Investors wiped out $1 billion of the market value of UAL, United’s parent, within minutes of an erroneous news flash on Bloomberg screens about a United bankruptcy. Google and the Tribune Company, the owner of The South Florida Sun-Sentinel, whose Web site was the source of the article that led to the headline, soon blamed each other for causing the fiasco.

A chain of mistakes and vulnerabilities led to United Airlines six year old bankruptcy being reported as fresh news. Investors reacted, destroying value to the point that trading of UA stock had to be stopped until the situation could be cleared up.

Two features on a Tribune run website started the chain. One allowed an old article to appear in the most viewed box. The implementation apparently doesn’t prevent obscure articles from filtering to the top in off hours.

The second displayed the old article on the Sun-Sentinel site with today’s date but no original publish date.

Google crawled the article. It’s age and lack of original publish date confused the automated news search into interpreting the article as current.

Then a private analyst published it without independent verification. Then Bloomberg included that analyst’s report in their feed.

This led to the panic selling. Trading was resumed and the stock recovered much of its value but don’t mistake that many people lost alot of money.

The Times focuses on the relationship between newspapers and search engines. You can also focus on the pressure of news agencies to keep up with “breaking news” on various platforms. You can focus on a loss of discipline among editors.

I’d like to highlight how two casually implemented features on a website indirectly led to serious harm. I can’t imagine a print editor allowing an old article to appear without an original publish date. So how was it acceptable to allow online content to appear that way?

Given the relevancy algorithms Google is known to use, how much was the behavior of Tribune’s “most viewed” area intended to create exactly the behavior that backfired in this case, i.e. to create referential links back to Tribune for old content.

There’s plenty of blame to go around but how much sits with those who defined, accepted and implemented this behavior?

I think the format works. Software ethics is not rules or reason, it is navigating essential complexity in building software and in moral choice. Descriptions that “abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence” (Fred Brooks)

We embrace essential complexity using the values and practices of agile software development.

We can become better software developers using the same tools we use to build better software.

We can learn through practice to recognize and accept responsibility for the intended benefit and unintended harm we create.

We can retrospect on our actions and their consequences, engage in a conversation with our peers, learn from, challenge, and support each other.

I am convinced it is the role of product owner or customer that needs the most work in our evolving agile practices.

Sponsors express their desires as feature requests. But, as Alan Cooper argues, there is no linear progression from what people need, what they perceive they need, and how they express that in language.

At the same time, supporting departments, customers and management want a commitment to a scope and schedule. And in response, the team wants methodical decomposition to estimatable stories.

And so product owners dive into story writing, decomposing software into smaller bits in order to grasp the whole from the details. But the resulting release backlog looks only slightly more nimble software requirements specification and only slightly better at describing what customer’s really want.

What if regardless of our initial input from customers, product owners took Jeff Patton’s advice and focused our initial backlogs on specific, desired and attainable end user goals — not on interactions but why they are valuable to users? What if themes were something other than a less granular stories?

Could we retain this focus through release planning by sizing these themes not by committing to a single path and simple decomposition but by a more complex matrix of possible implementations, classifying how effectively those implementations might meet the end user goal?

(July 2008) “There are some 146,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, down from a peak of 170,000 in 2007″ — Reuters

“Although no decision has been made, by the time President Bush leaves office on Jan. 20, at least one and as many as 3 of the 15 combat brigades now in Iraq could be withdrawn or at least scheduled for withdrawal, the officials said. The most optimistic course of events would still leave 120,000 to 130,000 American troops in Iraq.” — NYT

(July 2007) “More than 180,000 civilians — including Americans, foreigners and Iraqis — are working in Iraq under U.S. contracts… The numbers include at least 21,000 Americans, 43,000 foreign contractors and about 118,000 Iraqis — all employed in Iraq by U.S. tax dollars.” — LA Times

Goal

“(O)n my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war… ensure that our troops were redeployed safely, and our interests protected.” — Barack Obama

Estimate

“Military experts believe we can safely redeploy combat brigades from Iraq at a pace of 1 to 2 brigades a month” — Barack Obama

Target

“…that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010″ — Barack Obama

A lot of attention has been placed on the target of sixteen months and whether Obama will stick to it. Obama has said, “I am going to do a thorough assessment when I’m there,” he said. “I’m sure I’ll have more information and continue to refine my policy.” This has been called a “flip flop” or “reversal”.

