Agile practises

The University of Helsinki’s way of working - Living documentation on this wiki

The purpose of this wiki is to maintain living documentation on the University’s own established agile practices, to the extent they are not already well-defined elsewhere (e.g. when a practice is not defined in the Scrum Guide or Modern Agile, or the University's way clearly deviates from these). In particular, local interpretations of the Kanban model, for which no canonical definition exists, have been documented here.

As a default, projects and development teams should use the practices presented in the Scrum Guide and this wiki, as they have been proven to work in the University's context in the experience of other teams. However, if a default presented here is not suited to the needs of your project/team, or is simply too vague, does not add customer value etc., it is advisable to adapt the practice. In such cases, make the deviation and the reasons for it visible both internally (e.g., to the PO) and externally (to other teams): discuss internally why you are adapting a practice and document your version to this wiki, so that also others can understand and learn.

Modern Agile

The University of Helsinki’s model for application development is well described in general terms by Modern Agile and its four basic principles:

• Make People Awesome
• Make Safety a Prerequisite
• Experiment & Learn Rapidly
• Deliver Value Continuously

The University of Helsinki’s application development has experience of Agile IT projects since 2005, the early days of Agile, before most people had even heard of it. Since 2013, all application development commissioned and made in-house by the University has been agile.

At the core of the University’s agile development, light and minimalist structures have been more typical than extensive, enterprise-level frameworks.

Scaled Agile

The University of Helsinki does not (currently) have a single management model for agile development that covers the University as a whole. This has been identified as a drawback.

Among the units actively involved in application development, University Services (YPA) has in 2021 adopted the engl. BT standard, developed by the Finnish Business Technology Forum. BT standard). Its mindset and concepts are useful also in the wider context of the University of Helsinki.

We are also familiar with other agile scaling models, such as Kokonaisketterä ("Total Agile"), SAFe, Nexus and LeSS, and some of their features are used by various stakeholders within the University, but not in a centralised or comprehensive manner. The Lean Culture Toolkit of YLE (National Broadcasting Company) is close to our heart as a mindset, but not in an official capacity.

Scrum

The default method of application development on the project and team levels is Scrum.

Scrum Guide as a baseline

By default, the University of Helsinki uses Scrum as defined by the Scrum Guide of the Scrum.org community. The University of Helsinki uses the Finnish version of the Scrum Guide (Schwaber & Sutherland, 2020 / translation Lekman et al 2021):  https://www.lekman.fi/scrumguide

Local cultural variations in this wiki

However, few organisations comply 100% with the Scrum Guide, and Scrum Guide does not have a view on all the procedures required for application development.

The University’s established practices have been described in this wiki, if they differ from Scrum Guide or are not described at all in it. When starting a new project, consider within your team whether you will adhere to these default values or deviate from them; document your changing and evolving practices here, possibly to be adopted by others as well. Evolutionary change is good!

Kanban

HY Lean