New lean and agile books
Jul/100
I bought some lean&agile books to read during my summer holiday. The list is not complete because I have already read quite many of them. I got Mike Cohn’s new Scrum book freely from the publisher. Thanks about that.
“Scaling Lean and Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum: Successful Large, Multisite and Offshore Products with Large-scale Scrum (Agile Software Development)”
Craig Larman;
“Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams (Addison-Wesley Signature)”
Lisa Crispin;
“Leading Lean Software Development: Results are Not the Point (Addison-Wesley Signature)”
Mary Poppendieck;
“Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products That Customers Love (Addison-Wesley Signature)”
Roman Pichler;
“Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn))”
Lyssa Adkins;
“Kanban”
David J Anderson
ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever”
Jason Fried;
“Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development”
James Coplien;
“Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”
Daniel H. Pink
“Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard”
Chip Heath;
Command and control with pair programming
Nov/091
I found a revealing discussion at a popular suomi24.fi-site titled Ketterä IT-helvetti (agile IT hell ). It is amazing how often daily Scrum is practiced just opposite of Scrum’s basic idea of a self-organizing team. This 15 minutes is just for the developers to say hello to each other and coordinate days activities. They need to know the situation after yesterday’s work because software development is not predictable. Sometimes tasks estimated to take 2 days take 5 days and sometimes they are ready after one day. So everyone needs to know where the team is and agree on what to do next. The metaphor of chickens and pigs is meant to make sure that managers do not use that for micromanaging the people.
Command and control is bad because it destroys peoples’ natural work motivation. People including developers want to achieve something and autonomy to do it - not that they are given orders and controlled tightly. Command and control reduces productivity and creativity which is really harmful in an art like software development. Psychological studies have shown that time after another.
Pair programming can be done in a way that does not decrease the motivation. As the code is owned by team and every team member is responsible of changing any peace of it the team needs a way to teach the secrets of the code modules to everyone in the team. That is pair programming. It prevents harmful specialization and at the same time decreases the number of errors in the code. Your pair is not watching and controlling what you are programming but you two work together to create great software. Two creative minds coding and discussing together is a way to learn from each other and do a great work. Pairs are changed normally on daily basis so that different angles on the problem can be thought.
Pair programming should not be a stressful situation like the one described in suomi24. The team should discuss about the situation in its retrospective and decide how to continue to find the the joy of work that agility gives when it is practiced at its best.
Less extreme Scrum
Oct/091
Agile software development has often seen as an foreign element leading to chaos in Virginia Satir’s model. Current situation of Scrum is indeed somehow chaotic. Key persons are arguing against each other and it has been very demanding to define what Scrum actually is? Ken Schwaber’s ScrumGuide is our current definition but it is not ready for a Scrum Alliance’s multi-choice exam. There are many different versions or variations of Scrum which may or may not be under a common framework. Common thing in these is that they are more realistic and less extreme.
It has been visible for a while that radical extreme Scrum has given space to real life. Some of these modifications clearly belong under the title “Scrum but” but some others are coming from Schwaber and Sutherland, who are the authorities who define Scrum. In the London Gathering Schwaber introduced product backlog refactoring meetings where team collaborates with the product owner to create actionable product backlog items. In Munich Gathering Sutherland emphasized that the user story must be ready for the Sprint, which means that a good enough specification exists to continue. The main difference here between Rational Unified Process and Scrum is in the collaboration between the developers and the product owner. In RUP there are strong roles and artifacts that are just handed to next group of people. Product owners’ role has got more content by the discussion of release planning - still obscurely defined time-box of Scrum.
We are now also openly talking about undone features and telling that team might not be able to complete a user story to the point that it can released. So we add a stabilization Sprint where undone features are completed before the release.
Situational leadership model was my favorite in the 80’s. In addition to Tucman’s model it was also well visible in the Munich Gathering. Actually that means that we have to admit that leaders can’t just assume that teams self-organize when they are just empowered to do so. Sometimes directive forms of leadership are needed though we understand the drawbacks of command and control.
Schwaber’s integration teams that he introduced in his book Enterprise and Scrum have not been heard much in talks of the Scrum people. The case studies of real life projects tell clearly that defined organizations are used, not just self-organizing flocks of business and technical people. The question of scaling agility is interesting and clearly not solved in a way that theoreticians and practitioners can both accept.
Actually, I would like to asses (or rather measure) different agile solutions instead of arguing about right or wrong Scrum.
Losing weight with Scrum
Oct/090
Scrum is simple and hard. So is losing weigth for the majority of people. The secret of losing weight is that you eat less. That is that simple, but doing it is hard.
We can apply empirical process control to control one’s weight. Let’s have a daily weighting every morning to create a burn down chart of your body mass. Then you tell your group of peers what did you actually eat yesterday and what are you planning to eat today. This is basically how weightwatchers do it.
Eating less is hard and so is software development. Deciding what do (that is called prioritizing), limiting work to capacity under pressure and keeping the commitment are tough things to do in real life.
Disclosure: My own weight is normal and has always been.
Scrum Team availability
May/090
If you read XP or Scrum books or online sources you find that team is a stable group of developers who work full-time to accomplish the goal. The recommended way of estimating its capacity is to use historical velocity and team members report effort remaining in hours to have daily updates of the burn down charts.
In agile estimation the estimate of the complexity of the features, often expressed in story points, is the easy part though not trivial. In my thesis I have a small experience report about the variability of the feature sets, but I will leave that now. Instead I want to talk about the variability of the team’s capability to implement what they have promised.
In real life the organizations are not so lean that they have dedicated teams for the development. Instead, each developer has responsibilities in multiple projects and also critical maintenance work that must be done as soon as possible. An of course, they are also vacations, trainings, corporate administration and common meetings.
Some the capacity variation mentioned in the previous chapter is known or can be estimated in the Sprint planning. Using just velocity averages assumes that this variability is irrelevant and averages out in a large number of Sprints. But if we know that most of developers have their vacation in July, then it is just reasonable to take that into account and adjust the promises accordingly. In my own Sprints I have asked every developer individually how many person days is he/she available for Sprint work. That is best guess of the capacity at the moment. An then the team limits the work into that. Naturally, there is a mathematical relation between velocity in story points and capacity in person days. So you can still use story points as your unit if you want.
We could argue about the best guess of the capacity. In historical average velocity we take into account the average changes of the availability of the developers, because we count only the story points of realized features. It could be better estimate of the capacity if the developers have optimistic bias in the Sprint planning. But in averages we don’t have known capacity deviations as we have if we ask the capacity from the developers.
The real variability of the capacity occurs during the Sprint. It is not enough that team members report the effort remaining of each task. Suppose that I have promised to be available 15 person days in the Sprint and I get an urgent need to put 10 days to something else. Then it is quite natural that I tell that as an impediment in the daily Scrum as soon as I know about it. The consequence might be that a feature is taken away from the Sprint. Obviously the burn down chart would have told the same thing but not so early.
I think that it is relevant to take availability variations into account in Agile projects, because they have impact on the stress level of the developers with all of its consequences. The variability has also consequences in releases especially when we work in a project which has many teams that depend on each other. Realistic daily view of situation is needed.
That’s it today. A long story of a small but important detail.