, right? You can work the entire day. It's not just the stand-up. Let's do one last take away, last take at this, where basically, let's drop the three questions, right? We're not going to answer the three questions. Let's focus on what is the game plan for today? What is your goal and how you're going to try and achieve? We're going to slightly change it. So let's say I'm giving you the goal saying, let's say we have a guest for dinner today, and we as a team have to work on that. That's our short-term goal right now, right? So as a team, what are you going to do, right? So you're going to discuss that as a part of your stand-up and see how we're going to achieve that goal that we have for today. And we're going to drop the three questions. Okay? So we're going to also drop the scrum master and go straight to this. So we have a guest today. So how do we go about it? So what's the game plan? What do you think we have to do? We have to plan for menu, what the guest is from which country and culture, so that we can accordingly plan. Yes, that also we have. I feel like I came to know that he loves kabab. So I'll order some starters initially. In the meantime, we can cook something, but then that'll save time and get the conversation started. So that is what I do. But do we have any budget constraints? No, big budget constraints, but you know, just ensure that you do not order any craps. He does not like craps. Last time he ate craps and he was having an upset stomach. So just, that's about it. I'll volunteer with the dishes and the salads. I'll take care of digits. I'll take care of who have the main course. So we have to be up to the next level to be able to take care of it. Okay, we'll take care of it, but we do not decide what we are going to serve. So what do we have to decide what we are going to serve? So I think there was a suggestion that we will serve a starter. Come on, put it on the table. Yeah, that would be a nice thing. Yeah, ice cream would be a lot better, but yeah. I'll go on. I'll go on. So who will you go to? Yeah. So we take care of digits. Yeah. I'll take care of main course. So buying things he will take care of while speaking. I'll go and pick him up from the airport. Okay. So I'll give you more of my money to him. Okay. Okay. Let's meet them. All right. Thank you. So what did you guys observe? Anything different this time? From eating dinner to... It went all the way up to serving dinner as in they were participating to serve the dinner themselves. And somewhere it moved from a restaurant to the self-service or they hosting the dinner themselves. That's part of it. So I was alluding to that. The statement is we have a guest for dinner tonight, but it doesn't qualify anything further, which is meaning like in what format and fashion, which gives room for interpretation. It's a larger, broader, open-ended statement, rather, not a question. Yeah, they did come up with an aspect of approach to solve that. Given the statement, yes. This time it was much better. The entire team members, they were trying to synchronize their activities to achieve the goal. That was actually... Yeah, so that was the real move towards the proper stand-up. I don't know what a proper stand-up is though, but we'll figure it out. Well, the team self-organized this time. There was an emergent way of planning it. Their focus remained on achieving the goal that was to serve the dinner, including the guest. And there was no particular person, like a scrum master, who was this meeting held for, but this is a team's meeting, which they carried out as a team meeting. And somebody was asking questions to each other that who's going to do that, and everybody volunteered that I'm going to pick up the kebab, and somebody said I'm going to do this. So that's a great one. So there are few key words that I would look at, right? One is observation from the team. So initially, we had a goal. We have got guests for dinner tonight. The team here, rather than just planning for dinner, they were actually thinking how to make the customer happy, guest happy, you know, by giving him food of his choice and food of his liking. They're thinking about it. So that's a value addition which I was thinking from the team perspective. When you leave the teams to kind of self-organize, they start looking at doing something more than what was just there on your backlog or whatever you have, right? They look at really delivering value. So there's a couple of quick things I want to highlight, right? One is volunteerism and the whole self-organizing volunteerism thing. Now, if we impose the three rules, three questions, do you think that would come? It becomes more of status giving and status taking, right? But is that bad? I mean, is that bad? That's really the essence of what we want to talk through through various different things, right? It's not bad, but it doesn't add value. So is it fair to say that you need to start somewhere and you need to start with those rules in place, but you need to very quickly learn how to grow out of them, right? Those are like training wheels, you need to grow out of them. And we kind of saw a quick demonstration of three different stand-ups and then some variations across those three stand-ups, right? Hopefully, we are moving closer towards the value. What would be the next evolution from here? Where could we go from here? Maybe the next stuff could be we don't have a scheduled stand-up meeting, something like that, teams sync up whenever they think they need it. I've actually tried it out. Initially, for some project, I started off having for the first week daily stand-ups and the team was co-located. Then I really did not feel the need to have a stand-up, daily stand-up. It was just across the desk like, hey, hi, what's going on? That's about it. And all the team were seated next to each other and they said, okay, I'm doing this. I think I should be able to do and I'm having this problem. The other person would reply, oh, I have a solution for you. Why don't you try this out? So it was a team discussion which was happening across the desk. So we really do not need to have a kind of a ritual. But there was definitely a