Are You Agile Enough?

I recently read an article in SD Times about how organizations tailor agile processes to fit into their environment, rather than feeling a need to be dogmatic. Adapting a process to work in your environment is very important to being successful. It's also  important, however to understand how the variations you are making help you move toward your goals.

Being agile is a means to an end; your goal is to develop better software more effectively, not to be able to wear a "We are Agile" badge. If you're considering adopting agile, you are probably doing do because your current approach isn't getting you where you need to be so it's worth giving the 'by the book' technique a shot before you try to adapt an agile method to your circumstances. This especially applies to when you consider omitting practices.  Like many approaches,  there is a synergy between the the core agile practices; any one can help you be better but the big wins come when you do them all.

 The essential parts of an agile process in my experience are:

• Feedback, with a goal of continuous improvement.
• Honest evaluation of why you're doing and why.
• A (periodically) stable codebase so that you  deliver functionality to customers quickly
• A set of goals that lead to customer value.
• A belief that the team doing the execution can find the best solution and that management needs to step back to encourage innovation.

Agile methods define some techniques for achieving these goals. Scrum has you doing sprint planning, daily scrums and sprint reviews. You need technical practices like unit testing and continuous integration to verify that the code does what your project plan expects it to do. There are other ways to achieve these goals, but if you are trying to change how you work, a template is helpful.

When I read something like this finding reported in the article:

Of agile’s core tenets—daily standup, iteration planning and unit testing—VerisonOne found in its fourth annual “State of Agile Development” survey that 69% of the 2,570 participants adhered to these three things.

or

Even a variation of Scrum exists. Known as “ScrumBut,” it was dubbed for shops that don’t fully comply with the methodology. It is for those who say, “We are doing Scrum, but…” While some people may view this as non-agile, others argue it’s simply a customization of an agile process to work better for that particular company and its structures.

I wonder what these teams are they doing instead of the core "standard" practices to achieve the goals of agile.  The argument about whether those practicing "Scrum-But" are "agile" misses the point of the label, which is to highlight the areas where teams can work to improve their productivity.

My former colleague Bruce Eckfeldt was quoted in the article as saying:

“I see the methodologies as a continuum, and at the end of the day it’s all agile with the same principles and practices,” ... “There’s nothing set in stone on how to do something. You’re always looking to improve."

If you're not improving as fast as you like, consider what steps in your process you are skipping.  It's really hard to grasp the concepts behind agile until you are disciplined and try to apply the practices. If you have another approach that gets you to the end goal, by all means do it, but at the core, agile methods don't define a lot of detail. The basics are mechanically easy. The hard part is getting comfortable with the transparency agile methods require.

"Agile" methods define a set of goals and techniques to attain these goals.  If you are trying to adopt agile, but don't want to adopt all of the practices of a method, it's fair to say that your organization isn't ready for a given practice, but be honest about it. Without the honesty and transparency, you're missing the key difference of agile methods.

As to the relationship between textbook and practical agile when adopting agile methods, Bruce is quoted as saying:

“things may be reasonably pure,” but then people start to see what works or not and begin “to look beyond the textbook versions of agile.”

The trick is not to customize too soon. Until you give the process a fair trial, there is a great tendency to fall back on comfortable ways.

Organizations look to agile methods because their current approaches don't allow them to deliver as quickly as they can. And in the end, organizations and people need to change, whether they are adopting agile, or any new process. 

Before adapting you need to understand the core values or agile before you risk throwing the benefits away. You need to understand why you want to make the adaptation and honestly express the reason. And most important of all, you need to be clear and consistent about your goals. For example, if you want to encourage unit testing, you need to be clear that unit testing is encouraged, and accept that initially slightly slower progress is possible and OK if people are learning to write tests. Nothing can kill a change endeavor more quickly than inconsistent messages.

Being dogmatic for the sake of method purity isn't useful. Following the process until you understand the benefits of the practices can be very useful as a way to facilitate change.  I'll end with a brief story.

When I first heard of XP, at an OOPSLA conference I came back to work and suggested that our definition of "done" include unit tests. The other person on my team grumbled each time I asked "did you test that?" The grumbling continued until a couple of days later when, being presented with a problem report from our QA team, he was able to diagnose the source of the problem in minutes with the help of unit tests. "Cool," I head him mumble as he found and fixed the problem.

