A product owner describes work. The team estimates it. The product owner sets a delivery target. The team commits to it.

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.

Posted: July 10th, 2008 under development, scrum.
Comments: none

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.

Posted: July 6th, 2008 under development, scrum.
Comments: 1

Construx has a white paper revisiting Stephen McConnell’s Software Development’s Classic Mistakes.

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.

Posted: May 16th, 2008 under development.
Comments: none

Fail fast is a technique for improving the quality of software:

“failing immediately and visibly” sounds like it would make your software more fragile, but it actually makes it more robust. Bugs are easier to find and fix, so fewer go into production. – Jim Shore

Scrum aspires to a fail fast approach to building software.

It describes practices that surface problems:

• a backlog prioritized by the product owner and estimated by the team (accountability)
• short iterations
• frequent retrospection
• a role dedicated to removing impediments

It champions values that motivate individuals to address problems:

• delivering business value
• collaborating with customers
• empowering teams
• building quality in
• continuous improvement
• courage and honesty (a refusal to hide risk)

Possessing these values and practices, an organization is less likely to overlook or tolerate dysfunction when it materially affects the setting and achieving of project goals.

1. risks are identified before they become problems
2. simple problems are detected and resolved quickly
3. thorny problems are mitigated
4. catastrophic problems are aired to all concerned parties (informed consent)

Cases #1-3 increase a project’s chance of creating value.

Case #4 compels an organization to cancel a doomed project.

All four cases represent a better outcome for the business. Assuming that business offers value to the world, that’s better for our end users, our reputation, and our society.

Immediate and visible failure. Much preferable to hidden, prolonged and inevitable failure.

Posted: May 15th, 2008 under scrum.
Comments: none

Kallokain wrote a rebuttal to my post questioning the value of productivity metrics to justify agile.

In a recent article Ken Judy takes the stand that agile software development should not be adopted on the grounds of higher productivity. The reason for that, Judy claims, is that there are better ways to justify adopting agile than with hard numbers.

I can sympatize, because I have worked in my share of software development projects where the measurements did more harm than good. Nevertheless, I believe Judy is wrong in this instance. Most organizations measure the wrong thing. That does not imply that measuring is bad in itself. (read the post)

Just to be clear, my objection is not that agile should not be justified by hard numbers but that I haven’t seen a metric for productivity gain specifically that both stood systematic scrutiny and was economically feasible for the average business to collect.

In my experience, measures that are tied to some non-revenue related abstract concept of “productivity” such as lines of code, story points, etc. are more problematic than helpful.

My point about velocity is that it is a measure that should be a feedback system back to the teams and becomes problematic if it is considered some sort of intrinsically meaningful measure that can be reported to senior executives (as in “We completed 20 story points last iteration, 25 this iteration. We’re five story points more efficient!”)

I agree that the ultimate measure of success in business is profit. I understand that any business decision should somehow influence revenue gains or hard dollar cost savings.

The problem with justifying an agile adoption based on revenue gains is there are so many other considerations that attempts to credit any single factor become dubious.

Cost savings need to be real not theoretical. Who did you lay off? How much budget did you give back based on agile adoption? Jeff Sutherland has a paper that does show significant cost savings using Scrum. The subject company was a CMMI-5 organization and there commitment and rigor to measurement was higher than most companies would support and is cost justified based on the government regulations they perform under.

If someone can propose a relevant metric that is economical for a small to medium size business to collect, that can be measured over time in small enough units to show increased performance due to specific process changes, that has some relation to reality that can be meaningfully communicated to senior managers, and doesn’t create more problems than it solves, I will be happy to consider it.

Posted: February 19th, 2008 under development.
Comments: none

To help some peers advocate for agile adoption, I prepared an experience report to demonstrate how my old team benefited from XP and Scrum practices. This is an extension and refinement of an earlier post on the benefits of XP.

Team Cohesion

Before and during our agile adoption, I informally administered the Gallup Q12 employee engagement survey. It is composed of twelve simple questions. Agreement correlates to retention, customer loyalty, safety records, productivity, and profitability.

From the beginning to the mid-point of our adoption, staff went from a response rate of 70% agreement 30% disagreement to 80% agreement, 15% neutral and 4% disagreement.

The most improvement was in daily opportunities “to do my best” and daily feedback on performance and expectations.

