Session Title: Experience report, 1 year of software developments to win a world racing championship
Submitters: Luca Minudel
Abstract:
This is an experience report of 1 year of software developments with Scrum, Lean and XP in a unique context characterized by very hi levels of pressure, speed, unpredictable events and rapid changes:
- The car is developed through all the championship and there are new evolutions at every race
- and at every Race new software features are released
- Every track is different from each other, the car require different settings for different tracks
- and the software have to calculate a different race strategy for every track
- The weather and track surface conditions change during the race as the position of the competitors
- and the software during the race support engineers in the pit garage to inspect data and adapt quickly.
The purpose of the project was the adaptation of software applications to the regulation changes and the maintenance and evolution of software applications used to calculate and decide the best race strategy.
General notes:
Sponsors and suppliers pay huge fees to get the right to use the name and the brand of a racing team in public events. So I'm not going to mention the team name or brand to get free exposure, it wont be fair. Confidentiality in racing sports is as important as innovation so will be honored. The information for this session is already publicly available (from articles, interviews, conferences), what this session does is to connect the dots in retrospective through the lens of Scrum, XP and Lean sw development.
Contents:
This is an Experience report from the point of view of a team of 3 software engineers involved in the day-to-day duties at the forefront, working to make change happen bottom-up with the support of the management. The focus is on the feedback loops, on the inspect-adapt approach and how we tried to do it right.
What was the purpose of the project, the costs and what was the expected value.
Who was in the team, which other teams were involved. How was the project initiated.
Who toke the role of ScrumMaster, who was the Product Owner. How management and customer was reported of progress.
How changes was handled. How engineering practices had to be changed. How software was stabilized before it could be released.
What difficulties has been surfaced by Scrum, Lean and XP and how were resolved.
To what degree the project was successful and to what degree Scrum was instrumental to the success.
How Scrum framework was implemented. The largest impediments encountered, how were resolved, which were not resolved.
Intended audience, prerequisites and expected benefits:
Basic understanding of Agile practices and Scrum framework is a prerequisite.
Practitioners in agile software development and anyone working in a team that's adopting Agile practices will benefit by looking at how Scum has been adopted in a real life situation.
Anyone using Scrum and Agile practices in an hi-pressure, fast paced, complex or competitive environment will benefit by looking at how similar problems has been solved in another team and by sharing their experience.
People experienced in social aspect of Scrum and Agile software development, people experienced in complexity science and chaos theory and people experienced in TDD/Refactoring training are welcome to discuss the largest impediments of this project.
Objective(s) of the session:
To share what was learned during this project in a very hi-pressure, fast paced, complex and competitive environment.
Collect feedback and ideas from the audience that had experiences on other hi-pressure, fast paced, complex or competitive environments.
Discuss about the largest impediments encountered and collect ideas on how to resolve them.
Time table: (look the proposal of another time table in the comments)
Total time: presentation 90 minutes, discussion 30 minutes (Joseph Pelrine will take part to the discussion)
- [5 min] Intro
- [15 min] The purpose of the project, the team, other teams involves, the management, the project initiation
- [35 min] The feedback loops and how change was handled:
- Reporting to management and customers
- Dealing with Product Backlog after every Race ant Test event
- The Sprint Planning meeting
- The daily Scrum meeting with all the teams involved
- The meeting with the management
- Software stabilization before the release
- [5 min] How the Scrum framework was implemented
- [10 min] What Scrum surfaced for as
- Confidentiality value Vs transparency, competition value Vs collaboration
- Changes and improvements to engineering practices
- [5 min] To what degree the project was successful and Scrum was instrumental in the success
- [5 min] The largest impediments encountered and how were resolved
- [10 min] The largest impediments encountered and unresolved
- [30 min] Discussion
- Q&A
- the largest impediments encountered and unresolved