Had we not given the discipline of testing a good shot because we believed that unit tests didn't help, we would not have understood why the practice mattered. If you think that a method has value, try it, learn, then adapt. The opposite, adapting before you try, is less useful.

The Checklist Manifesto as Agile Primer

I recently read Atul Gawande's book The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right and found a number of of useful lessons in the book for agile developers. Agile software development methods often have very few explicit processes, but these processes are essential, and require discipline to execute well. We're often tempted to skip steps, either because:

• We think that the step doesn't apply in a particular situation or
• We forgot

The former is reasonable when we really understand why the step isn't relevant, but we are often tempted to convince ourselves that a step is unnecessary before we've mastered the basic process. One common example is the Scrum Team that is tempted to skip one or more of the standard planning or review activities.  And forgetting is just something that happens when we're busy and moving quickly.

It's when we skip steps that processes break down. Think about the time's you've had a hard time tracking down a problem. How often was this problem in code that you wrote a unit test for?  While it's often tempting to say that a change is "too trivial" to break something, how likely would you make that same decision if you had to go through a process (either on paper or enforced by tools) that asks "did you write a unit test?" to which you had to explicitly say "no?"

As another example, consider the various meetings  that are part of your agile process such as your daily scrum.  Jean Tabaka's book Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders,  discusses the value of posting and following agendas for the meetings that agile teams have.   In some sense these agendas are just checklists that we follow to set up a context that allows us to meet the goal of the meeting is an efficient manner. In my experience, Daily Scrums and XP stand-ups become less valuable when they stray from the agenda, because people lose focus, and start thinking of them as less valuable. And the posted agenda (checklist) empowers those who find a side conversation distracting to move the meeting along.

Discipline is essential to an effective agile software development process. But discipline, Gawande points out, is hard:

Discipline is hard—harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can’t even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.

So, if checklists enforce discipline, do they do so at the expense of judgement and creativity? Gawande says no:

...the question of when to follow one’s judgment and when to follow protocol is central to doing the job well—or to doing anything else that is hard. You want people to make sure to get the stupid stuff right. Yet you also want to leave room for craft and judgment and the ability to respond to unexpected difficulties that arise along the way. The value of checklists for simple problems seems self-evident.

Using example from aviation, structural engineering, and medicine, Gawande demonstrates that well made checklists allow you to focus on the activities that require creativity, by providing a way to get the basics right.

The checklist gets the dumb stuff out of the way, the routines your brain shouldn’t have to occupy itself with

As much as I find checklists useful, if used the wrong way, they can do bad things to productivity and creativity.  As Gawande says:

Bad checklists are vague and imprecise. They are too long; they are hard to use; they are impractical. ... They treat the people using the tools as dumb and try to spell out every single step. They turn people’s brains off rather than turn them on. ...Good checklists, on the other hand, are precise. ... They do not try to spell out everything... Good checklists are, above all, practical.

Perhaps a surgeon, using examples from aviation, medicine, and structural engineering can teach agile developers something valuable. The main lesson that appealed to me as someone who values (lightweight) process is  process can enable you to be more effective and move quickly by liberating you from thinking about the well known issues, and allowing you to focus on the hard problems.

If your team is struggling with process and not getting enough done, think about whether there are some simple things you are forgetting, and write them down. And, most importantly, iterate on the checklists.

Note: This was also the first non-fiction book that I read on a Kindle  so I'm discovering how useful the Kindle is to capture notes as I read. I'll have more to say later about other lessons from the Checklist Manifesto about teamwork and collaboration.

Agile Portfolio Management

 I've heard people criticize agile methods as being too reactive and focusing too much on the little picture and ignoring larger goals. This is a misunderstanding of a basic idea of agile. Agile methods are't about thinking small.  Agile methods are about making small steps towards a goal, applying programming an management discipline along the way. (For more, have look at an elevator pitch for agile I wrote last year.)

The basic approach of all agile methods is to

• Define a goal
• Break the goal into incremental bits so that you can iterate towards the goal
• Periodically (at the end of each iteration) pause to evaluate both your progress towards the goal, and whether the goal makes sense. 

