Agile Forward: a simple toolkit for process improvement

Abstract

As agile methods mature and its successful adoption becomes more and more widespread in the software industry, teams get more open and capable of responding to change. The adoption of agile methods cannot be seen as an end by itself, it must be seen as a mindset pushing teams to keep improving to be more predictable, to deliver faster and with more quality. To achieve this goal, agile methods, e.g. Scrum, include practices such as retrospectives that continuously challenge teams to find out how they can improve. However, many teams fail to detect important areas where they can improve. This work focuses on the activities of agile software process improvement, from analysis to concrete planning and implementation phase, with the goal of understanding the overall phenomena: key obstacles, common practices, and recommendations. In concrete, we define and propose a practical toolkit to help Scrum Masters, and other important players, to detect issues, by collecting relevant data, finding concrete solutions, and putting these into practice. The work was based on a case study conducted at Zendesk Denmark where different methods, tools, practices and techniques were explored and applied in order to improve their process. An action research method was used by following an iterative improvement methodology where the researcher and practitioners worked together to solve the problem. The proposed toolkit was then validated with other agile teams.