I’m convinced if I had administered the Q12 late in our adoption, we would have had even better results. The key un-addressed concerns were about having a best friend at work and feeling connected to the mission of the company. By 2007 our team grew to include people brought in by personal recommendation of other members of the team and our portfolio included consumer facing work directly for our CEO.

Rather than re-take the Q12, we undertook a 360° performance review. That we did this on our own initiative shows just how much trust we had built with each other.

Test Coverage/Code Quality

XP practices enforced methodical unit test coverage, mutually arrived at coding conventions, and real-time code inspection by multiple members of the team. The team went from no unit test practice to comprehensive coverage over the business logic and controller layers. (Unit tests against data access and gui were less comprehensive. I don’t intend to get in the middle of that debate here.)

A user story, test-driven approach to development has been shown to reduce defects in final testing by 40%.

XP and Scrum force conversations between the development team and product owner that incentivize all to build quality into the software rather than allowing technical debt to accumulate and relying on downstream QA process to fix the application.

In 2006-2007 there were no business impacting failures of our internally authored software. We were able to function as a project team with no dedicated developer maintenance staff. Change requests were minimal enough that we were able to prioritize them into our project sprints as overhead.

Reduced Risk

While any team has experts, “Agile” practices reduced our reliance on “specialists”. The entire team was capable of working on and maintaining any aspect of the code base. We passed the “bus test”; despite our small size, no project was at risk if any given member of the team became unavailable.

Leadership

Our team raised our skills and began contributing to our field. We write, present and teach at conferences on topics of scrum, XP and platform as well as contributing to open source projects and developer knowledge bases.

Recruiting and Retention

After establishing “Agile” practices we recruited skilled candidates from higher paying positions who desired to work in our culture and with our practices. We received inquiries from as far away as South America and Europe. Despite the reputation of our team and market demand we retained staff.

An additional benefit is that pairing provided an efficient on-boarding process for new hires. Developers joining the team provided immediate contribution. A metrics-based way to demonstrate this is to show that sprint commitments weren’t affected new hires first weeks. I observed that but mainly base this on comments from the team lead and existing members of the team.

Workplace Diversity

A 2006 paper by McDowell, Werner, Bullock and Fernald found that pair programming practice, “may help increase female representation in the field.”

Agile values and practices support a collaborative, empowering and sustainable work place. Such environments support diversity and take advantage of the breadth of experience each worker represents.

Client Satisfaction

We asked for quotes from our clients, vendors and even competitors which we included in our budget presentations (I’ve pretty aggressively scrubbed them):

“Working with the agile Software Development team has been rewarding on many levels…it’s a team that celebrates creativity, organization, listening, feedback, openness, honesty…and is proof positive that a great process results in great product. I look forward to our very regular meetings (I even readjust my travel schedule as much as possible to not miss anything) and am never disappointed. They are an engaging and engaged group of individuals.” - CEO

“[____ saved] half a head in [another team] and a full head in my team.” - VP

“The _______ written by our development team are the guiding-light to our decisions. [third party solution] has a vast wealth of information but no good reporting and our in-house [solution] enables us to divine meaning from the mountain of data.” - VP Traffic Operations

“We also use [third party solution] for all of our broadcast networks but I have heard about your software technology for ____. We currently do that through manual operators but I’d like to understand how you do that more sometime and how it works…” - Senior Executive, Competitor

“Given the complexities of ____ that includes the combined limitations of automation, graphic and traffic systems I believe [the team] has created a solution that has proven to be much more capable than most systems than I’ve worked with.” - Vendor

Frequent Delivery, Adaptability

Throughout 2006-2007 our team of 3-8 developers balanced two simultaneous lines of work on diverse projects built in Microsoft Windows Forms, ASP.NET to SQL Data Analysis Services Data Warehouses, Vista compatible Windows Presentation Foundation and XAML, open source .NET MVC frameworks and Ruby on Rails including a rich windows application built on beta Microsoft Technology.

The team completed eight IT and three consumer projects while doubling head count from 5 to 10 (+2 contractors). We initiated our consumer product initiative and achieved our first release of a rich windows application with a six month allocation of effectively 1.5 - 2.5 developers.

Invention/Innovation

Agile practices evolved from Lean management and associated knowledge creation theory. In this, it shares ancestry with Six Sigma.

