GE Healthcare Goes Agile

Imaging unit takes control of its development environment and likes the results By Andrew Deitsch and Ross Hughes
A third challenge for Imaging Solu E Healthcare is a $17 billion- provals have happened, coding begins. tions product development effort was Coding typically takes s~veral a-year business unit of Gen the many artificial barriers that existed eral Electric, making every months, and then we release the prod among functions, especially marketing thing from multispectral uct into a test environment where we and engineering. These barriers high-definition CT scanners to diag can collect customer feedback. This is werent any different than in most nostic pharmaceutical devices. Our Im usually the first time customers see the large organizations, but it was clear aging Solutions unit, which has 375 new product before we begin a rigor that they were becoming more prob engineers supporting 18 products that lematic over time. increase clinic!an productivity, a year ago faced several challenges meeting AgileTransitiOfl commitments in this multiproduct dis To address these issues, early this tributed environment. year Imaging Solutions replaced the First, we struggled with the pre waterfall software development dictability of our program execution. 1. Be realistic: Your organizations methodology it was using with an agile unique needs will dictate what can be The cycle time on projects was too accomplished in a two-week sprint. initiative. We already had pockets of long, taking from 12 to 24 months, agile development going on within var 2. overcommunicate: Dont assume often with significant delays. These everyone will get It the first time.They wont. ious development teams around the long cycle times frequently caused the world, but they were run by engineer business to push to add features be 3, Modify: Its OKto use a hybrid ap ing groups that only used parts of agile. proach to aflile. GE Imaging Solutions yond the initial requirements, fearing needed more up-front planning and postThey used Test-Driven Development, that the market couldnt wait for an sprint testing, for example. Continuous Integration, and ran proj other cycle to get those features. That, ects in sprints, but didnt adopt other 4. Coordinate teams: They can learn in turn, often increased a programs from and help each other;the closer in facets of the methodology. scope, causing further delays and in alignment they are,the better. We liked the agile-based scrum ap creasing the cycle time even more. A 5. Cultural change is key: People will proach of having the product owner as longer cycle time puts a project at risk have problems with the changes agile an integral part of the development since the requirements gathered at the brings. Identify passionate individuals and team. We hoped that adopting agile beginning are out of date by the time get them to help with adoption. would break down these barriers and get the product hits the market. the whole business working in unison to Second, our waterfall process fol release the right product to our cus lowed the typical phased-gate ap ous verification and validation effort tomers on time. We especially liked the proach, which begins with gathering prior to release. The challenge with this approach is idea of biweekly sprints, where product requirements, creating a high-level de increments were completed, and the sign followed by detailed designs, and that the ability to incorporate customerchance to demonstrate functionality to then creating a traceability matrix requested modifications occurs so late customers at the end of the each sprint showing how those design details tie in the cycle that any significant misses and get immediate feedback. back to the system and user require could require complete changes to the We began by visiting colleagues at ments. At that point, a formal design design, causing a lot of wasted time and one of our joint ventures who used review occurs and once the various ap effort, and delaying the project further.

~ Lessons ~j Learned

I~l1about softw~e development at Dr. Dobbs: drdobbs.com

Dec.6,2010 59 nfonnationweek.com

AGILE DEVELOPMENT

agile methodologies from the beginfling of their development process and were having great success with it. We sent different people a number of times to observe sprint reviews, retro spectives, and sprint planning, as well as to learn how they use third-party toolslike Rallys Agile ALM plat formto create a single source of record for progress and quality across their software development teams. We also met with the quality and regula tory team to understand how it was making agile work within its Quality Management System. Those conversations got us excited, and we began to focus on getting sen ior leadership support. Theyd seen the results of using agile development at the joint venture (especially the fre quent customer feedback), and were quick to support our move. Our next step was to hire an out side agile coach, who met with the entire team to understand our prod ucts, organization, and development processes. Once he assessed our cur rent state, he customized our scrum training. We decided to launch our move to

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informotion week.com/12861ddj/rio agile with one team. Then after that team was comfortable, roll it out to one site. And, finally, we could take it to all of our development sites globally The objective for our pilot was to acquire scrum experience, under stand how we could apply these tech niques within our larger business (such as making it work within our Quality Management System), and to build confidence among team mem bers and leadership that we could be successful. Everyone involved in the pilotex ecutive leadership, managers, mar keters, developers, testers, and techni cal writerswas trained in the scrum methodology We needed the whole crew on board; we didnt want this to be just an engineering effort. We staffed a strong cross-functional team for the pilot and protected it from outside distractions. We defined a manageable scope with a short time re lease horizon of about four months. We established clear success criteria so that we could evaluate whether we achieved our goals. Yet the project was meaty enough that the team could learn scrum skills while delivering something meaningful to the business.

