Off to Agile 2007

Oxygen Software Development is off to Agile 2007. Four of us are speaking:

Ript™: Innovation and Collective Product Ownership
by Ken H. Judy and Ilio Krumins-Beens
XR11: Product Ownership
Thursday, 4:00pm

In 2006, Oxygen Media CEO Geraldine (Gerry) Laybourne, the woman largely responsible for Nickelodeon’s early success, partnered with her XP/Scrum development team to create a new mission and new revenue stream for her company. This experience report covers product conception through initial release of a single product. It describes how Gerry’s leadership qualities paired with agile practices to engender deep mutual trust and collective ownership over technical execution and business outcome. This unbounded collaboration provides a template for future projects at Oxygen and other organizations with innovation as part of their agile product development strategy.

The Gentle Art of Pair Programming
Oksana Udovitska and Wendy Friedlander
Wednesday, 8:30am

The presenters build upon their experience as software professionals and the pair programming practices employed at Oxygen Media, the first and only cable Network owned and operated by women, to teach The Gentle Art of Pair Programming. This tutorial will cover the basic principles of pair programming, why it is a worthwhile practice and how to get started. Discussion will include how to take full advantage of pairing and how to cope with its challenges. For those new to pair programming, this will serve as a good introduction and include concrete first steps. For those already in a pairing environment, this presentation will include new viewpoints and interesting discussions on familiar topics. Additionally, everyone will benefit from the interactive and fun games for improving and enhancing communication skills. Being women in a male dominated profession gives the presenters unique perspectives and insights into pairing which they are eager to share in passionate and exciting ways.

Whitman Poem

Fort Green Park

One of the joys of Brooklyn is being immersed in history. My apartment is in a house built just after Lincoln’s presidency. Down the street is Brooklyn’s first park designed by Olmsted and Vaux and standing on the site of a Revolutionary War fort. As editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Walt Whitman lobbied for the creation of that park.

Roaming in Thought
Walt Whitman — Leaves of Grass

ROAMING in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality,

And the vast all that is call’d Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead.

My Management Mission

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As a technical manager, what am I for? What are my core values?

Nurture a passionate, focused, autonomous team. Attract, retain and develop people who do right for their team.

Approach the manager’s work with humility. It’s not about getting people to do what I want. It’s about having a team that owns what they do and does it well.

Wed developers’ desire to contribute and love of problem solving with practices that minimize waste, reward learning and provide continual contact with customers.

Hold the team accountable for their commitments. Have them define their own standards of performance (estimates, quality practices, definition of done). Allow them to feel the inevitable disappointments. Celebrate their achievements. Always expect them capable of improvement. Treat their collective workspace, opinions, and time with utter respect.

Always seek out the next challenge and deliver on commitments.

Don’t wait for ways to provide value to my employer. Anticipate the next change or growth. If wrong, react to it.

Avoid make work. The goal isn’t to keep the team busy. It’s to keep them contributing.

Teach senior management the value of the team by what they do. Project success drives organizational change. It trumps reasoned debate. Project success can sometimes even win out over habit, emotional ties, and political ingenuity.

Treat all people ethically

Authority is a trust assigned to me for a purpose. A leader’s behavior shores up the workplace behavior of others and affects the health, happiness and family life of staff. Be accountable to that.

If there is a purpose in work and in life it is not to create unnecessary human suffering.

Two Product Backlogs – One Sprint

Forked Road For the last year, our development team combined work from two different product backlogs into one sprint backlog.

One product backlog contained work in support of mission critical television operations. The other was our first consumer software effort, Ript™.

In taking on a sprint commitment, the team did their best to honor a 55%/45% allocation roughly measured in story points. Our primary revenue stream had the higher allocation and the higher priority. The team was to prevent obstacles in the Ript project from endangering commitment to mission critical television support.

We had good reasons for doing it this way. It worked for a while. Then it didn’t. We’re adapting.

Why we did it

  • With six developers we were too small for two teams. We pair and didn’t want a two person team. Been there. Done that.
  • We wanted contribution from everyone on Ript. Jointly conceived and striving for innovation.
  • We wanted everyone to be familiar with our mission critical applications.

Why it worked

  • Our television support projects fit in a cohesive program, were predictable and reliably estimated.
  • The team felt a strong emotional commitment to Ript.
  • The team has a mature Scrum/XP practice.
  • We let the team manage the allocation while holding them accountable to the commitments they set.

Why it stopped working

  • The television support work transitioned to an unpredictable mix of smaller projects and maintenance.
  • Ript grew into a larger project and strained against the allocation assigned it (effectively 2.5 heads).
  • Ript raised enough interest that it became a higher priority to the company.
  • We foresee an ambitious portfolio of projects coming up from both sides of the business.

How we intend to change

  • Grow to create two four person teams.
  • Each team will focus on one line of work.
  • Run two sprints on sync’d two week cycles.
  • Have a co-located product owner proxy for each team.
  • Share the Scrum Master.
  • Two senior developers (manager and coach) will swap between the two projects daily.
  • The remaining six developers will more slowly rotate among teams at sprint intervals.

We’ll still have to balance maintenance and project work within each sprint backlog but we will avoid drawing work from two product backlogs. That solution fit a particular set of challenges from our business and I don’t regret having done it but now it’s time to adjust.

Change drives more change and I expect our actual practice to adapt in ways we haven’t anticipated.

The thing is, as long as we managers protect the integrity and cohesion of the department, I’m confident the team will be able to respond. We’re committed to the company. We’re committed to each other’s success.