log that was being given daily by the team. That was like, rather than saying, okay, we had estimated, say, for eight hours a job. And rather than asking, you've already taken eight hours now. It should be done now. Why are you not done? But he would just say, hey, I would need another couple of hours and I should be done with that. So we were doing a reverse tracking the way Instagram says and we were able to figure out if anybody's having an issue. And that was done all without having a daily stand-up. That was the best part. A few things, right? When you're talking about tracking, right? Do we really need a stand-up for tracking? Probably the answer what I'm hearing is we don't because if you're co-located or if we can have a good way to synchronize or if you have a tool that can do that, you don't really need this. I mean, we could use the stand-up really for specific problem-solving or coming up with a particular game plan for things, right? Which is where I think it moves to in terms of more of just-in-time stand-ups, right? When you kind of hit a roadblock or when you have something, you pull everyone together. But hopefully, because you're working very tightly with each other, whether co-located or distributed, you keep everyone in sync of what's happening. And you can still achieve the objective, the value out of a stand-up that the stand-up gives you without technically having to do the ritualistic way of doing a stand-up, right? So thank you, guys. We're going to transition into another example. But thanks for participating. Look at... Yeah. So we saw what ritualistic... We kind of gave a flavor of what a ritualistic stand-up was. So really, they were going across doing things in a prescribed format or an order. Whereas practice is the actual application of the belief. So that's the real delineation between the two terms. And really, rituals, we say, are necessary to start with. It's like when a kid is learning to ride a bicycle, you really need those helping wheels. But when the kid has already learned how to balance, right? The same very wheels which were used to learn now become an impediment in taking sharp turns and move across with agility. So you need to remove those wheels. So rituals, at some point, were a helper, but the same rituals become a bar and they stop progress. That is what essentially... I mean, I'm not saying rituals are not bad. They are useful in the training that they give. But we need to realize when rituals are a helper and when they are a bar. They will help you launch yourself from ritual to practice. Secondly, once you are at a practice level, you need to understand the principles that underpin the practices as well. Slowly rise from practice to principle. Further ahead, the journey doesn't stop there. You need to launch yourself from principles to values. Find out what is the real value that's underlying or underpinning the principle itself. So keep an open eye, be very watchful, and then tune according to your maturity of the team as you progress. See what's helping, what's not helping. Drop it, add, and that's real agility. So just one more thing. Does being agile mean that... I mean, does doing TDD or retrospectives or stories or stand-ups, does it all mean that you are agile? Well, no, you have to question. Is that all the practices that you follow? Are they a ritual? Are they practice? What are they? Let's look at another quick example. Has anyone seen stories like these every day? I've seen a lot of people work on stories like this. As a developer, I want to create a database table so that whatever. This is good to kind of try and understand, okay, how to articulate something and stuff like that. So again, as Dhaval was pointing out, it's a good launcher, but maybe you want to get into more of writing something on these lines where you're clearly articulating who is the consumer, what is the value that they're going to derive by doing what. And this is, again, good training wheels to move further in the journey towards the value. Then we talk about things like collaborative story mapping sessions, right? Jeff Patton is here, he's going to talk about story mapping, but there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in the collaborative planning session. For example, here we have Bob who's the expert who's visited a lot of client side. He's coming and explaining different contexts and trying to lay out what happens in a typical client situation. And then people map out a day in a life of Ed who's one of the users, one of the personas of this product that we're planning to build. People start building out these activity maps, start laying out things like these. And then basically you build these collaborative story maps using which, these are not really written in as A, I want to show that format, these are more of, this is the goal that we're trying to achieve to achieve this goal, here are a set of things that we need to do and you just lay out things. And you would notice that the team is fully engaged, they're kind of challenging each other, they're kind of questioning is that really the priority should be move it down, there any dependencies, things like that. And then you kind of get into, you know, putting it in your team area and start working on it. There's not much rituals around this after it is done. You don't go sit down and start saying, okay, I need to write this in as A, I want to show that format because that's not really going to help you much. Right, once you've understood the context, once you understood where it is going to fit into the bigger scheme of things and you can visualize it, you've still achieved value, right, does that make sense? Fair enough, can I ask you a counter question? Is it possible that even after writing as A, I want to show that people forget the value and they still go off goal-plating something? Is I think once you have kind of described this overall picture of what is the problem you're trying to solve and you've collaboratively worked together to address that, to a large extent that knowledge is disseminated into people's head, it becomes tacit knowledge to some extent and then as people collaborate and there