List/Grid Yearly Archives: 2009
Tech Days 2009
Things have been super busy at Anvil Digital so all I’ve had time for is twitter these days. If you don’t follow me yet, make sure you add me http://www.twitter.com/miguelcarrasco as I will more than likely save blog posts for deep discussions and thoughts over the next year. That said, if you are a Winnipeg [...]
What’s the ideal Sprint length
Introduction
I may have blogged about this previously. I have written so many blogs, I can’t recall any more. However questions regarding Sprint length surface on the forums regularly.
As per usual, the answers one must give always depends on the context and every context is different than the next. So let me start with the context – this is an excerpt of a post on the scrum development group on Yahoo. Incidentally, Yahoo groups is a good place to hang out. You learn a lot from all the questions and the different contexts facing teams around the world.
The Context
A team of 5 members currently working with 10-day sprints. They haven’t managed in the previous 5 sprints to have 100% of the User Stories completed. It is typically around 60-70% completeness.
There is proposal to increase the sprint duration to 15 days “because doing review meetings and planning every 10 days is a lot of overhead” according to the team.
My thoughts
Let me start out by stating some facts …
The official Scrum sprint length is 30 days. However I don’t think (I don’t have facts to back me up on this but it’s the sense I get from all the communications on all the forums) there are many teams working to 30 days any more.
Much of the Agile community agrees that shorter Sprints are better. So 2 week Sprints and even 1 week Sprints are becoming more the norm.
Why are shorter Sprints better?
1. Well we have learned from the Lean folks that shorter Sprints means less work-in-progress which means shorter cycle times and overall less waste.
2. Additionally, shorter Sprints tends to stress your process, revealing any flaws. Like no automated build process, automated test harnesses our unit test frameworks. Fixing these flaws has a tendency to provide leaps in productivity gains for your organization.
So assuming you buy the argument that shorter Sprints are better. My initial quick answer to the question is don’t try to lengthen the Sprint. Rather try to figure out why you’re only hitting 60% – 70% of your originally committed goals.
By the way, 60% – 70% may not be that bad, after all you have a team that is currently demonstrating a consistent output Sprint after Sprint.
So that leads me to think that either the story point estimation is not consistent, or the team is just over-committing. So I would suggest that they do the following.
Try to really assess what is going on in the retrospective. Let team members speak freely about their thoughts on the matter.
I would definitely spend a little bit of time re-assessing the size of a few completed items i.e. if the story was 10 points originally, what would they estimate the size now, after the fact. Re-assessing the relative size may well fix the problem.
Some folks, most notably Ron Jefferies, would argue why do you need to get your estimation down pat. Well in my opinion for one, predictability goes a long way to help remove team stress. So its great for a team to say we can commit to say 100 points and deliver between 90 and 110 each Sprint. The business will love you for this.
Whats good about this problem in and of itself is that Scrum is doing what it’s supposed to do; surface issues for the team to resolve. And if the team feels that going to 15 day Sprints is the right thing to do, so be it – it might well be. But I would try to first figure out why 2 weeks is not cutting it. Many teams make it work so it should be doable.
Hope this helps if you’re in the same boat. If not at least if it provides food for thought!
Jack
agilebuddy
Agile Project Management Questions Answered
I was asked recently to answer 5 questions about agile project management for a feature on PM Boulevard. I thought you might appreciate seeing them here too…
1. How has the Agile practice evolved over the last two years?
I don’t personally think that agile practices have particularly changed in the last two years, however there is clearly a stronger emphasis on some elements more than others now.
Scrum certainly seems to have crossed into the mainstream since I started my blog. Even though it was less than 3 years ago, Scrum still felt quite new and innovative in the UK at that time. I work in the web development sector and now every company I meet seems to be doing Scrum.
Another change is the interest in agile from the project management community. This seems significant as people start to think more about how best to apply agile on larger projects. Looking at Google Trends, which shows search volumes over time, the graph below shows that search demand for ‘agile project management’ started relatively late in terms of agile adoption, and interest is still growing strongly now.
The other thing that seems to be a clear trend during 2009 is a much stronger emphasis on Lean software development from the agile community. It seems to have really gathered pace in the last year or so.
2. What would you tell someone who thinks Agile is just another fad?
I don’t think agile can be called a fad now! Admittedly it may not be for everyone, but it’s certainly not a small minority any more. Again using Google Trends to gauge search demand and therefore people’s interest in a topic, ‘agile software development’ has been in high demand on Google as far back as 2005 (although it’s obviously been around a lot longer than that), and has remained high ever since. I don’t think something can be called a fad when the buzz has been going for over 5 years already and is continuing to grow strongly. For anyone that hates the idea of agile and is secretly hoping it might just go away, you’d better get used to it because I think it’s here to stay!
3. What are some tools that you use?
I know this might sound like it isn’t much help to others, but we don’t actually use any project management tools or any specific agile tools. Those who read my blog will know I’m a big fan of Excel and the whiteboard, although clearly agile project management tools would be a useful addition in some circumstances, particularly where teams or stakeholders are distributed across multiple locations or projects are particularly large.
