This week marked the latest annual Agile in Defense conference, in the outskirts of Washington DC. There were about 100 attendees, and strong support form the agile community. As with any conference, the real value was the conversations that happen between the talks, but the talks themselves are also worth mentioning…
Warnings From the Past
I showed up a little, but just in time for Dr. Robert Charette’s talk. He gave a hard warning about the pitfalls of NASA’s Faster, Better, Cheaper program in the 1990′s might be repeated once more in the Defense community. Specifically, the program met with some initial triumphs such as the Mars Pathfinder project. But the continued pressure for “cheaper” began to create a culture of compromise, which some say led to the Challenger disaster. The response was to swing the pendulum all the way back to the extreme opposite end: never ending budgets. He warned us that mentality could bankrupt the military.
Agile EVM for Defense
Scrum expert Brent Barton then gave a tutorial on how to calculate Earned Value Management (EVM) in an Agile environment. Easily the most practical talk of the day, it was based on his original white paper, which you can download here.
The Agile Virus Spreads
Ronald Pontius, the Director of C2 Policy for the DOD CIO, gave an update on specific agile initiatives in the DOD. First, the Section 804 of NDAA 2010 and Section of 933 of NDAA 2011 are formally closed. The Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) completed its report for developing a strategy for rapid acquisition. That report included a proposed a modification of the DOD 5000 acquisition standard to be more iterative. But that was just the beginning. Not only did he cite 9 active programs seeking to be more agile (e.g. streamlining for “integrated test” initiative at Department of Test and Evaluation, but he gave a few pointed assertions:
- “The latest acquisition guidelines are encouraging concept of “time certain” delivery” (aka “timebox” in Agile speak)
- You can’t execute in smaller chunks if the requirements guys aren’t on board”
- “The CIO of DOD, Ms. Takai, is absoletly embracing agile”
- “Agile is consistent with Under Secretary Ashton Carter’s “Better Buying Power” defense memo“
- “All the C4SI senior project officers “get it”. The problem is at the middle management level.”
It was an encouraging list of the seeds of positive cultural reform.
Agile By the Numbers
The most enthusiastic talk of the day came from Dr. David Rico’s talk featuring some shocking statistics.
- Large systems are risky. When systems approach 400 millions lines of code, bad things happen
- The average productivity for a DOD system is under 1 line of code per hour
- Of the world’s $1.7 trillion in IT expenditure, $858 billion is lost
- Today 60-70% of DOD projects are using #Agile methods, including the F-35 and F-22 (My guess is all those projects may have at least one agile teams, but very few full program-wide implementations of Agile/Lean methods)
My two fave talks were Tony Stout’s and Dave Sharrock’s. Brent’s was very practical, hough I sometimes wonder if we can’t make EVM easier, by simply aligning actual working product releases (perhaps along when Epics are delivered) as the milestones. Dr. Hutchison and Dr Charette’s were also very useful in terms of context and the challenge of getting Contracting Professionals to these conferences has been taken up for GLASScon! (http://glasscon.org)
Excellent response, Paul. If we can get contracting people to the event, we should tell them what’s happening in the wild. Here’s a webinar I did on that exact topic: http://agile.vc.pmi.org/Webinars/ViewWebinar.aspx?WebinarAction=View&WebinarExternalKey=d46f05cb-41a0-418f-bb1a-5ae644ca2256 (PMI login required).
Thanks for the report, Jesse! I think Robert Charette is right on.. The latest report I read about a Dod project gave me the clear impression that there was too much politics and not enough technical excellence. Any mention of the concept of technical debt during the talks or in the corridors?
Good to hear from you, Olivier. YES, there was talk of changing the way testing is done, even if the phrase “technical debt” didn’t come up. Specifically two of the keynotes were from Federal directors, reporting on the hot buzzword of “integrated test”, which means embedding testers into the development effort. Traditionally, large government contracts insist on separating software vendors from quality vendors in order to be “unbiased”, hence the cottage industry of Independent Verification & Validation (IV&V). So from a DOD perspective, it’s a big deal the conversation on “integrated test” is starting.