Illusion Of Control

Jimmy Bogard have written a very interesting post on Flexibility and control.

He is writting: “The manager had likely fallen under the illusion of rigid control leading to more predictable success.”

His image with arrow and guided missile is terribly true and helps a lot to understand agile concept. Has I’ve already written in a post on Agile Practices With Waterfall Management, management that does not embrasse really agility (maybe due to some misunderstanding), this can produce very weird effect.

Agile Practices With Waterfall Management

What about Program and Development Management that are using a waterfall approach with agile development team? By waterfall approach for management I’m talking about management decision not to start the development before requirements are defined, planification and release date setup. It’s not unusual to see also a stabilization phase defined as for example the last couple of iteration.

This is mainly due to:

• Product Management team is not ready at all for the first iteration,
• Infrastructure changes not identified before the first iteration,
• Product Management wants to have a full plan on the future release before starting, to prepare pre-announcement.

The final result of this approach is that the development team is not working at all…because it’s simply forbidden. The market driven approach has been well understood by Product Management and they are blocking any kind of development before they have decided what features have to be implemented.

Joaquim Rendeiro talk about co-existence of waterfall (especially for management) and agile methodology in his post on Agile or Waterfall?. Yes, they can exist but may have the consequences I’ve talked about.

IMHO, this occurs inside teams that are transitioning to agility and are not mature enough on this agile approach. As agility provide a huge responsibility and control capability to the product management, they used this extra-strength keeping in mind the waterfall approach targeting dates and content of the releases.

The development management should be the driver to accelerate the transition to a real agile approach. For example by rejecting all big kick-off meetings to start a release, and encourage a better preparation of each iteration. The development team managers should also avoid any technical discussion include an product owner and take the responsibility to make the technical choices. Often, the technical choices are delegated to product owner. Yes this is strange, but haven’t you any discussion with a product owner like: we can implement the story this way and it will cost 13 points or a different way and it will cost 21 points but this last one is less good for reasons A and B. Let guess the answer…do the shortest path. Even if this is usually the good answer from a technical perspective (I’m supporting the principle of simple design which is often shorter to implement), there is not reason to delegate this decision to product owner.

Agile approach requires a clear definition and separation of responsibility for every shareholder.

Agility For Large R&D Team

Getting agile is probably the only (or best) way for large R&D organization in a software company to setup their workforce in front of their need. They usually are working over multiple products (legacy or not), and are market driven. In small software companies, the product management marketing function is endorsed by R&D management and they work usually on a small number of projects which are at least tightly integrated, which means R&D team is focusing on only 1 common goal.

Start-up have focused/sharp vision, excellent creativity. Large company are relying on strong market analysis and capacity to move on…most of the time as soon as a startup has demonstrated new markets.  Vijay Challa talk about this in his post on Agility World 2.0.So, they have to invest (put development resources) on the products depending on the market trends, profits from each product,…etc. That’s why its important to be able to switch developers from a product to another to be reactive.

Some agile principles helps for this:

• iterations and time boxed releases to have reactivity when some resources are removed from a project,
• sharing knowledge instead of specialization to be allow reallocation,
• pair programming to reduce learning curve when new developers are working on a new project.

I tend to think that agility is maybe not always that relevant for small company, but its certainly a must have for large software company to be reactive.

Critical Code Mass

Agile methodology are based on the capacity to make the code evolving. Extrem Programing have some principles around that as simple design and continuous refactoring for example. Notice, that the aim is not to anticipate future evolution.

Even out of an agile perspective, this is a good practice to keep code simple, maintainable, easy to make evolve and avoid what I call the Critical Code Mass. This post of Kevin Barnes on The Code Garden is worth to be read and is also talking about code evolution capability.

All this is about complexity of code, but this does not means thousands or millions lines of code. Of course, having a very tricky algorithm written with a too large code base will create difficulties when an update will have to be done: a new developer will need time to explore this code before doing the change (maybe even do some prototypes). Even the author himself of the code maybe request additional time to test the change before checking in.

The Critical Code Mass can also be achieved on a very small code base, for example, when the algorithm have kind of magic: few lines of code, but it is not obvious how it work and even why it is working. Implementing a change can also be a challenge.

