The document describes practices at Pivotal Labs, an agile software development company. A typical day involves a large standup meeting for all employees, followed by team standups and pairing on projects. The workspace is designed to be open and collaborative, with pairing stations, visible build monitors, and opportunities for learning like weekly tech talks. The company has multiple offices that follow similar practices and occasionally rotate employees between locations.

1. Agile, The Pivotal Way
20 years of experience
Condensed into some things that work for us
Ian McFarland, VP Technology ian@pivotallabs.com

3. Pivotal Labs Snapshot
• Founded 1989
• Agile since mid ‘90s
• Rails since 2006
• Approximately 100 people, and growing
• HQ in San Francisco
• Regional offices in New York, Boulder,
and Singapore

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A little quieter
than we used to be

5. A Typical Day at Pivotal Labs

6. ...starts with breakfast
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8. Followed by Standup
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9. Followed by Standup
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11. The Large Standup Covers
Things of Global Utility
• Help
• Anything anyone needs help on
• Interesting
• Anything of global interest or utility
• New techniques, interesting gotchas, events
• Introductions
• Anyone new to the office
• Stretch

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A whiteboard helps capture
Helps and Interestings

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down topics so they’re not
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forgotten

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An information radiator
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shows who’s on what project
this week.

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by Team Standups
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16. The big standup is followed
by Team Standups
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...and then we start pairing

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...and then we start pairing

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Pivot
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22. Product Owners are
Close at Hand
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Build monitors...

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...are visible...

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...and ubiquitous.

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Wednesday Tech Talks

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...which we videotape

28. ...and
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http://pivotallabs.com/talks

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email station

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31. ...and people go home at 6.

32. A Typical Day at Pivotal Labs
• 8:45 Breakfast
• 9:07 Standup
• 9:15-ish Team Standups
• Noonish Lunch
• 6:00 End of the work day
Pivot Pong PRN

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The Theory Behind Breakfast

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Pivot Pong

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40. ask@pivotallabs.com

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We try to remove
impediments to productivity

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...and foster learning...
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45. Productive Workspace
• Open Workspace
• Colocated Developers and Customer
• Consistent Pairing Stations
• One big screen, 2 keyboards (we use 27” and 24” iMacs)
• No laptops on the floor
• Visible build monitors
• Everyone can see the backlog in Tracker
• Breakfast, snacks and beverages on hand
• Space for interruptions away from the workspace

46. Standard Development Workstation
• Keeping tools consistent across machines is critical to
high-rotation pairing.
• People don’t have their own machines, but sit where
their project is.
• Machines are reimaged after each project • ASR FTW!
• A brand new machine is ready to use within 30
minutes of it showing up on the floor.

47. Why Sustainability Matters
(for bean counters)
• Predictable delivery is at a premium
• Tired developers introduce bugs
• Developer retention is important!
• Good developers are never easy to come by
• Ramp-up is expensive
• Team changes expose companies to risk
• Crunch time buys short-term productivity at long-
term cost

48. Why Developer Happiness
is Important to the Business
• Leading Indicator: Developer Happiness strongly
correlated to Developer Productivity
Grunt Work = Money Wasted
• Happy workers are more focused

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Multiple Locations

50. The New York Office
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Standup Agenda Whiteboard

52. Pairing Stations
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Tech Talks

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Tech Talks

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Email Stations

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Community Events

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Community Events

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Community Events

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Community Events

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Community Events

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Community Events

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Boulder, Colorado

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66. Singapore

67. Singapore
yeowatzup

68. grongar

69. Rotations
Ralph Hockens

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Simple Telepresence

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Meeting rooms all set up for
teleconferencing

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Robots! We have Robots!

73. Cheap and Cheerful Telepresence
• Mac Mini
• HDTV
• iSight
• Snowball Mic
• Skype or iChat
• Total: about $1,500

74. Remote Pairing

75. What do you mean, Agile?
Ralph Hockens

76. Manifesto for Agile Software Development
We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:
Title
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• software over Goes Here
Working Bulleted Textcomprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration overHere negotiation
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Responding to change over following a plan
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That is, while there is value in the items on
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the right, we value the items on Here more.
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Kent Beck James Grenning Robert C. Martin
Mike Beedle Jim Highsmith Steve Mellor
Arie van Bennekum Andrew Hunt Ken Schwaber
Alistair Cockburn Ron Jeffries Jeff Sutherland
Ward Cunningham Jon Kern Dave Thomas
Martin Fowler Brian Marick
© 2001, the above authors
this declaration may be freely copied in any form,
but only in its entirety through this notice.

