Category: Agile Project Management

Teamicide

Perry Hertler, Monday, March 15, 2010 @ 7:44 pm

A couple of years ago I had the benefit of seeing agile contrasted against waterfall with the same development team on the same project. The team had recently delivered the 1.1 version of a global web application. The customer then took over the project by replacing the project manager and business analysts with people who had no agile experience.

Up until after the 1.1 release our highly productive team absolutely loved coming to work in the morning. We were eating up storing points with an insatiable appetite and pressure to perform came from inside the team. Frequently our roles would cross. Developers would help out Testers and BAs as needed and the Testers and BAs worked very closely together to document proper story acceptances.

When agile was dropped for a more traditional process, things deteriorated very quickly (teamicide). I noticed major negative consequences in user stories, project planning, management, and software development.

Stories

The agile team that was together from inception through release 1.1 benefited from testable stories with high value features. Developers worked with Business Analysts to identify tasks within a story that would require significant development time so that the Product Owner could make informed decisions on whether or not a particular feature provided enough business value to warrant the cost. The BAs also enjoyed lower cost alternatives provided by developers. Only minor changes to a story were allowed after a pair of developers started on it. Significant changes required a new story.

After release 1.1, pseudo-stories were created with many nice to have, but not critical requirements with no developer input. Story requirements changed throughout the iteration including after the story delivery.

Planning

The agile team assigned points to stories during the inception. The amount of points completed during an iteration determined the team's velocity. The average velocity over the last two iterations was used to predict release dates.

The new project manager on the post-1.1 team planned out the next four releases in Microsoft Project with no input from the developers. The releases had unrealistic delivery dates for features that were not yet defined. This is the classic "phony deadline" technique used by managers to (de)motivate developers.

Project Management

The agile project manager was deliberately inattentive to enable the team to self-organize. This resulted in very high morale because developers felt free to contribute ideas and felt a sense of project ownership. The agile project manager's primary role was to remove obstacles that would otherwise distract the team.

The new project manager micromanaged all aspects of the project. We continued to have a stand-up every morning, but as each person gave a status, the PM would ask further questions like "how much longer until the story is completed?".

Development

Pre-teamicide, pairing time was protected, the velocity was high, the code quality was good. Pressure to perform came from other developers. All of this was achieved a sustainable pace with little or no overtime.

Post-teamicide, development time was highly fragmented through frequent meetings, phone calls, and IMs. The velocity was very low and pressure to perform came from the project manager who had set unreasonable deadlines. Large amounts of overtime were required, which led to many more bugs in design and code.

Conclusion

This project thoroughly convinced me of the effectiveness of the agile methodology. It was a great learning experience, but I hope it is not repeated!

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Post-Agile in the Game Development World?

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, February 15, 2010 @ 4:52 am

photo credit: Rich B-S

Gwarred Mountain over at Climax Studios has posted a very thoughtful blog post about software development methods and the appropriateness of Agile Software Development. I was ready not to like this article, what with the title and things like this:

If I have to sit through another meeting with some little "agile" toe-rag defending their train wreck of a project then I may end up forcibly ramming a kanban where the scrum does not shine.

But then I thought about all of those fresh-faced management consultants we've run into recently -- who have read a book about agile -- trying to teach us how to do it. Well, yes. I've had some uncharitable thoughts myself. Continue reading »

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What’s the value of Agile out of the box?

Michael Walkden, Tuesday, January 12, 2010 @ 10:24 pm

I often meet peers who ask what Agile practices Pathfinder utilizes. From the outside we pretty much use all of XP’s practices. However, if you take a deeper look we do some things a little differently (especially how to use and calculate velocity). For Agile purists, one might question if we are really doing Agile. They would claim changing practices is slippery slope. For example, a team will start altering Agile practices to create a “home grown” version only to find they are using only some practices and not seeing the benefits they hoped for. I feel questioning if we are really doing Agile based on exactly what practices one uses shows how familiar and mature one is with Agile principals. A better question would be to ask why we changed them. Agile is not meant to be a methodology, but a set of principals. In my opinion, using things like Velocity to estimate whether a team will finish a project within a certain time frame is a hack at best. This always was hard to explain to customers. While I was reading Leading Lean Software Development I discovered something that helps. The Poppendieck’s point out that the engineering practices of Agile (TDD, collective code ownership, etc…) are solid and not likely to change. But, the project management practices implement a system on top of another system - a hack.