I think it is really important to take care of this Critical Code Mass if you do not want to let your program behave like a black whole. This evolution of the code is silent and do not appear suddenly. If all the development team is not aware of this and do not pay attention to avoid it, the projects evolutions will become more and more difficult and long.

Beyond TDD

Take the time to look at this vidéo, it’s one hour long, but worth it.

Agile methodology are far less adopted than traditional waterfall methodology. Is it due to a lack of maturity? Maybe yes. I think Agile methodology will continue to evolve and this is a good thing.

I think that agile methodology are misused and people is emphasing too much the test versus design which is not to me the original sense. The ‘behaviour’ is really the unit of mesure of the business value provided by a software.

Scrum scoped to the dev team

Product owner is a role within scrum methodology that represent the customer. The question is about a team that would like to apply Scrum methodology without such role.

The answer is definitely “No” obviously. How to use such methodology in an organization that do not provide such role. I think this can be hardly achieve by managers assuming this role but they have to be fair. The team will assume its responsibilities (sizing, self organization…etc) and the manager will validate the acheivement of the stories even if this has no value from a customer point of view. The manager then will do the buffer with the “real” customer, and takes his responsibilities.

The hard point is for the manager:

• have an iterativ approach at least (1 month is perfect) 
• create new user stories if the customer is not fully satisfied with the implementation and track them as new items,
• describe precisely the content of the user stories to help the team do a precise and accurate sizing,
• provide support to the team if they have questions on the impelmentation during the srpint,

The key point is not to have a manager which is only simple bridge between the customer and the dev team, but fully assume the role of Porduct Owner. Sure this is not easy, but this can be done this way.

Faking Scrum

This week, the team get a training on Scrum. The goal was to introduce more agility in our development methodology. After this training, managers decided to use Scrum as Agile methodology, starting in 2 weeks for our neqw internal release. That sounds good.

The team is about 18 developers and QA engineers. Scrum recommende to have about 7 folks per group. This imply to split the team into smaller groups. The current oganization is really not agile; this not so suprizing as we kept the same organization for around 11 years and we are Agile practitioners only for 3 years. So the team in splitted into 3 blocks: QA and 2 development groups (business and platform). My concern is that we keep the same organization on re-grade the existing manager as ScrumMasters. I think this is faking Scrum for 3 reasons.

First, teams are supposed to be cross-functional, which is not the case today.

The ScrumMaster is supposed to be a facilitator/moderator and contribute to the features development as the other members of the group. The existing managers do not have such contribution. More over the ScrumMaster is not supposed to have any authority, which makes very difficult the association of manager and ScrumMaster roles for one person.

And last; self-organization of the team is a fundamental of Scrum. I do not see any of that in a re-organization fully handled by managers.

I hope we will go throw a different path: let the team re-organize itself by involving every members and do not fake Scrum.

Knowing early lose for late win

 I see often managers stretching their team to acheive goals as early as possible without any middle term or long terme appraoch.

Achievement is important but you have to be less productive at some point –take a breath — to get better acheivement latter. Here are some example:

• training and team’s skills ehancement,
• change a tool if you are reaching the edge of it
• do not assign storyes/task on a specific area always to the same developer for productivity reasons
• reduce tests (automatic or not) and focus exclusively on coding

 

Stand-up meeting practice

We are doing daily stand-up meetings in our team. This is one of the agile practices that has been setup (we are doing also test-first and time-boxing). These agile practices have been introduced progressively as the company decided to go on this path.

The initial goal was to improve internal communication inside the team on the project. I’m not satisfied with the result regarding our goal. Of course, every one is a little bit more aware of what’s going on in the project, but the organization of the team impact strongly the results. The team is in fact a composition of silos, and the daily stand-up is just an enumeration of information on really different areas. Finally there are very few cases where appears some shared information (I mean, information that is useful to more than only one guy).

In a certain extend, it does not provide the feeling that we are all on the same project. At least, folks have a rough view of who is doing what…which is not bad.

Today, Jeremy D. Miller have written a post that exprerss exactly my feeling:

A team building a feature is far better than a group of individuals doing tasks