Tag Archives: scrum

Two Product Backlogs – One Sprint

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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.

The Limits of Informed Consent

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Informed Consent — “the right of each individual potentially affected by a project to participate to an appropriate degree in decision making concerning that project” (Gail D. Baura, Engineering Ethics: An Industrial perspective)

Space Shuttle

“(T)he astronauts should have been informed of the possibility of O-ring failure before the Challenger launch…” — G. Baura

Often the people asked to pay down a risk are not the ones who suffer if the risk plays out. For Challenger, this distance contributed to the sacrifice of innocents.

As developers, we must never hide risk for which others suffer the consequences. This is core to Scrum. The team tells the Product Owner anything that may affect the business outcome of a project.

Scrum’s focus on self-directed teams instills the courage informed consent asks of us. Frequent opportunities to inspect and adapt gives it voice.

However, an ethical view obligates us to more than delivering business value and we cannot entirely cede our conscience to our product owners. We have an obligation to each other, our collective reputation, the people who use or indirectly benefit from our systems, and the public good. For the most part, these interests have no informed consent on our projects.

As Agile practitioners and Scrum advocates, how can we expand our conversation and help each other exercise due care?

Big Design Up Front

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Un-named waterfallI’m a moderate in the agility vs. discipline debate.

Scrum/XP has worked for my team. Four years in, we deliver better adapted solutions with higher code quality.

What I love about Agile is that it acknowledges what’s hard and treasures what’s valuable. There is inherent complexity in modeling partially understood and fluid problems. There is deep potential in talented people rallying to achieve a goal.

However, Agile is not the only path to valuable software. As Stephen McConnell and Barry Boehm say, it’s all a matter of the appropriate tools for the appropriate context. Different levels of planning, description and formality have their place.

The only way to know whether a practice works for your team is to learn it (seek mentors), apply it with discipline, and track your performance over an extended period of time.

The infuriating thing is many shops don’t think deeply about what they do: “The Demise of the Waterfall Model Is Imminent” and Other Urban Myths

The value of any practice is really doing it.

Retrospectives and the Hair Shirt

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Scrum is really simple, barely a process, more a framework. The hard work in using Scrum is fixing the things that it exposes, actually inspecting the things that it makes transparent and adapting to optimize the results and the organization that produces the results. — Ken Schwaber Scrum and NonScrum

My team embraces retrospectives. Every two weeks we list what we’ve done well and what we didn’t. We choose one or two things to do differently in the next Sprint. We revisit those commitments over time to see what progress we’ve made.

My team exists in a larger company.

In Waltzing With Bears, the one irrefutable reason to not do risk management is when no one else is doing it. If you are the only one presenting costs and possible negative outcomes management will assume your projects are troubled and you are a negative thinker. They’ll fund proposals that by comparison look cheap, safe and promise outstanding success.

I don’t exist in that extreme situation. But my team’s willingness to acknowledge mistakes is sometimes taken for negativity. Our willingness to admit the possibility of failure sometimes provides support to skeptics. Our willingness to question assumptions is sometimes seen as stone throwing.

Leading Change

In order to build something new we straddle two realms. In one we cultivate our aspirations and in the other we struggle to attain them.

At times we need to set aside our skepticism to see the world as it should be and people as we hope they are. Other times, we need to see how far we are from where we aspire to be, dig our feet into the soft earth and push.

Jeff Sutherland has a simple exercise for spurring organizational change

  • Setting aside all the obstacles in your path, picture one thing you would like to change. Write down what it looks like.
  • Now, go back to where you are. Look at that outcome. List things you can do in the short term that get you closer to it.
  • Which of the items on that list are achievable and most effective. Put those at the top of the list.
  • Identify what you can do in the next week to to achieve the items at the top of the list.
  • Assign each of those items to someone in the room with you.

You’ve just planned a Scrum.

The Hair Shirt

There is a difference between justifying one’s mistakes and reflecting on past performance in order to improve. There is also a difference between acknowledging one’s fallibility and dwelling on it.

We developers are crafts people not monks. Our job is not righteous contemplation — it is thoughtful and rightful action.

So as reflective developers, we do not wear a hair shirt. Our goal is not to dwell on our own or other’s failings.

We are idealists.

We embrace grand visions, ambiguity, contradiction and change. We believe good people deliver the best results in environments of trust and honesty.

.. And we are pragmatists.

We believe believing doesn’t in itself make it so: success requires discipline, determination, and ingenious problem solving.

And as we embrace both the outcome to which we aspire and the given circumstances that surround us we will acknowledge mistakes. We will shine a bright light on obstacles in our path. With humility and tenacity we will challenge ourselves, our teams, and our companies to do better.