In my experience, I’ve had several development teams practicing agile web development using Scrum, and they have been able to operate Scrum on a team-by-team basis without the need for any specialist tools to help manage. Instead we have placed a much stronger emphasis on face-to-face communication and collaboration, using Excel to manage product backlogs, user stories to convey requirements, and whiteboards to provide visibility.
4. Do you think that Agile and the PMBOK can coexist?
I definitely think agile and PMBOK can coexist, although some elements of PMBOK would be irrelevant to apply on an agile project. However there are plenty of elements of PMBOK that are not addressed at all within agile methodologies, for instance project initiation, cost management, risk management and various other aspects too.
I think the problem here is that a project manager must know PMBOK-style project management methods like PRINCE2 and agile methods such as Scrum very well to be able to choose the right techniques for the right situation. This obviously demands a lot of skill and experience from the project manager and is potentially very difficult for anyone new to either method. This is where experienced project managers that have successfully transitioned to agile have a really strong advantage over others who have only really managed projects with one approach or the other. It gives them the ability to blend the methods based on the unique characteristics of their particular situation, which along with leadership skills might be the thing that differentiates a good project manager from a great one.
I have blogged about this topic before here: Agile Project Management Is Not Enough!
5. Can you recommend a book, blog, podcast, Web site, or other information source to our readers that you find interesting or intriguing right now?
Apart from my own, I would recommend various other blogs, some of which you’ll find in the sidebar of my blog. My personal favourites at the moment are Leading Agile by Mike Cottmeyer, Succeeding with Agile by Mike Cohn, and Agile Techniques on InfoQ. In terms of books, you’ll also find some books I can recommend on my blog; they’re on an Amazon affiliate widget in the middle of each page. ‘Agile Project Management with Scrum’ by Ken Schwaber and ‘Agile Estimating and Planning’ by Mike Cohn are particularly recommended.
Kelly.
Photo by Marco Bellucci
Product Owner vs Product Manager
Introduction
Based on a recent post on yahoo forums, seems like there may still be confusion out there as to what the differences are between these two roles. Questions like, is there overlap? can the Product Manager take on the responsibilities of the Product Owner? what are the specific requirements for either role? pop up all the time.
There was a really good discussion on the Scrum Development Yahoo group on this topic and some really good points were made. So I’ll try to distill this for you here and of course put my own twist on this.
I think that the founders of Scrum purposely chose a different title for a reason. They could have easily just kept the title the same. But I think there was good reason for this. And that is that the PO has a specific set of duties in the Scrum role.
How do their roles differ?
First and foremost is that the PO drives the priorities for the development team. This is done via the Product Backlog as a vehicle for communicating priorities. Essentially, a company has a certain available capacity to turn requirements into working functioning code. How that capacity is used up is completely in the hands of the PO.
In order for the PO to do this, the PO needs to understand the bigger picture. Whether or not the PO distills this information from other roles or whether he has to get this information himself depends on the company.
Based on his/her understanding of the bigger picture, there are some additional specific duties that the PO must perform (not necessarily defined anywhere):
1. Articulate the product vision to the team
2. Define the goals at the beginning of every sprint
3. Tell the story behind each user story so that the development team understands what is required. So the PO must understand the end user requirements.
4. Define or help define the user story acceptance criteria so the team knows when they are DONE
5. Be able to prioritize the stories and be able to negotiate/collaborate on priorities with the team. Negotiate priorities occurs when after taking the top priorities off the backlog; there may be some remaining capacity that the next highest priority story won’t fit in to. So in those cases, a lower priority feature could be picked.
6. Must be available at all inspect and adapt points to answer questions and help guide the team empirically
Product Managers on the other hand must be able to do a whole bunch of other things, including but not limited to:
1. Defining the marketing strategies and outbound marketing communications
2. Pricing strategies
3. Understanding the positioning of the product in the market place
4. Competitive analysis
A couple quotes from the forum worth repeating here
“Scrum does not prescribe further responsibility beyond optimizing development to ensure business success” (Anonymous)
“The Product Owner role, on the other hand, is really about representing the business side and working with engineering to optimize the software (or technology) delivery part of the entire product solution.” (Greg)
The best ..
“The product owner role is a genuinely new role and disruptive for most organisations, as it does not easily map onto existing roles and structures” (Roman)
In summary, depending on your situation, the PM and PO roles will be performed by the same person, a group of people or separate people – frankly I don’t care. As long as there is a person dedicated to doing the PO duties and responsibilities as defined in the 6 bullets above, then all is good from a scrum perspective.
Switching stories mid sprint
Introduction
I blogged about this some time ago and then posted the blog on various agile forums to judge peoples responses.
Most of the responses were well reasoned, however, one of the responses I received shocked me somewhat and so I feel that it’s worth blogging about this particular situation once more.
The response I received was “You’re not serious you’re going to ignore the PO” and “You can’t be a slave to the process”
In all fairness, there are many situations under which the need to switch stories arise. And the specifics were not really provided. For example:
How long are the sprints?
How far into the current sprint are you?