Teams often skip the second part of the this evaluation, but it's the constant evaluation of the long term goals that makes it possible to reconcile the concepts of being agile and planning.

If you have doubts about whether long-range planning in an agile environment is even possible, read Johanna Rothman's book Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects, which I  recently received a review copy of.

A project portfolio is "an organization of projects, by date, and by value, that the organization commits to or is planning to commit to." This sounds like a scaled up version of a product backlog that you might use to organize your work in an agile project, but with a longer time scale. So it's certainly aligned with agility.

In this book, Johanna motivates the importance of the project portfolio to enabling agile development, and also demonstrates how the technical and project management techniques of agile teams make it easier to define and iterate on a project portfolio.

Johanna is an expert on merging the human side and technical sides of projects.  I learned quite a bit about managing people from Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management which she co-authored with Esther Derby. In  Manage It!: Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management Johanna discussed how to manage projects. And one of the more challenging part of managing a project portfolio is overcoming the resistance some people have to defining a goal for a project, a portfolio for a product line, and mission for an organization. In Manage Your Project Portfolio she shows how how to address common obstacles to defining a project portfolio, evolving it, and using it as a tool  to allow everyone to understand where the organization is aiming.

And the benefits of a project portfolio don't just help with "fuzzy" concepts like vision, but can also help reduce and address items such as technical debt. In addition to an overview of concepts, and concrete guidance on how to address problems, the book interleaves stories that establish that this work is based on real-world experience, and help you to relate to the issues the book addresses.

I recommend this book to anyone who has a role in defining projects.

Estimation Poker

Estimation is a necessary part of software development. Product owners want to know how much work can get done by a deadline, project managers need to make commitments, and developers want to know if they committed to a reasonable amount of work.  While estimates are often inaccurate, estimates  provide landmarks along the way of a project to gauge progress. So, estimates are an inevitable, and useful part of the software development process. Many complain that the process of getting to those estimates, estimation, takes too long, so planning sessions are cut short and teams don't have enough time to discuss issues that have uncertainty. By appropriate use of planning poker, you can balance the needs for good estimates while minimizing time spent estimating.

Sometimes when a team is asked to estimate a backlog item, one or more people with expertise in an area are asked to estimate the item, but this is not the best way for an agile team  to get a good estimate.

There are benefits to involving a larger part of the team in the estimation process. The challenge is that people feel that involving the whole team is wasteful if the estimation process takes too much time. On the other hand, inaccurate estimates have their own costs for the team and the other stakeholders.

Planning Poker, an estimating method popular with Agile Teams can address some of these issues. Briefly, planning poker involves getting the developers on a team together to estimate stories using a deck of cards that have numbers that represent units of work. The numbers are often spaced in a Fibonacci sequence, the theory being that the larger the estimate, the lower the precision. Planning planning poker can be a really useful tool to both improve estimation and discover uncertainty in requirements.

People resist planning poker for reasons like:

• It seems inaccurate if the person doing the estimating does not having the "appropriate" expertise. A UI developer may not feel qualified to estimate a story that seems to be mostly backend processing, for example.
• It seems like a waste of time because people believe that one person can estimate for everyone.
• It seems inaccurate since the person who's been assigned the work should estimate it based on their skills.

Even if you find yourself throwing a wild guess at a planning poker session, the fact that you don't understand the scope of the issue is useful information. The benefit of having the entire cross-functional team understanding and estimating stores is that you can identify challenges across the application. What might be easiest to do in the back-end can add work to the application tier or UI, and also make testing harder. Having one person estimate  can make it hard to identify misunderstandings and issues because we tend to want to agree with "the expert," and there is no forum for identifying misunderstandings.  It's not always clear at the start of a project who the best person for task will be, both for the reasons I just mentioned and because assigning the work up front can lead to inefficiencies if work takes more or less time than estimated.