Once you have sufficient experience managing projects with Agile practices you should feel comfortable adapting those practices to your own teams and projects. As long as you are still following Agile principals this is okay. In general, this is what’s going on in smaller companies. Having coached a number of large organizations transitioning to Agile I can say this isn’t how they look at things. The problems start when you adapt the practices, but try to deliver all projects in an identical manner. This makes sense for waterfall-like delivery methods. But, when an organization comes up with its own version of “Agile” it can only work for the subset of projects it is tested on. Rolling this out to the entire organization as “the way” to deliver projects from them on is a failure pattern. The principals are lost and so is the adaptability of the organization. The time spent to move over to agile is immediately wasted.

Photo Credit:
kevindooley
under a Creative Commons Attribution License

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Review: Leading Lean Software Development

Michael Walkden, Sunday, January 10, 2010 @ 8:10 am

In Leading Lean Software Development, Mary and Tom Poppendieck present a handbook for how to run a software development group, top to bottom. I intended for this to be a simple review of concepts known to me for years, but the book offered much more. The book’s jacket describes it better than I can: They “show software leaders and team members exactly how to drive high-value change throughout a software organization—and make it stick.”  If you are completely new to agile and lean you the book might move a little fast for you.  If this is the case, I suggest you spend some quick time getting agile and lean 101 elsewhere first.

If you walk away with one concept after reading this book it should be to believe that success comes from people. The best companies focus on developing problem solving skills and local decision making. These companies favor adaptability over efficiency.  These companies make money to survive rather than simply surviving to make money.

The book starts out by defining the concept of frames, “the unspoken mental constructs that shape our perspectives and control our behavior in ways we rarely notice.”  A useful way to look at software development. I was happy to see their description of Agile as evolutionary rather than revolutionary. This is why when you explain the set of Agile practices to those with extensive experience they usually nod their heads and say they are already doing them. I have been telling people that Agile is a collection of best practices that good software shops have been using for years. Now I have a reference to support this.

Software craftsmen should read chapter 2 about technical excellence. The chapter goes through each engineering practices, explains it such that a non-practitioner can understand and gives examples. After they are done they should make their manager’s read it, then their managers.

Conclusion

I wish this book had been written 5 years ago. It would have saved me considerable effort and time trying to define what a well run software organization looks like. Your mileage my vary, but I will say that I intend to keep this on my bookshelf right next to Managing The Professional Service Firm.

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The Dog Ate My Software: Agile is not Undisciplined

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, January 4, 2010 @ 5:00 am

photo credit: LKaestner

Back in college I used to work at the main campus computer center. That was back in the days of time sharing Unix and mainframe computers, so it was a great way to get some extra CPU time for my various projects. Besides locking up at closing time (I loved to work the 10pm-3am shift), I had to change toner cartridges, support the brick macs, windows 3.1 machines, and the various Unix and Mainframe terminal users.

Over time, you learned to identify various user types. The vast majority of users had simple "hey, how do I do this" or "this ain't working" types of issues. Of the rest there were two main problem user types: the "helpless bunny" and the "walking crisis."

The Bunny displayed profound helplessness in order to get you to do their work for them. The first time I had a Bunny, I was caught unawares and spent the better part of my shift formatting their document in Wordperfect. With subsequent Bunnies, I used tough love and gave them manuals and man pages to read.