77. That’s nice... How do we do that?
• Business Driven: Requirements come from business stakeholders
• Iterative Development, with Short Iterations
• Test/Behavior Driven Development
• Continuous Integration, Continuous Releasability
• Pair Programming
• Productive Work Environment

78. Business Driven
• Requirements come from business stakeholders
• One designated Customer is empowered to make decisions
• Priorities are set by that Customer
• The Customer can change priorities on anything unstarted
• The Customer accepts the work in fine-grained increments
• The Customer is intimately aware of progress, and projected
completion dates
• Closing the feedback loop is critical Accept Reject

79. TDD/BDD
• Good tests tell us when we’ve met the customer requirements
• They tell us when we’ve broken behavior that used to work
• They tell us when we haven’t, so we can refactor with impunity
• Writing tests first keeps us from overdesigning/doing things we
don’t need to do
• Writing tests first forces cleaner API design, because we have to
call into our own code in order to write it
• It leads to looser coupling and encourages higher cohesion
• Good developer testing keeps the cost of change constant

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82. Test-Drive Everything!
• Rails, Ruby, of course
• JavaScript too!
• Mobile too!

83. Iterative Development
• Because the customer is seeing the work on a daily basis, the
feedback cycle is short
• This keeps the cost of change low, by preventing unnecessary
work
• It allows for new insights to be gained from the work we’ve
already completed, and for those insights to be incorporated
into our new code
• Iterations are as short as we can make them

84. Continuous Integration,
Continuous Releasability
• Knowing when things break is critical to reducing the cost of
fixing defects.
• Keep the build status visible, so you can fix it quickly
• A broken build is a ‘stop the line’ event
• Continuous releasability does not mean you release every day.
• It just means you can.
• Releases can be distracting, so weigh the cost of a release
against the value it adds to the business.

85. Pair Programming
• Do we really have to pair?
• Isn’t Pairing Slower?
• I don’t like pairing.
• I’m shy.
• I don’t want to look stupid.

86. Do we really have to pair?
•Yes, you do.
• ...but only if you want to be efficient
• This is one of the least-used practices, and one of
the most important.
• And stop whining! You do it already when you get
stuck on something.

87. </rant>

88. What do developers really do all day?
• Coding
• Reading web pages about coding
• Stuck on some problem, unsure of:
• The right approach
• What the API for that object was
• How SQL indexes are selected
• How bind(this) works in JavaScript
• Checking email
• Checking news, stock price, staring blankly into space

89. How does pairing help?
• 80/20 rule: You don’t get stuck, so you spend your time on
the most interesting part of the code.
• As you eliminate the grunt work (thanks Rails) more of the
work requires real thinking, and design
• You talk through design, and refine before you code.
• You learn from your pair, everything from design and testing
techniques to (no)SQL, CSS, and JavaScript tips.
• Focus matters: Your pair keeps you paying attention, and
can smooth over disruptions

90. How does pairing help?
• More developers in a smaller space
• How many truly independent fronts are there in your
codebase on which you can make progress?
• New team members: You’re really productive the first hour,
not marginally productive starting two weeks in
• They have a local sherpa to tell them how the code they’re
working on actually works.
• Knowledge Silos: Your bus number approaches ∞

91. Pairing Combinations

92. Pairing Combinations

93. Pairing Combinations

94. Pairing Combinations
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95. Pairing Combinations
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96. Pairing Combinations

97. Team Size
• A single pair has zero communication overhead
• 2-3 pairs have almost no communication
overhead, as long as pairs are rotated
• 4-5 pairs require a whole additional FTE for
coordination
• Above 5 pairs, projects really need to be
subdivided into separate efforts
• And you have to have enough separable work so
that the additional people are adding value

98. Anchors
ell brown

99. All but the anchor
can swap out whenever

100. Specialization
MC4 Army

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Design

102. Enough Design
zengame

103. Agile is not...
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...a religion.

105. ...but a tool that works well
Terinea IT Support

106. ...and that needs to be
renewed continuously.
donielle

107. Retrospectives

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The Client Engagement

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110. Family
andresmh

111. pedrosimoes7

112. Family
jronaldlee

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The Agile Inception

114. Ramp up or down as needed
alexliivet

115. TheTruthAbout...

116. Client Engagement Model
• Get their Product Owner in our space
• Start as the whole team,
or work with their existing team
• Help them hire, replacing Pivots as we go
• At the end of the project, they know our
practices, and their own code base

117. Business Terms
• Net 15, with 30 day retainer
Christopher Isherwood

118. Culture Matters!
• Consistency of service
between teams and locations
• It works!
Maintaining the Culture
kaibara87

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The Team Matters

120. The Location Matters

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Market Street
San Francisco

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Broadway
Manhattan

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Pearl Street
Boulder

125. Fusionopolis
Singapore yeowatzup

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Hire Well

127. Hire better than you
• A’s hire A’s
• B’s hire C’s
• Hire A+’s
rochelle, et. al.

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Hire for Aptitude and Fit

129. The Rob Pairing Interview

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Pairing with a Candidate

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132. Listen to your gut!
TheGiantVermin

133. The Two Beer Test

134. Don’t keep people
who don’t fit jessicafm

135. Come Visit!
• You all have an open invitation to
come visit us in any of our locations.
• Just drop me a note and we’ll set it up.

136. Thanks!
• Ian McFarland, VP Technology, Pivotal Labs
• @imf
• ian@pivotallabs.com
• Talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks
• Jobs at http://pivotallabs.com/jobs
• Try out Tracker at http://pivotaltracker.com/
• Photos used under with attribution as noted or are
original works