If you find that your estimates are inaccurate, or your estimation process takes too long, consider the following approach:

• Gather team members who are working on all aspects of the application. You need not have the whole team, but be sure to represent each "architectural layer". If your team is less than 7 people or so, include everyone.
• Look at the description of each story or problem report in priority order. Ask the team to pick cards based on what they read.
• See how close the estimates are. 
• If they are close, ask someone to explain what they envisioned doing to implement the issue. If someone has a vastly different idea, they should speak up. 
• If they are different, as someone with one of the extreme estimates to explain their reasoning. This will start a conversation about what the requirement means, and what implementation strategy makes sense.

This process helps you to focus discussion time on the hardest, highest priority issues. You will want to be sure that to allocate an appropriate amount of time to planning and estimating relative to your sprint length. You may still run out of time, but even if you do, you'll  have discussed and estimated the highest priority items as accurately as you could have, knowing what you knew. 

The biggest challenges to having accurate estimates are not having consensus on the "what" and not understanding the details of the "how." The process above is one way to focus discussion on the high-risk items in your backlog, while keeping the time spent on estimating reasonably low.  

The Indivisible Task

One of the things that makes agile work well is a daily sense of progress that can be reflected in, for example,  a burn-down chart.  For burn-down charts to be meaningful, the estimate of amount of work remaining in a sprint need to be accurate. Re-estimating work remaining in a task is helpful,  but the best measure of progress is the binary "done/not done" state of the items in your backlog.

Assuming that you have a clear definition of "done" for a task,  it's easiest to measure progress when you have tasks that are small enough that you can mark them complete on a daily (or more frequent) basis. Breaking work down into a reasonable number of reasonably sized tasks is something many find challenging. (Note: I'm talking here about development tasks as part of a sprint backlog, rather than splitting User Stories in a product backlog, though there are some parallels.)

 I've worked on teams when people refused to break down large task into 1-day or smaller parts. The common excuse for not breaking down work  is that the person who signed up for the work understood what the work was and the estimate was accurate. Of course, we had no way of knowing that the estimate was at wrong until the work was not done at the end of the week or so.

What was interesting to me is that those most resistant to decomposition weren't less experienced programmers, but rather the people the team acknowledged as "experts" and "good designers" who were good at decomposition as it applied to designs. So the theory of attacking complexity through looking at smaller pieces was something they were comfortable with. Not only that, they actually worked in a way that led to discrete units of work being completed throughout the project, whether in terms of frequent commits or even simply being able to finish a work day with a sense of accomplishment, even if the great task was still incomplete.

Breaking down work isn't as hard as some make it sound.   From a development centric perspective some of the things you already do which can guide you in task breakdown:

• Thinking about when you might commit code. It's good practice to commit code frequently; consider the Task-Level-Commit pattern from Software Configuration Management Patterns. 
• Considering what the tests you write as (or before) you code.  
• Deciding what you want to accomplish before leaving work each day so that you end the day with a sense of accomplishment.  

What these items have in common is that the define natural boundaries in the development process.

The main difference between doing this kind of planning and good programming practice is making your plan visible to others. This takes discipline, and a certain amount of risk, since if your plan goes awry it's visible.  Part of being a successful agile team is understanding that plans can be wrong, and using that experience to figure out how to do better in the future.

You may discover part way through your planning that the task breakdown you did no longer makes sense in light of something you discovered. That's OK, but at least you have a good sense of what work was done, and you can figure out what tasks are left (and estimate them!)

By breaking down work into smaller parts you have the ability to:

• Evaluate your progress in a definitive way. as it is often easier to define "done" for a smaller task.
• Get feedback from your colleagues before you dive in to a problem. 
• Share effort if any of the work can be done in parallel.
• Simplify updates and merges, as the changes to the codeline will all be small at any point in time.

It is possible to come up with too many sub-tasks, such that the overhead of tracking them on a backlog negates their value as a tracking tool. In that case,  there is nothing to prevent you from taking note of the very small things you do each day and combing some of them into day or half day items that do appear on the backlog. And if you really only want to have large tasks on the sprint backlog, consider doing your own fine grained breakdown that you can use to help you give a better estimate for time remaining. I tend to favor backlogs with tasks of a half to one day, and then making personal notes about smaller steps  to complete  those tasks on my own.