The Walking Crisis was typified by the grad student who waited until the last moment to add end notes to their masters dissertation, and dammit, if they were going to suffer, you were going to suffer. Their technique was to try to convince you that their problem was your problem, i.e. the fact that they couldn't do two months of work in five hours was a shortcoming of the software, and thus a support issue.

The more enthusiastic you were about helping users, the more susceptible you were of being dragged down by the Bunny and the Crisis.

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Requirements Set in Stone and Software Made of Concrete

Bernhard Kappe, Monday, December 21, 2009 @ 12:06 pm

Twas the night before Christmas, and 500 pages of detailed requirements had been produced. No line of code had been written, not even by a mouse.

It sounds great in theory: You produce requirements up front, getting them so detailed that they cannot be misunderstood, you vet them with a full committee of stakeholders who will be impacted (except your customers.) Then you give it to the developes. The result: you can get a really precise cost and timeline, you'll save on expensive development time, and your CFO will sleep soundly at night.

It's a nice fantasy, but it's wrong. It's a fundamental misinterpretation of how software development works. In fact, it's a guaranteed way of increasing your costs and producing bad software.

Here's why:
If you're developing software, you're coming up with a new solution to a problem, or solving a new problem all together. Otherwise, why are you building software, rather than buying it?

Traditional requirements definition processes are a spectacularly bad way of understanding stakeholder needs, and coming up with, conveying and vetting a solution for these types of problems. You will miss certain requirements, you will over specify others, and some of them will never get used. Your stakeholders will only be able to provide feedback of limited value until the working software is actually in their hands. At that point, you will finally start getting valuable feedback that you can push through as change orders.
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You Shall Know Our Velocity!

Bernhard Kappe, Friday, December 18, 2009 @ 7:09 am

With apologies to Dave Eggers, this post is not about traveling around the world in a week to give away $32,000, but about measurement and agile development.

One objection to agile development we get sometimes from people who have never done agile is that it sounds too undisciplined, unstructured and risky.

Would they say the same thing about lean manufacturing or six sigma?

They're confusing agile with cowboy coding.

In fact, like six sigma, agile software development is explicitly about reducing risk, measuring efficiency and continuous improvement.

The old management adage of “You can’t manage what you don’t measure” holds true in software development as well. If you have no feedback loops, and you’re not measuring and improving, you’re not really doing agile development.

The core measurements we use are story points and velocity.

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Your SDLC or Your Product – You Decide

Michael Walkden, Wednesday, December 9, 2009 @ 10:33 pm

…or the telephone game

photo credit: tallkev

Last weekend I was watching a movie with my kids. In the movie there was a chain of monkeys that needed to pass on the message from one character to one on the other side of the chain. The message went something like, “Don’t throw us over the wall. There must be another way. We will all be killed.” As it went through the chain and the receiver heard, “Throw us over the wall. It’s the only way. Banana.” The scenario seems ridiculous, but its roughly equivalent to how many companies approach software product design. Often times companies don’t realize they are creating a product at all. They think they are just running a project and focus only on delivery of that project as if it is the only artifact of their work.

The problem stems from the fact that when organizations reach a sufficiently large size they must focus on consistency of delivery and efficiently using people’s time. For large organizations this is part of the mix that makes up their competitive advantage. However, the sheer size and number of moving parts required to enable clocklike consistent delivery leads to the most knowledgeable people about the customer never directly speak to the people responsible for building the product. Or translated into a traditional SDLC, the definition/high level design team isn’t communicating with the build team. In my experience they are usually two different groups of people. I’ll give you an example:

A while back, I was leading a software development team creating a product to be used by all 170,000 of my customer’s employees on a daily basis. They happened to have a team of user experience designers and wanted to take on the “big picture” part of the design themselves. This company could afford the best and the brightest talent - and was able to attract them. Individually the folks on this team were talented and knew their craft well. I actually learned a lot just from my brief time with them. However, once we got the design in hand it was obvious that the usability team’s artifacts weren’t going to work for the project. They didn’t meet the end user’s needs nor were they implementable within the time we had available for the project. The client’s design team literately spent months of time showing users lo-fi prototypes, running focus groups, and understanding usage statistics from similar applications. But, the simplicity the end users craved didn’t match the complexity of the business rules required. Upon further investigation the customer’s design team never was given a business level view of the problem to be solved. We tried to merge the business requirements with good usability, but ultimately the franken-design didn’t work. We had to throw out the big picture design and use them as ”guidelines” instead. Clearly it was a waste of talent and a haphazard way to build a product.

In hindsight the design team should have been presented the complex business rules so that their design could incorporate them from the beginning. However, the customer’s SDLC only allowed the design team to be engaged in the definition/high design phase of the project. Once we got to the design phase they were hard to find. By the time we got into the build phase the development team was simply a distraction from other work for these designers. A better model would have kept the designers on the project as each piece is built. I’m not suggesting full dedication to the team – 40 hours a week. That would be nice, but that’s not likely possible in most organizations. I’m suggesting a small time commitment over a long period of time.

Most of the time projects are actually building products. If you are building a product, but focusing SDLC metrics and efficiency, keep in mind that your phases are likely making walls around teams and causing ineffective communication between them. As Matt from 37Signals points out, “Inefficiencies are what make you special.”

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Fake Agile: All of the Symptoms, but not the Disease

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, December 7, 2009 @ 12:56 pm

photo credit: Ramón Peco

For any software development professional who has contracted out from time to time, this story must seem familiar. You interview and are told that they practice agile development. Once you show up at the job site, they tell you they practice their own "brand" of agile, which turns into "sort of agile" or "we've take the best parts of a couple of different methods" or "it isn't exactly" -- wild and crazy hand gestures -- "XP."

It's a classic case of people following the form or ritual of a process without understanding the why of it. Take the morning scrum, for instance. The ritual around these usually calls for them to be done standing up. We've of course all heard of the standups that run an hour or two. Someone on that team doesn't understand the function and is following the ritual.

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Advice to Developers: Try Understanding the Business

Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, November 25, 2009 @ 1:47 pm

The flip side of my advice to business people to start treating your developers like adults is that developers have to start behaving like adults. What does that mean? Well, my point is that in order for business people to include developers in business discussions, developers have to be ready and willing to understand and participate in those discussions. And that means a little bit of homework.

For developers to understand why this is important, just think about the client/stakeholder you've worked with who has been the most willfully ignorant of the software development process -- the sort of client that demands things that are hard or impossible to do with software and then throws a tantrum when someone tries to explain this to them. Who wants to work with that person? No one. Think of how ineffective that appdev team is with this person gumming up the works and whipsawing the team with unreasonable demands.

Now put yourself in the shoes of a business person who is dealing with developers who are ignorant of basic business concepts. Why would you entrust such folks with any degree of authority for developing a new software product for your company? You wouldn't.

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Pair Programming: Lone Programmer Shoots Back

Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, September 30, 2009 @ 2:38 pm

photo credit: Johnathan!

I got a few angry and scolding comments on my last post on pair programming. Let me address each of the issues in turn:

1. Programmers are not lazy - Rather, they are no more or less lazy than any other type of worker. Why do the peak usage times of most web sites, including Facebook and the like, coincide with business hours? You can look at the studies that reinforce this finding, but those traffic graphs speak volumes. Workers -- developers included -- that pair, spend less time on personal stuff than those that don't.
2. Nobody ever gets hit by a bus - True, but people do leave projects. Maybe the whole bus (or Pie Truck, if you prefer) is a read herring. The real issue isn't developers leaving a project. It's that you have less flexibility when one developer knows a piece of the code and the other doesn't. I can't double down on a part of the code that needs more resources, since then I'm in Mythical Man Month land and am throwing gasoline on the fire.
3. Nobody can prove that pairs are more productive - There are studies pro and con on this. I can speak from experience. I've been on a number of agile projects that did not use pair programming. We had a good history on what the velocity for each iteration was. We changed to pair programming and got anywhere from a 30% to 50% increase in velocity going forward, along with a large decrease in bug reports per iteration. That's pretty convincing.