are other practices that we put together, they help ensure that we are making progress on this and not going off in a tangent. There will be also times when you will have to deviate from this because things have changed since what you did this, right? So now you have a framework in which you could make changes and you could say here is where we are, we change this, this is the impact it's going to have. So it gives you all of those kind of placeholders or a framework in which you can operate. So certainly it is possible that people will still go in some cases and do something slightly off achieving real business value but the chances reduced in my opinion because now you're collaboratively working as a team, right? And the knowledge is disseminated much more. So here we still have a product owner, next I'm going to talk about where we got rid of the product owner all together. If that happens you could have a product owner kind of helping you. So what I was saying like during your reviews and things like that on an ongoing basis at least you will be working with the product owner and during the reviews you would be having other stakeholders or real users kind of validating what you're building and if you're off tangent you will fail fast, right? Now if we move one step you know from here I'm going to take a specific example of one of the projects that we built on which is basically a cab optimization product and all companies kind of see here in India that's a pretty common practice and then what the company wants to do is improve the utilization of the cab so that more number of people are traveling in one car the utilization is higher. The time taken for the employees to reach office they want to optimize things by optimizing the routes and things like that. So like these were kind of sudden brief that was given about this product this is what we wanted to do. So we went through did this product discovery kind of came up with different themes saying what all we need to do at different levels to be able to achieve something like this and then we kind of jumped in and did a lot of low fidelity prototype interaction design with people. This is real testing happening with real users even before you started building any software. Have we written any stories? No. Have we done any planning? No. We are just trying to do a product discovery trying to figure out what is that the users want and what originally started with the idea everyone kind of imagined an application where user goes logs in enters details and stuff like that. Through these discovery sessions through these interactions kind of changed quite a bit to you know ending up with something like this which was essentially built in a weeks time which looked like a three month project ended up being something as simple as you know just use Google Maps Google map exposes APIs people can go click on this select the route enter the destination see the route and then there are also other products available which will give you an optimized route with multiple points and that's what your routes will be. So that essentially ended up being the project. Did we have stories? No. In one week we were essentially done with the entire product. Did we have product owner? No. So you could gradually evolve even though this looked like a fairly sizable complex problem with a lot of algorithms that you need to build you were able to piggy bank on a lot of other stuff that quickly you know get something working and see if your hypothesis is right or wrong. So you know I don't know if this will work for everyone in every context but I think it works if we can try and see how we can think from a different point of view you don't have to necessarily always go through the you know big long process of gathering all the requirements breaking it down into stories creating a backlog. I mean that might be valid in some cases right but I think in a lot of cases what you will find is something you know that leads to a lot of extrapolation leads to a lot of over engineering leads to bloat in a lot of places and this kind of brings you back into the more of the lean mindset where you're trying to say what is the bare minimum I can do what I can piggy bank already that is available and build something quickly. Maybe I'll throw this out because it's only one week of effort that I've put in. Think of this as almost as a spike right but at least it gets you started and now you're not thinking so much in terms of the process the rituals or any of those things you're really focusing on delivering value straight right out right that's the kind of transition I'm trying to talk about like you know it was good we move from the traditional you know big upfront requirements gathering model to you know doing stories and things like that but I think that's that's pretty outdated we need to move on we've learned better techniques since then of how to build products these days a lot of large complicated products can be built very quickly without having to go through the entire process. So that's a very good point right so what Sunil is pointing out is that you know this solution seems to work fine when people on the team understand the context and understand the domain knowledge and they're able to make some of those decisions make those balancing act and move forward what happens when that expertise does not exist within the team right what if let's say you're building some kind of really complicated business optimization solution where you need to really be a business expert or a domain expert to understand how to do that so my question to you is if they don't understand how are they going to get to the stage where they will understand so interestingly I've applied this for building nuclear monitoring systems where people don't quite understand what happens in the nuclear system and you know the challenge the very challenge is the person who was running this entire program said people don't quite understand it's too risky I want to make sure that we document everything before we get started on you know people and they had spent by now three years doing that and things had moved because things keep moving in