But this is a simplistic interpretation of both Obama’s position and the nature of a target. The target is informed by the estimate in an attempt to attain the goal. The target should change as new information provides better estimates and if the adjusted target better attains the goal.

It is not the target but the estimate and goal that need to be debated.

Who are the military experts? Does this estimate represent a consensus among these experts? What are the assumptions surrounding this estimate? Does a range of 1-2 brigades per month represent the full range of uncertainty? What are the set of risks that might scuttle this estimate?

What does safety mean in the context of a war? What does it mean to ensure our “interests” are “protected”? What kinds of events would threaten our interests and change the redeployment schedule?

As long as our public debate focuses on positional bargaining around targets we will continue to miss the point.

“Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.”

The nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations concluded:

“(M)ost of the key judgments have since been debunked as inaccurate, false, or misleading. ”

“According to the Senate committee’s July 2004 report, analysts who wrote the NIE relied more on an assumption that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) than on an objective evaluation of the information they were reviewing. This group-think dynamic, the report states, led analysts, intelligence collectors, and managers to ‘interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of a WMD program’ and led them to ‘ignore or minimize evidence that Iraq did not have an active and expanding program.’”

A vast majority of senators did not read the whole report but only the summary or how that summary was represented by the administration.

“It’s probably pretty hard to say with 100 percent certainty how many read it,” the senior staffer said. “You can say with 100 percent certainty that it’s less than 10.” — The Hill

The unlikely became possible, the possible became probable, the probable became fact and the “facts” rallied a country to war.

Estimates

People are good at estimating their own ideal effort on well-defined work within their realm of experience.

People are poor at translating ideal effort into calendar days, estimating how long others will take to perform work, and estimating work that is either poorly understood.

Estimation is time consuming with diminishing returns so the effort should be managed to cost, i.e. time-boxed. That is why Agile practices invest more energy and place more value in estimating immediate work than on more speculative work farther out.

All estimates contain uncertainty. Industry research says an upfront estimate can be 25% to 400% of actual performance. The range of uncertainty is deeply dependent on context: how much work is involved, development lifecycle, experience with the particular work, shared experience within the development team and maturity of the management organization.

It is poor practice to “pad an estimate”. Padding doesn’t match the scatter that surrounds upfront estimation. For large scopes of work a developer should express an estimate as a range of uncertainty (i.e. “four to eight months skewing to between six and eight”).

Middle managers should not pad or trim a developer estimate. That is undermining the developer’s authority and making them un-accountable. The estimate is the estimate.

That doesn’t mean that the business doesn’t make planning decisions based on estimates. It means those decisions are separate from, though informed by, the estimate.

Targets

When a product owner or sponsor takes a developer estimate of 4-8 months and sets a release date six months out, they are moving beyond the estimate to set a business target. This is a judgment of what expense and time to market promise sufficient value to justify the work.

The product owner is using the developer’s estimate to inform themselves of the risk they are taking with their investment. An aggressive target within an estimate with high uncertainty is a larger risk than a conservative target on a more certain estimate.

Commitment

Setting an achievable target and owning that decision, communicating the rationale for your decision and having that rationale inform your priorities earns trust and rallies a team to deliver.

It’s the targets, stupid

Don’t set arbitrary targets. Don’t burden yourself with unnecessary risk, demotivate your developers and thoughtlessly constrain the value built into your software.