The value of working in small steps isn't a new idea. in 1999 Johanna Rothman wrote about the value and mechanics of managing your work in terms of  which she calls inch-pebbles (as opposed to "milestones") and Fred Brooks advised "allow no small slips" in  The Mythical Man-Month, and being able to identify these slips is key to having effective sprints.

Agile teams work because they have mechanisms to give frequent feedback on status. Accurate estimates of work remaining are an essential tool for evaluating progress, and small tasks help you estimate accurately. Decomposing work is not easy, and takes discipline, but the benefits are great.

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know is Done

The book 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts is finally available, and the title is on the mark.

Kevlin Henney, who I first met at the 1998 PLoP conference, asked me to participate in this project  in September of 2008.  I am honored to be a part of the list of contributors, which includes Kevlin,  Bob Martin, Michael Feathers, Giovanni Asproni, and many others who have important things to say about how to build great software. Kevlin did an amazing job coordinating and editing, and the the book represents an excellent cross-section of the many contributions that formed the basis for the final version.

Reading this book gives you a chance to learn from the experiences of people who've worked hard not just at writing good code, but at creating good software systems. Some of the advice may be things you already know. Some items may be surprising. Read this book to learn, be challenged, and to understand why programming isn't just about languages and syntax.

For more info, you can look at the associated wiki site. And feel free to share with me any thoughts you have about my contributions: Deploy Early and Often and Own (and Refactor) the Build.

Tracking what Matters

I'm a big fan of burn-down charts for tracking sprint and release progress.  The basic idea of a burn-down chart is that the team starts with estimates for all of the tasks in the sprint, and then on daily (or more frequent) basis re-estimates the amount of work remaining.

With a burn-down chart, you are tracking the new estimate based on the work that you have done. As you work on the sprint backlog you get a better understanding of the tasks, and thus you can revise estimates for tasks that span more than one day. This is reasonable since the original estimate is, well, an estimate.

Sometimes if you spend 4 hours on an 8 hour task, you'll have 4 hours of work left. Most of the time the time left  will not be the original estimate less the time spent, but more or less. At the end of 4 hours, the remaining work estimate for the same 8 hour task could be 2 hours, or it could be 10 hours if you discovered a snag.  This is important information for everyone involved in the project and allows the team to identify a problem at the daily scrum. Re-estimating is harder than just doing subtraction, but it's valuable.

One thing that happens when teams use an issue tracking tool (like Jira and Greenhopper) to manage their backlog is that re-estimating and effort tracking are combined. The only way to re-estimate is to "log work." You're required to enter the amount of time spent, and the tool will kindly offer to change your estimate to the difference between the original estimate and the time spent. There are two problems with this:

• It's important to think about the time left for the task based on the assumption that your original estimate had a margin of error. For all but trivial cases, the "calculated new estimate" is always wrong.
• The "time spent" value isn't really useful to stakeholders. In the best case you are only doing one thing during the time in question, so your time spent entry is accurate, but doesn't answer the question: "when will it be done!" In the worst case, you're not tracking your time accurately, and the time spent number is inaccurate, and provide no real  information.

Like all things agile, when looking at your project tracking approach you need to be clear about what you want to track and why. The main concern for stakeholders on an agile project is whether they will get the functionality they want at the end of the sprint. So the time-remaining number is important.

There are some good reasons for tracking time spent including evaluating estimation accuracy and billing
But in both of these cases you need to evaluate the overhead of the tracking time relative to the value. Tracking total effort for the sprint relative to estimated work done may be more useful than per-task effort to estimate tracking, and analyzing the results in a retrospective may yield more useful information than per-task tracking.

When doing sprint tracking:

• Make sure that everyone understands the goals of the tracking process so that you get uniformly valuable results. You definitely want to track how close you are to "done," but explain how important tracking effort is. 
• Make sure that, whatever the goals, that the data are updated daily. If the burn-down chart doesn't change for 2 days is it because people didn't update their estimates, or that the project is at a stand-still?
• Remind everyone that the estimates are just that: "estimates," and an informed guess that turns out to be wrong is better than no estimate at all. (And the inaccuracy of  the estimate helps to identify unknown complexity.)

Burn-down charts can be a simple, valuable, tool to identify problems during a sprint as long are your teams breaks out of the habit of tracking "effort" as opposed to "effort remaining."