that space quite often right so having tried that multiple times they basically came you know to us saying we're going to look at a different solution like is there a different way to do this so we got everyone in room we spent a week and basically what turned out is that people had quite a bit of ideas around at least because they've been working in that code base or similar code bases they had some ideas now what we're trying to do is bridge that gap so that the business experts can talk about the problems that they have the people can talk about some ways to solve that problem and then collaboratively they come up with a shared understanding of what they're trying to solve there'll be a lot of places where question mark support and we say we don't know we're going to go get some more clarity in this area but let's map it out in terms of where do we stand today where we have clarity what is the most important thing can we start building that so I think again I in my opinion there's better ways and we need to work collectively to figure those out I don't understand the term scope sorry that's what the problem we're trying to reduce by doing this collaboratively together right by so if you saw we were doing paper prototypes these are real developers who are working on that product actually going and interacting with users taking prototypes trying to get feedback and then coming back and saying no that just blew in our face this is not going to work let's go back let's change this let's test it out let's not spend effort trying to build the product let's not go there without understanding what we are trying to do right let's do that before we start off splitting work and start going in different directions so I think that's the problem we are trying to address and honestly in my experience what I've seen is you have a product owner they write stories they believe that everything is under control but inevitably there's a lot of disparity between how the product owner perceives something needs to be done what the team wants the team is trying to do so there's a lot of disconnects over there and that is only realized at the end of the sprint or things like that it's too late in my opinion right and you've already made certain directions certain decisions architectural things that could be a lot of cost to come back and correct later so I think this is what we are trying to address by getting everyone to work collaboratively together to actually have an end to end working prototype on paper before you start going off and building it yes we don't have user stories so if we define these themes if you see here we've defined these themes and we're saying in this particular theme we want to capture employees travel preferences this cuts across multiple things that needs to be done from different places we need to get information and stuff like that and that essentially when that is done that's how we will know what we've been able to do so at this point you will say how do we know this is actually done so we will build some prototypes right we will go get that validated and we will say okay with this information do we think we would move to the next level so there you have captured in some sense your acceptance criteria right but we are not really going too much in terms of defining acceptance criteria for every story or defining definition of done for every story I think that's too much of a ritualistic way of looking at things right we can do better than that in my opinion yes absolutely I was just waiting for you to bring that up I don't know how many of you if anyone attended yesterday there was a workshop on microservices Fred Jaws ran that workshop so the very first thing he talked about over there is that he's been building a bunch of products now and they don't write tests that from someone like Fred saying we don't write tests anymore but what do we do the first thing we build is a monitoring service and that's what is our test right that gives you live data live feedback from real system and that's your test right so here we started with the monitoring as well to say that's the first thing we need to do how do we know if the right caps have been you know prepared so basically it produces something and someone sits and manually validates that was our first step maybe that's a manual test but that's how we started so you know building monitoring in is absolutely essential for if you want to travel very fast approach to take that was like get the monitoring services up get everything up you don't need any retrospectives you don't need tests you don't need stand-ups you don't need anything you straight away put the code into production watch it fail that's your feedback that's live right fix it redeploy it get done sometimes don't even touch the old service just create a new service copy paste the entire thing and just deploy it now I don't think you know that's suitable for every case every situation but you know people have been applying some of these thought processes which we thought were taboo we couldn't even talk about things like this people are actually doing this and running successful businesses so something for us to think about you know is that even a possibility is that even possible right I mean have you gone too much into the agile mindset and become really very rigid about how we think right we need to really question where do we stand retrospectives I'm going to skip that actually because I think there's a little bit more interesting stuff coming up after this so I mean the what we had on retrospective is typically we start with what worked what did not work then we move to some kind of a little bit more interesting format we try and look at what we should start doing stop doing then we start looking at root cause analysis we start going deeper and trying to mistake prove things this is kind of gradually how we evolve as we practice some of these things and you know a lot of teams that we've worked with we eventually go to what we call as micro retrospectives or we do only just in time retrospectives and kind of move away from these retrospective retrospectives per se and that seems to be fairly