It's easy for folks to misunderstand pair programming and to dismiss it as useless, weird or wasteful. It's one of the first things that gets ditched when the going gets tough, yet it's one of the most important, along with TDD. That's why I wanted to make as strong of a statement as possible in favor of pair programming and against singleton programming.

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Pair Programming in the New York Times

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, September 28, 2009 @ 3:26 pm

photo credit: albany_tim

When scientists and engineers explain their esoteric disciplines to the general public, they reach for analogies. Sometimes those analogies are apt and serve to clarify what is hard to understand, sometimes they are less apt and serve to obfuscate and confuse. We certainly use our fair share of analogies in software development -- construction, manufacturing, brain surgery -- and some of them, especially the one to construction, have been very harmful.

So when I saw the article in the NYT this past week on pair programming, I started counting the analogies.

1. First there was the implied analogy of the title: the "Buddy System," commonly used in safety critical situations where two folks look out for each other.
2. Next there was the colorful "Where's Waldo" analogy where Waldo was a bug, and the artist producing the drawing was the programmer writing the software. His pair was then easily able to detect "Waldo" early on in the drawing of the picture.
3. Programming is like creative writing where you can get writers block.

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Software Development: Importance Doesn’t Always Equal Effort

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, September 21, 2009 @ 1:35 pm

I've worked on more than a few software projects over the decades and one of my favorite little misunderstandings is the Importance versus Effort disconnect. That's where non-experts assume that because a particular part of a software system is more important than another, it must also take more effort to develop. That is rarely the case and, in fact, importance -- however that is defined -- is rarely a driving factor in determining effort or cost. This sort of misconception can result in some planning and budgeting mistakes, sometimes to comic or even tragic effect.

To illustrate, I can point to a trading system that I worked on (the names have been changed to protect the innocent). The average size of a transaction in this system was over $1 billion in 1990's money. The part of the system that resolved the transactions was really really "important," but the part of the system that allowed an application helpdesk to support users by seeing what their user's saw cost 60% more to develop. That's right, an "unimportant" helpdesk module was more expensive and took more effort and cost more than the "important" backend that handled billions of dollars a day.

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Getting a team over the fear of daily scrums

Michael Walkden, Tuesday, September 15, 2009 @ 1:23 pm

If my previous post about the value of agile meetings over traditional status meetings got you interested, I want to share a common pattern of behavior I often see from teams trying scrums for the first time. Hopefully you can avoid these and save yourself some time.

For new teams to Agile the statuses given in scrums are generally … well … lies. “Yep, on time. No obstacles.” I was once told by a colleague that, “You can’t hide on an Agile team.” This is true. However, this kind of exposure can be extremely uncomfortable for individuals to get used to. In traditional software teams people aren’t used to their peers asking them direct questions and paying close attention to their progress.
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Agile Development and Play: Understanding the Value

Blake Smith, Tuesday, September 8, 2009 @ 3:03 pm

My Addiction

I'm addicted to TED talks. There have been many nights where I've stayed up way too late watching them. For those who are unaware, TED is a yearly conference where world leaders and thinkers gather to share their ideas and spread their passions and work. I'm someone who gets fired up listening to outher people's passions. I love hearing about what gets other people excited, what makes them tick, what makes them want to share with the world.

One of the more interesting talks I've listened to recently is by Tim Brown at the Serious Play conference of 2008. Tim talks about how the elements of play can improve creativity and productivity in our workplace and life. I found the lessons learned from this talk something that can be very directly applied to software development, and taking some of these nuggets of teaching can help me be a better thinker and worker.

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