Agile is based on empirical not plan-driven process control. It is closer to lean product development than lean industrial manufacturing.

Lean product development models sustained innovation as a process of knowledge creation and conversion within an organization that acquires and shares learning in an cycles within and across teams and up and down from leadership.

Agile fosters true joint work which is the only form of workplace collegiality that advances organizational change and innovation.

Our consumer product was recognized for its design and implementation by Microsoft’s platform and developer evangelist team as well as by the WPF team. It achieved high ratings in usability testing with end users (avg rating 8 of 10) and showed potential to deliver on its revenue targets.

Posted: February 11th, 2008 under scrum.
Comments: none

Did I measure “hard numbers” to demonstrate increased productivity with Scrum/XP? No.

…and that’s a good thing.

The tyranny of metrics.

Metrics have unintended consequences. Particularly when they justify incentives or affect people’s workplace. In the short term, performance improves regardless of what you measure. Over time, behavior distorts in ways you don’t want.

What to measure?

Lines of code? What a terrible measure of productivity! Is “thethethethethe” 5x’s more valuable than “the”? I know it takes longer to copy edit.

Function points? Who has access to a qualified function point counter? Is 6 fp’s more productive than 10 fp’s? What if I only need 4 fp’s to get my job done?

Velocity? Too many agilists fall into the trap of thinking of velocity as something objective.

Example: A team of three performs 40 story points in one sprint. A team of ten does 50. Which team is more productive?

If the teams estimate in isolation, work on different types of projects or if the sprints were months apart the appropriate answer is, “who knows.”

People will adjust their sense of how long things take over time and in response to change. That’s good. 1pt <> 1pt. 1hr <> 1hr.

Velocity is a feedback mechanism for the team - a way of informing their own intrinsic motivators and refining gut estimation. Burndown is an early warning mechanism for iterations or releases. Leave it at that.

What’s my baseline?

Rigorous tracking is a hard-won part of agile adoption itself. I have no “before” to compare to an “after”.

Small businesses are volatile. Our team grew and our work changed dramatically during the course of our agile adoption.

We have better things to do.

Measurement is an overhead. Tracking a backlog and velocity are enough.

There are better reasons to adopt agile.

We sought improved customer satisfaction, reduced risk, improved quality, incremental delivery, and innovation. We obtained other benefits including: great recruiting and retention, rapid professional development, high employee engagement. [I'll go over these benefits in a future post.]

Be the change

I saw an XP experience report by a big BPM vendor. Even they didn’t have quantitative metrics to support their adoption. Why? Because the reasons above apply to big companies as well.

If nothing else, agile practice should shorten our patience for doing things we know don’t add value. Re-frame the conversation.

Posted: February 10th, 2008 under scrum.
Comments: 3

My development team began adopting Extreme Programming (XP) in January 2004.

Before this, we were hit and miss. Success relied on individuals. We had few shared practices. Our goal in going “Agile” was to consistently perform across projects.

“Agile” declares a set of common values and supportive practices. It fosters collaboration with customers and shared ownership within project teams.

In time, the team became proficient in core XP practices:

Planning

• User stories
• Iterative development
• Tracked velocity
• Daily stand-up meetings
• Regular retrospectives with continuous improvement

Designing

• Simple system metaphor
• Use of development spikes
• Refactoring

Coding

• Onsite customer
• Pair programming with switching
• Test driven development (TDD)
• Continuous integration
• Collective ownership
• Sustainable pace

Testing

• Extensive unit test coverage
• Bugs are resolved within the iteration
• Acceptance testing by the on-site customer

Within a year the team’s performance was more consistent and visible. We were measuring our velocity and predictably delivering on our 30 day iteration goals.

We discovered our project management practices had become a bottleneck. We were clearly hitting idle periods within and around projects because of a failure to efficiently describe and prioritize work.

We introduced Scrum as a management framework on top of XP. It provided practices for organizing and prioritizing work. It helped us define roles and responsibilities.

We clarified our expectations of internal clients and achieved more efficient interactions overall. We created mechanism for reporting progress and costs to senior management.

In Q1 06, the team’s practices were evaluated by an Agile Coach, Jason Lewis. Among his findings:

Oxygen Media’s Agile software development process overall rates above average and is better then the benchmark team. The benchmark did have considerably more Agile experience, but less time together as a team.