good because over a period of time the team is matured the team has learned certain things and now they don't need those training wheels and you can move away from that right so that's kind of where we are going with this entire thing that's a good point I mean what we've had what we've tried in a few teams is basically have a big poster on the wall where people can stick things that they want to discuss at some point but they think it's not very urgent right now it's not very important right now but something like we call it a risk backlog essentially and we just keep posting things on it and at some point we might realize that that item is appearing a couple of times so let's just pull in and then have a retrospective on that right but that's again a pull based just in time retrospective where people have a placeholder to put stuff and it might not be a burning urgent need that we need to do something right away but at some point when we all have a breather we might be able to look at that so that's kind of what we've tried doing and it seems to be pretty well so can I hand it over again to Dhaval so so far we've seen about four practices right starting with MVP what do you call retrospectives stand-ups and so on so forth I would like to ask you to step back a bit now and kind of you know look what's what's really the essence behind all of this the essence behind all of this is to inspect adapt and evolve number one thing is to do continuous experimentation doesn't matter if you fail organizations should allow individuals and teams to fail otherwise we are not going to learn so experimentation and that too should be continuous from experimentation we can determine what works and what does not work like what we saw as we gradually as we evolve through we have to drop the ritualistic way of doing jettison be fearless curate discard that's the and you question and dispel gospels and if you don't what really happens is either the callousness creeps into the team you become very indifferent or you become too fanatic about something and it's very hard to get results when you hold on tight to something or when you are totally indifferent yeah so in a sense you are close for modification and this this particular session in some sense has been a personal journey for both of us so that's why we are here talking about this also what I would like to say is we need to look at this in a very pragmatic way wherein we have to acknowledge the fact that this is not a linear straight path it is a journey and we are here to progress success we have to redefine success as progressing upon progress which is continuous improvement it is not about whether I it earned this much money or it did not earn that or that and so on so forth at the end of the day we are all here so that we can experience and why why do we have to take that experience we because experience helps us to draw out what is within from within and at the same time experience helps us to seed values which we could do which we we can cultivate further so what I would like to do is for example life throws us a lot of challenges at us right and it knocks it badgers you know it nudges us but if we if we don't learn from that then we won't be able to draw out what was within to the four secondly what I would like to say is that really values are neither handed out by giver nor accepted or rejected so what what really are values then we've looked at all this and I would like to now bring the context of individual back here in terms of values yeah they are really the inner dispositions of a human being so let's take an example here imagine if two people are pairing right and we are arguing about something here and he says you know what this is not correct do it in this fashion this is correct because I say I can't go on arguing and we argue about mundane things but in this process of argument I realize the way Naresh is talking this because he comes from this perspective all of a sudden what happens is I try to understand his perspective and I develop respect and at the same time if he I'm arguing he can say oh well he is arguing because he comes from this perspective now both of us have certain value stack though the priorities of the values would be different and that's why we are arguing eventually in the process what would happen is we'll find that the values will permeate you know I'll start accepting he starts accepting me we have a productive discussion and that's how the teams kind of come together further by telling and talking about values it's not going to work I have a four year old kid I just can't talk to her about anything I have to be involved with her I have to respect her time be with her and that's how the values will permeate if I preach and talk about values it just remains in the upper levels of mind right today if we just said what's the value like for example in stories or retrospectives and if we just talked about it it would have been just remained up here you know and it leads to hypocrisy duplicity and pretension we don't want that so the next better step would be to show and remember that's where we are kind of I'm just drawing a parallel here because but the best thing is to involve somebody by involving somebody you are respecting them automatically my next question is are you all aware of your own values what do you value when you come to work in less than a minute you know write down what you value the most I don't want to see what you write down and you know why I'm saying less than a minute because mind has the habit of coming in between manipulating your responses example like in our day to day work we interact with a lot of people we see you know a guy comes to you you know I paired with you yesterday you know it was so beautiful let me I took it even further when you were not here let me show you I've evolved the stuff that we worked on yesterday that person is actually coming from deep inside you know the values springing forth in his behavior what about the other person here I know I've made a mistake here but now I know how I can work how I can work on it this person has also done some reflection he's very truthful he's expressing this