Agile Singapore 2014 Conference

Current smart-phone business is in intense competition. All the manufacturers are under enormous pressure to deliver faster with higher performance and quality than its competitors.

Agile seems to be indispensable choice to survive in the current market and hence, many are trying to implement it in their organization. However it’s not easy in a big Electronics company, since it has been following huge-waterfall process for a long time, originally designed for hardware development with lots of regulations and for satisfying Telecom service providers’ process, which is another waterfall.

This talk is about how we made progresses in this situation. We have observed 8 obstacles in applying Agile in the huge-waterfall company and has made several trials to overcome them. Some of them worked, some did not.

Successful cases involve organizational wisdom such as having internal enemies, process guys who have the authority of approving work outputs, transitioned to support Agile teams so that we can use their power. We also see that Technical practices are a big help to attract people: “Developers like Technically Sexy things”. We tried applying the modern engineering practices in a technically sexy way so that people get interested easily. We also found out that “Fun” is important in any activities. We have made every effort to make the activities funny!

To summarize, this talk will show the below in the context of Android application development including live demo of running & testing an android application.

1. The difficulties we had in applying Agile in a big, electronics company: 8 Obstacles
2. How we approached in our company to overcome the problems: Using the power of opponents + small and step-by-step advancement + Technically sexy practices.
3. How we implement them in a way that people have fun in performing the activities!