Livestock Improvement Corporation Gets Agile!
| How do you challenge everything you do and still keep your cash cows? With a little help from the experts at Software Education. |  |
 | Livestock Improvement Corporation (LIC, www.lic.co.nz) is one of the largest integrated herd improvement organisations in the world. A dairy farmer-owned co-operative based in Hamilton, New Zealand, LIC has been providing services to farmers since 1909. Its services range from herd testing and milk analysis, to artificial breeding, animal health, farm advisory, herd recording, DNA analysis, farm automation and farm mapping systems.
Since the formation of a specialist customer software development team in 2006 known as Farm Systems, LIC had been struggling to achieve its goal of producing software products faster, better and cheaper. As Jenny Saunders, Farm Systems Software Manager, says: “Farm Systems had been developing using traditional Waterfall methods since it's formation in 2006. Although we always managed to deliver to the customer, projects were generally over time and budget; this was not working for our customer needs. Traditional Waterfall methods were proving too cumbersome for a fast moving customer-driven product range.” |
Inspired by what they had learned about Agile in training and at Software Education's SDC Conference in 2009, the Farm Systems team held a series of workshops to voice their concerns and identify the “pain points” associated with their current development methodology.
During these workshops, the team identified specific Agile practices that they felt could be applied to improve their software development process; from iterative development and daily stand-ups to co-location and adaptive planning. The next step was to engage Software Education to provide structured, classroom-based training for the group.
To bring Agile techniques 'alive' for the team, training was undertaken using real LIC projects, with the group forming two cross-functional teams which would actually work on the projects involved. These two teams then worked on identifying stories for their projects. In a single day collaborative workshop they scoped both projects, identified the user stories, prioritised and estimated them and produced initial release plans for the resulting products. This was an enlightening experience for the whole team.
As Rob Ford, head of the Farm Systems Division puts it:
“We achieved in one day what normally takes us six weeks!”
How has this translated into everyday practice?
The group's workspace has been reorganised, with 'silo' functional groups replaced by cross-functional teams consisting of business analysts, developers, testers and product managers representing the customer voice.
Each team has an Iteration Manager who provides leadership and guidance, facilitates the workshops, tracks progress and leads the daily standup. The Iteration Manager is responsible for removing obstacles and providing resources for the teams to be successful.
The teams are working in two week, or 10 working days, iterations (they don't start and end on Fridays or Mondays as these are the days of the week when it is most likely that someone will be away from the office). Story cards are used to track work through the iteration and velocity charts in the team spaces show progress.
The developers are incrementally moving towards continuous integration. So far it is not quite to the point of continuous build but getting closer as their understanding of the tools and techniques improves with experience. Test Driven Development is being used for new work and some pair-programming is being done.
Testing is integrated into the iteration process - identifying tests during story elaboration using Behaviour Driven Development structures to present the detailed requirements in the form of customer tests. Test automation is being slowly implemented; currently most testing is manual but more and more automated tests are being built.
One year on, what are the real business benefits?
At a practical level, product quality is measurably higher, both in terms of marketplace success and more mundane measures of software quality - defect density and product maintainability. Defects reported in production have dropped substantially and the internal quality of the code means that changes are easier to implement.
For the business sponsor, project visibility and ownership means that the right product is being delivered within time, scope and budget.
What's more, release cycles for a core product have gone from one per year to one every two months, resulting in much greater customer satisfaction.
For the teams, taking ownership of their own practices and actually being able to deliver what the customer wants has created a real sense of satisfaction, strong team spirit, pride and ownership - LIC is a fun and inspiring place to be.
Where to from here?
The LIC Agile transformation has been a cultural change - moving from silo-based streams of work which delivered high quality products largely thanks to the heroic efforts of the team, to cross-functional collaborative teams working at a sustainable pace and consistently delivering customer value in a predictive manner.
The transformation has not been without challenges; so far things are going well - the iterative model enables the teams to get rapid feedback from the product management group. Responding to changing business priorities is no longer a stressful “change management” exercise but a simple replanning activity at the beginning of the next iteration.
Cooperation and communication is high, and even the remote team members feel they are a part of a successful, high-performance team making a positive contribution to their farmer customers' businesses.
As Mark Dewdney, CEO of Livestock Improvement Corporation puts it:
“The change to Agile techniques has been transformational, the Farm Systems group are truly delivering software Faster, Better and Cheaper.”
Jenny Saunders, Farm Systems Manager at LIC, will be speaking at our business analysis-focused conference, SDC - Transforming Analysis, in March 2011. Click here for more details.
For more information on Software Education's extensive range of Agile courses, visit www.softed.com