in terms of his behavior actually all these people have certain deep values which they embody so one has to kind of discover so for example if I pick on you sorry sir your name Lakshmika your name and then when I say okay Lakshmika you're too annoying what would happen you will frown back at me or look at me with anger in the moment of anger what happens is you say I am angry you identify yourselves with the emotion but that's not what you are really so my question is who are you really then what can actually lead to authentic self realization of values in your day to day work is it acting with passion we all say he's so passionate about work expressing feelings thoughts and ideas the very fact that Lakshmikaan can say by anger after the anger has passed away that means he can step back and watch his emotions still step back in further and say okay we have the habit of thinking let me think I am the idea because we have the habit of losing ourselves into thought but at the same time we can control the same thought and come back to it and you can choose to participate in the thoughts and disengage from it yeah still something deeper which is beyond self expression what we want to do is we want to find out what is it that really leads to self realization ideals that are in higher, that are in harmony with higher nature now I am kind of it appears as if I am going on to the tangent but there is really the crux here we will just come back to this what are ideals ideals are nothing but set of values yeah for example there are this set of universal ideals and on this side you have something which is expressed in behavior or conduct so for example if I look at say transparency how many managers in the room and how many of you actually pad the estimates or how many developers when they do the standard I mean when they do the estimations how many of you pad the estimates almost all that means there is lack of transparency there right it's not expressed in behavior or conduct there is a gap between what your inner thing is and your outer action is yeah what about cleanliness I am not just talking about physical cleanliness here if there are developers in the room how many of you write clean code I think clean code is an expression of beauty and harmony why do we write clean code it just helps us to progress further in a similar way if I look at other universal ideals like fraternity equality, liberty so on so forth you have team work for example right where does that come from collaboration we saw that in standard how many of you really exhibit that you know you have to question all of this what I would like to do quickly because I am falling short of time here but would like to take XP as a practice because that's what I started out doing with and I would like to map back these XP values of communication, simplicity, feedback courage and respect on this and XP practices of pay programming, collective ownership on-site customer system metaphor refactoring so on so forth back to the ideals that I have talked about communication and feedback are tools basically are the tools of truth they help you reach the ideal of truth simplicity beauty and harmony, courage strength and force if I look at XP practices refactoring simple design encoding standards are there to have beauty and harmony help you express beauty and harmony in your code pay programming, collective ownership equality, fraternity and liberty whereas all these planning game, retrospectives test-driven development these are the real core values the universal values which are kind of being mapped to tying back to work this is if you are if in your inner self you don't have this how can you express that in your outer work if you don't value equality or knowledge sharing or collaboration fraternity ideals are missing in you how will you really collaborate so the idea is let's not call this as agile adoption using feedback we need to permeate agility and manifest the ideals the question is how do I really begin well as in everything we have to start from where we are because that's the most near most next step that I can take that which is far is the goal I have to reach there but I'll have to take baby steps to reach there yeah at the end I would like to really leave you with questions to ponder so if we look at these ideals which we are talking about here and we saw in the principles, values and practices these are kind of tying back to the universal ideals and expressing into your work content so the very first question that I would really like to ask is I'll go from bottom here have you matched your disposition to the psychological content of the job how many of we have done that really I'm yet to see a JD which has a description which has this kind of laid out we always talk about matching skills java 1.8 spring 2.0 okay come in walk in and you start coding for us well that gives rise to mediocrity we've seen that a lot so coming back second from bottom is there a gap between inner values and outer action and if yes how will you reduce it so one of the things that I would like to just point out is probably use these tools map it back to your day to day work and use this as a tool maybe on the right you can have a column 1 to 5 and you can do a trending of your own one being the nearest or one being the farthest and five being the nearest how far are you all we all from expressing this in our daily conduct and behavior I think no amount of practice or anything no amount of tools will help you because the out fiddling with this is actually fiddling with the outer structures you have to first go deep within to find the root cause so you can take use that as a tool pretty much and see how you can apply this on a day to day basis because unless these values are expressed in your job directly in your day to day work you will not be even able to appreciate XP values let alone your own so that's pretty much it questions if any comments I will take some time to just let it sink in I don't have a question but an extension of what we spoke about regarding the inner values and ideas I understand that there is a synergy which exists in team members which I also when I coach