Do set meaningful targets. Take calculated risks, manage costs, partner with your developers and know what and when you need to deliver to your customers.

It’s not an estimate. The developer cannot assume your risk.

It’s not a commitment. You’ve got to earn that.

At the end of the day, the product owner is responsible for understanding the business climate, understanding the customer, describing and prioritizing the work, and managing the company’s investment to a successful outcome.

Not to get super preachy on you all, but sometimes I think we’re full bore on the wrong mission.” — ‘Agile Shop’ by Dave Laribee

As people, we embrace change we can ourselves effect. Our conversations about value turn to story writing. Our conversations about competitiveness turn to scale.

But we risk engaging the surface of things and not the things themselves. Means to what end?

As brother bee preaches, I stand before you penitent of the sin of local optimization.

In my last job, I led a development team. We were an agile team in a non-agile company. We were engaged in the effort of years, championing organizational change bottom up.

In spite of everything we’d built — an excellent agile team, a direct relationship with our CEO, visible release backlogs and delivery — the business remained opaque. It was unable to rally to us and unwilling to provide the transparency and focus we needed to effectively rally to it.

As a result, our timeline didn’t match the life-cycle of the business. When it was acquired, our efforts were shelved and we all moved on.

An agile team in a non-agile organization is not agile enough.

How easy could it have been to do a print format that works? They must not have even tested on macs nor did they alert me my browser was invalid.

Something else - the url of their thank you page is “CheckInFailed”

In it, they list ten mistakes most likely to produce catastrophic or serious consequences.

Half of them speak more to executive and product management than development:

• #1 unrealistic expectations
• #2 weak personnel
• #4 wishful thinking
• #7 lack of sponsorship
• #10 lack of user involvement

Given my experience of organizations that means projects are marked for failure well before agile methods are even applied.

Under these circumstances, we can hope frequent delivery will either morph the project into something more valuable or cause it to die a quick and merciful death.

A better answer disperses transparency, collaboration and continuous improvement from the team room out to sponsors, stakeholders, support units, suppliers, customers and end users — from development and project management to economies.

What I am interested in is to find out how graphical and interaction designers can be eased into Scrum development.

In my previous team, our UX director, Bob Calvano, mixed in with the team: proposing UI elements in mockups but also pairing with developers to collaborate on implementations. The team and UX director shared decisions but the UX director retained authority over them.

The team and product owner learned to defer to him on thorny questions of emotion, aesthetic and interaction particularly where the product owner had no clear sense of how the decision impacted tangible customer value.

The team had to learn how to deliver constructive feedback on UX. They had to learn how to express personal opinion in that context.

The UX director needed incredible patience taking in well and poorly delivered feedback. He had to understand his own process well enough to use day to day input to enable his own creativity rather than shut it down.

We evolved this relationship in a small team in an environment of high trust and we took months getting there. He came from a more traditional agency approach but he did have a personality suited to collaboration.

He eventually left our team to become an Interaction Design Director at one of the top agencies. He did so because the high profile of the work and pay were irresistible, so this experience didn’t hurt his career progression or his ability to work other ways. Though I know for a fact he misses that team and is returning to a smaller environment where he can recapture that collaborative experience.

thoughts from people who have read Jeff Patton’s book and what they think about how his ideas fit with Scrum.

Haven’t read the book yet. Talked to Jeff about his ideas at Agile 2007 (He was my adviser on my presentation on product ownership) and at the Fall Scrum Gathering.

High praise for his thinking on user experience as a precursor in product development (why) not simply as part of execution (what).

We tend to focus on story writing as the first tangible step agile plays in product conception. There are whole worlds of collaboration in terms of understanding who the software is for and how it solves problems for human beings that should come first.

Jeff Sutherland says the vast majority of teams run Scrums without real backlogs. How many of those few product owners that have backlogs derive systems and features from a user-centered perspective?

Hoping Jeff Patton will give us practices to tackle that problem.