In the evaluation of practices, the team was overall: 1) well above average to outstanding in the adaptive learning practices, 2) Above average in Sprint practices and 3) Average in planning practices. High points for the team’s individual practices were the retrospective and use of the wall for iteration tracking. The one low point was the maturity of acceptance testing.

When comparing roles to the benchmark team, the benchmark team had a much better customer role but the team was stronger in the developer and facilitator roles. When comparing the team’s adoption of the practice’s versus the benchmark the team was generally more effective. Iteration tracking was one key area the benchmark team was better, however, the team was much stronger in the all the adaptive learning practices.

After the audit, we pre-staged our iteration planning, reduced our iterations to 2 weeks and formally planned releases.

We added discipline to our acceptance testing. We described acceptance tests in a narrative script authored by and exercised by our product owner (proxies).

We never automated acceptance tests for rich windows applications or systems tied to large, volatile back end data stores. But by Q3 2007, the team was using automated acceptance tests on it’s web applications.

The most drastic improvement however was in the customer role. Scrum defines the responsibilities of the product owner. In our case, that role was divided into two individuals.

The product owner, is an empowered single authority for prioritizing business value at the feature level. They are usually are executive level and work in the business unit “funding” the work. They also have working knowledge of the system to be built. Product owners participate in planning and review, and are available for ad hoc questions within iterations.

The product owner proxy is a member of the development staff who acts as onsite proxy for the product owner. This person assists in authoring user stories and maintaining a product backlog, meets regularly with the product owner, and acts in their place to broker decisions within the development team during iterations.

By Q2 2007, the team had product owner proxies for both our IT and our consumer facing work. Product owners included the VP of Broadcast Operations, VP of Ad Sales Traffic, our CTO, and our CEO.

Throughout 2006-2007 our team performed exceptionally well, balancing two simultaneous lines of work and maintenance in both .NET and Ruby on Rails with four to six developers. Our projects delivered on client satisfaction, originality and early monetary goals.

Team members raised their skills and began contributing to our field. They were writing, presenting and speaking at conferences on topics of scrum, XP and platform as well as contributing to open source projects and developer knowledge bases. We were drawing positive attention from our peer community and within our company.

Our consumer product, Ript™, was recognized for its elegance in design and implementation by members of Microsoft’s platform and developer evangelist team as well as by members of the WPF team. It also achieved high ratings in usability testing with end users (avg rating 8 of 10) and showed potential to deliver on its revenue targets.

Ript Promo - Click to play.

At the end of 2007 our company was acquired by a much larger television company. Software we wrote for internal use is considered valuable enough by the acquirer that they are hoping to transition into their much larger operations.

Posted: February 4th, 2008 under scrum.
Comments: 1

“Doc” List and I proposed an ethics open space for Agile 2008.

We all experience pressure to compromise our work and our reasonable care for others. As software becomes more beneficial, more pervasive, and inter-connected, our potential to harm grows.

Agile practices are making a contribution to ethical practice in our field, but we can and should be doing more to help each other navigate the ethical dilemmas we face.

This session will attempt to frame professional ethics in the context of agile values, make the community aware of the regulatory environment we may face from both state governments and standards bodies, and engage the participants in a conversation about how our day-to-day actions affect our employers, customers, peers, end users, and society.

Here’s the proposal http://submissions.agile2008.org/node/1573. Please rate and comment!

Posted: January 28th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 3

Team managers should till the soil with their teams.

Anything else is waste and waste must be rooted out.

Still it is hard.

Luke Melia wrote about how he performed as functional manager and dedicated 75% of his time pairing.

There are two tremendous challenges with this.

The first is limiting distractions in order to remain a reliable contributor.

Luke has tremendous reserves of focus and enthusiasm. As his manager, I did everything I could with our scrum master, Salim Divakaran, to support him, remove distractions and share workload.

The second challenge is being both the boss and a peer.

Luke recruited most of the team, he held weekly one on ones with each person, he insisted on unvarnished feedback, and is worthy of respect as both a peer and a manager.

So, here is the pattern: An experienced coach with people skills and authority over development practices pairing in with the developers. An experienced scrum master. Functional management residing in one or the other or divided up in some sensible and easily described way among the two of them.

This enables direct participation in the work, management attention to the team, and strategic contribution to the rest of the company.

Posted: January 28th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: none