my team members I try and see if that exists because there are always individual motors always individual values like you said how it permeates I have seen how sometimes some of these universal qualities or the values emerges from the team as well as a team they have a quality as a team they have something which also shines and says this is what they stand for so I think that is also a big sense in our work context correct you could visualize the team as an individual and it would have certain behavior certain ideals certain values for the team level and those also evolved as the team kind of matures or as the team kind of new members come in but you would see that at the team level as well any other questions any other comments these are the rituals and my question is more in terms of the interest in and around not having the right level of stories and ethics to the level of details that are required may probably work in 506 sprints feature I don't know if at an enterprise level or at an industrial scale can this be I have not seen it I have failed at it but that is my experience my view is what is it that you are here in the industry I think that is a great question can we take this and can we scale it, can we industrialize it can we standardize it across these things would it work at a scale would it work at a scale in terms of at a smaller we see that at a smaller work unit level this is okay but as we start building really large complicated products would it scale or service projects would it scale I mean I have my answer I know what my answer is and which is why we are talking about this but what I do want to do is to turn it back into people in the room and see if anyone has thoughts or experiences around trying some of these things and then I want to kind of give color my and maybe Dhaval can jump in as well and then we can talk about what our experience has been even talking about this anyone else wants to share talking about the gap between the inner values and the outer actions actually in the industry if you look at it it is there in at any level it is right from the top of the company to the bottom to the developer level so it is a cultural change we need to bring in so I think it is easy to say and sometime it has to be there actually see you have to be things you have to do the right things to do at the same time you should be politically correct right so how do we narrow down this gap you know is there any way I don't think it is we can completely run away with this I think it is a reality I think it will be continue I think I am just sharing my view and I don't know how at your organization this is what my observation you know a different organization which I worked I am in favor of this not because I know it will happen but I think it is a step towards that direction our way of work would change dramatically in coming days with digitization coming and socialization coming so much into picture the customer even asking for every statistics before taking a decision as they mentioned they had a service to check how things would move ahead so having said all that I think it would be our jobs will not be very big in nature the cycle time has to be very less and it is more of perspective and adaptive so I think this is a step in that direction I have seen I work for Dell I have seen Dell decentralizing big time not because they are very good in their thoughts but because it is the need of the R that is what I am personally giving I was about to actually just add do we have a choice we are at a stage where we really don't have a choice we don't have a choice I would like to share one just perspective as we all agree that agile is a value system but for most of the bigger organization is come as a process from top down and teams don't have much space just to think about why we are doing it so they start doing the practices and they just talk up with that but I would say that if a team is practicing it for quite long time if they try to understand what is the real value and principle behind it then probably they will understand and that is where the scaling of this value driven process will be more scalable so my observation has been a little bit in parts I would say I think way the organizations have I will just give you from a corporate perspective way the organizations have said that they really want to get to a flat structure I think some of these values you can already see them I think it is more of it alludes back to the fact that you have a choice right maybe yes, maybe no but at least where they have made a conscious and a realistic approach towards saying I want to have a flat structure I also know a lot of proxy statements around it they say I want to have a flat structure but you still have hierarchy that doesn't qualify but my observation so far probably not it is not there everywhere that is also my observation but where they say that there is to the fact of having a flat organization I think some of the factors which you spoke about you can see that exuberant just to share add more perspective to this actually our earlier SDLC processes and other things which were waterfallish really typically reflect the industrial age mindset in an assembly style approach and that's where you pass through that at the end of that output which you deliver is it according to the spec if not reject I mean that's the kind of the mindset it's not going to work because that mindset did not respect individuality in some sense yes and when you dissolve all these things you really start interacting with people unless you have a very positive environment in terms of values and it actually self feeds I have observed that in my team and it doesn't take long to give a positive spin on things I mean that has been my experience coming back to your question I want to bring some more perspective into that question 1999 2000 time frame that's when first I got exposed to test ribbon development and I actually fell off the chair laughing because I thought someone was joking it's not practical to even think about that today I think TDD is accepted I don't know if it's penetrated every company but people accepted saying yes this