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What We Learned
The pilot identified important les sons. First, we operate in a highly reg ulated environment so there are a

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AGILE DEVELOPMENT

number of additional quality and reg ulatory steps that must be completed before we can accept a user story that scenario written in the business language of the user that captures what he or she wants to achieve. Therefore, our definition of donethat is, the list of activities that add value to the product such as unit tests, code cover age, and code reviewsturned out to be lengthy. Our development teams need to plan for that when estimating what they accomplish in a two-week sprint. We also learned the importance of communicating, communicating, and then communicating some more. It cant be emphasized enough how im portant it is to make sure everyone from the dO to the developers knows whats happening. Often people dont

hear the message after the first, second, and even third time its said. So, while it may feel repetitive, its valuable to overcommunicate and keep everyone aligned. Finally, we found that we can be ag ile, but the rigors of being in a regu lated industry require us to operate a hybrid development model with more up-front planning and post-sprint test ing than would be found in a pure agile environment. Following the pilot, we brought our agile coach back in to train everyone who hadnt already been trained. We formed 10 scrum teams of seven to nine people and allowed them to selforganize. Even the leaders got engaged by forming their own scrum team. With more people getting involved, we needed to coordinate the various

teams that were all contributing toward a common release. We instituted scrum of scrum meetings with a representa tive from each of the teams to coordi nate activities. We also scheduled our sprint reviews so that theyre all on the same day. So now, every other Wednes day, the teams conduct their sprint re views together in the morning; after lunch, they hold planning meetings for the upcoming sprint. This ensures shared learning among the teams and visibility into whats going on outside any one teams activities. We also found we needed to identify cross-team dependencies early in the sprint or risk teams getting in one an others way Rallys Agile ALM platform provided insight into cross-team de pendencies and real-time status up dates. With these capabilities, we

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started to see teams swapping user sto ries and tasks. Teams that complete their own tasks early are helping ones that are slower. There is, indeed, an art to balancing the decentralized control of independent serum teams. Cultural changes are the hardest part of adopting agile. Thats something wed heard from others prior to jump ing into the methodology and it turned out to be true. People often find it dif ficult to change, and so its important to identi~ change agents within the or ganization who are passionate and can help with the adoption. A key aspect of the culture change is the role of man agers and individual contributors on serum teams. Managers need to avoid a command-and-control style where theyre pushing work, but rather build empowered teams. Individual contributors need to start pulling work, make commitments around that work, and then be account able to deliver on those commitments. Trust is an important part of people be ing comfortable enough to embrace change, along with providing a safe en vironment where teams can learn, fail, and bring up issues without fear of repemussionthis is critical for success. While weve only just begun our journey, weve seen positive results al ready Getting feedback early and fre quently from customers has let us pri oritize features correctly and, in one example, identify a clinical workflow that we hadnt known about. Weve seen much more transparency and ac countability among our teams. Team ownership has increased, and scrum processes have brought the entire teamfrom individual contributors to leadershiptogether, asking the right questions. The pilot project was delivered suc cessfully with the correct features and functionality. The release ran over by two sprints, so were still working on the predictability of our execution. Understanding a teams velocity and using it to predict future execution is

learning process that will take some timeand some more sprintsto per fect. However, were making progress, and we feel that the benefits so far of our agile adoption are worth the effort. Were now beginning the next phase of our transition by rolling out scrum

globally to the rest of GE Healthcare. Andrew Deitsch is VP and general man ager for GE Healthcare ITs Imaging So lutions group. Ross Hughes is GE Healthcare ITs ScrumMaster. Write to us at iwletters@techweb.com.

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