Are there stories that have yet to start that is of similar size that you can switch it out with?
Is this a critical issue that needs to be fixed ASAP as customers are complaining and may negatively impact revenues?
Those are some of the questions that need to be asked when making that decision.
In response to being a slave to the process…
Well you’re either a slave to the process or the team is a slave to any chicken in the company who shouts the loudest. Lets go back to basics and why the Sprint is there in the first place. It’s designed to provide stability for the team to get stuff done. Hopefully you’re doing short sprints so it’s not a lot of time before the team pops it’s head up again and asks for more direction.
If the team listens to whatever the next flavor of the month is, then we’re back to square one where there’s just chaos and nothing gets done. Seriously, smart people figured out why we need to do it this way. There is strong evidence to support that this makes a difference, a really positive difference. So lets not willy nilly and go changing plans whenever someone in the organization feels like there’s something more important to do.
Moreover, in this situation, I think it’s important the team asks some serious questions as to why suddenly there’s a story that’s so super urgent that it calls for a change in plan. Lets say you’re doing 2 weeks sprints and lets say you’re midway. This means in reality that 5 days ago, nothing was more important (top priority items get selected to go into the sprint). Why all of sudden is their a need to change direction so soon after. Additionally can’t it wait another 5 days?
Now I am sure there are times where such a situation arises and that’s fine. I would never be so hard-line to suggest that the team doesn’t collaborate over this and decide what are the best options. And in such a case, it’s important that the team does this.
But lets be very careful how we deal with this. Because once you do this once, it’s a slippery slope after that.
So what would I do. As already mentioned above, I would sit down with the team. Have the PO explain the dilemma. Thereafter, it’s up to the team to decide if there is an easy swap out that doesn’t impact the Sprint goals and productivity. Ultimately if it is possible, I am sure most teams would do it any ways. Level heads should prevail.
State of Agile
Introduction
Seems like there’s lots going on in the agile world right now. Lots of talk about Lean and it’s impact on Agile. Lots of attacks going on at the CSM certification. Kanban is all over the news these days. And just last week, I read about a new Agile methodology called Stride.
So how do we make sense of this all?
My opinion is that there is value in each of the methodologies (for the purposes of this blog I’ll refer to them all as methodologies even though some of you might not think of them as such). It’s real important to read about them all so that you are armed with enough knowledge to know what’s out there. I see this as a toolset from which you can choose for your specific situation.
In order to illustrate ….
Scrum is a methodology and process that provides the mechanisms for teams to learn and adapt. Scrum however doesn’t say much about the meaning of DONE and how to accomplish that. That’s where XP comes in. XP has great practices around engineering discipline. It teaches us all about craftsmanship and producing quality work. I personally cannot see anyone practicing Scrum without at least some elements of the XP toolset. Be it pair programming, TDD, ruthless refactoring, emergent architectures etc.
Lean on the other hand is way more philosophical, but they have great teachings. For example, recognizing that work-in-progress is a liability is huge. If you start to think like this, you’re going to minimize work-in-progress and as a result you will improve overall cycle time. With Lean, people come first. What effect does this have on your organization? Well happy teams make happy customers, better quality software, improved work culture.
And Kanban? Well Kanban helps teams with flow (i.e. cycle time, throughput etc) and almost eliminates the need for traditional sprints which I won’t get into here (subject for another discussion). So many teams are using kanban boards for controlling the workflow of tasks or stories, or both.
Scrum has also been said to have problems with scalability and cross site development shops. Well Stride in it’s infancy (not even sure you can call it an accepted methodology yet) has adapted Scrum to provide capabilities for better handling these sort of situations.
So what do you do?
Well in my opinion Scrum provides the best overall process or mechanism to manage agile project. It’s a good base to start with and I would definitely start with Scrum. But you can’t go it alone with Scrum. You have to pick and pack from other methodologies till you get what works for you.
I think Agile is evolving and most likely wont stop. And why should it. I want us to get better at it. And there’s so many smart people thinking about how to make software development better. I can’t wait to see what it will be like in 5 years from now.
Poka Yoke, error handling for your process
Software engineering is still a very human endeavor. Its a complex process that requires our ability to create non-standard solutions for non-standard problems. But with this ability to creatively solve problems comes a tendency to introduce defects, o…
The 7 Software Development Wastes – Lean series Part 7 – Defects
Introduction
When one looks at all the wastes, defects has to be the most obvious one. The cost and repercussions of finding defects varies depending on where in the cycle they’re found. Defects found early on in the development life-cycle are way les…
Silverlight, Twitter, Azure, WPF Mash Up
I use twitter a lot these days (follow me here), which is why I haven’t been blogging as much these days. I was on the lookout for some cool new Twitter clients and ran into Sobees. For those that haven’t heard of it yet, its made up of a couple of different cutting edge technologies [...]
Client Vendor Relationships in the Software Development World
Working on a Software Development project and stuck trying to nail down exactly what you are building with the resources you have? Working with a client and trying to get them to pay for services, and keep getting “That’s too much money.” or “I’d like to get all that done, by December, but I only [...]