is a good practice right and so we've seen the industrialization if you will right of TDD as a practice the people who kind of came up with the thought process talk to Ken back they've actually moved on in some sense while they will still say there is value they will tell you 20 places where they don't do that themselves so I think they are also evolving so when we talk about industrialization I think it's always about a decade behind what is happening in some of the leaders out there so to me agile has hit that point today it's hit the point where it's all about industrialization does it have the real essence or value that was originally thought about is a question mark is something that we need to ask ourselves and that's where we are saying that let's bring some perspective in saying let's focus on the values and let's not try to industrialize or scale things prematurely because I don't think we have really fully grogged it yet and it's still evolving so it's not like this is exactly how you should do and then let's just replicate it over and over again it's a complex adaptive system and it keeps evolving so I don't think we can say this is done let's standardize it let's scale it across and we're just going to follow this I think we are doing that in a lot of cases in agile in fact last year we had Dave Thomas one of the keynote speakers he after writing the agile manifesto he was one of the authors of the agile manifesto after writing that he said he's never been to an agile conference because he feels like they wrote the manifesto they codified it, it was dead and he was saying like really agile he put up a slide and he was talking about some of the big frameworks that we talked today and he said this is exactly what we were trying to avoid when we wrote the manifesto and here we are 10 years after exactly landed in what we were trying to avoid so do we want to go down that path it's a question for us to ask is there an answer that we like probably no the answer is that the industry will do what seems beneficial to the industry that might not be in the best benefit of moving the thought process forward so while like you guys pointed out there has been some we don't really have a choice so let's do it some cases it's more of lip service some cases people are really genuinely trying but have they really internalized the values if they have not how much confidence would you have in this succeeding I have very little confidence I would almost say that agile is dead so I can the statement I'm making is because you know almost 11 years ago there was nobody really talking about agile in India and we actually started that movement here and we've seen that evolve over the years and we feel like 11 years ago we were more mature than what we are it's kind of going in almost a reverse direction the problem is the principles are forgotten the values are forgotten the frameworks have remained and people have started modifying the tweaking the frameworks and stuff like that and it's become a business in itself so when that happens you know values take a backseat and then you start questioning is this really going to help us it's a question for us to ponder upon I know many companies that we've worked with have said we're going to go down this route this framework this framework and we are like do you even understand what problem we are really trying to solve or we just want to go and pick the next nicest looking fashion and wear it it's almost becoming like that so I don't know like do we want to industrialize it I hope not but it's happening whether I like it or not I'm kind of like listening to this and kind of chuckling I totally agree right we've got this industrialization of the agile principles and it brings to mind one of my friends who's like well he does agile transitions and agile coaching and he's like technically I'm not an agile coach what I do is I bring hope to these places and help people find out that there's something better out there that we can leave and go to so like I'm not going to tell you his name to save his reputation but like he he considers it a badge of honor to think about all the people who have moved on to better places after he like helped coach even if the coaching fails and the company doesn't have the principles and doesn't have the values but like just the introducing them like it sticks where it can stick and those places it sticks is so incredible so it's kind of just an anecdote about that so I'll tell you my secret I coach right and I don't know but the very fact is there are two elements which you really as a coach look upon I mean we are not trainers number one so there's nothing to be taught that's the very first principle and the second is curiosity feed the curiosity and get the rest of the things done automatically I mean that's what I have observed and that ties into that thing which you just mentioned hope right so it's feeding the curiosity and secondly I mean I don't know but nature has placed two great elements in every human being one is curiosity and second is hero worship everybody has a silent hero you know and that what it drives keeps on driving I also think nature has its way in terms of garbage collection it's really well implemented in nature so companies who I mean we've seen waves of companies come in and go out and you know if you really dig into it you know you will find one of the elements is that they were doing a whole lot of things but the values were missing right they we can talk about some really successful companies and why they're successful one big element to that would be holding on to the core values long after even the founder is gone right that's what to me is a successful company it's not what practices they do it's not about what they're doing today what products they're making it's the value system that still exist long after the founders have gone and those companies seem to last longer they don't get garbage collected while the others do so something to think about right I think we are exactly exactly on time so we're going to shut it down and then we're going to go outside and if anyone has questions you can take it over there thank you