During the weekend reading, stumbled upon this fascinating article which talks about Collaboration with a real life story.
Team work is needed, but one should not just nod for all requests. It could take the entire project down.
Have you observed that every company wants to be known as an Agile company(company implementing Agile methods), but no one wants to really follow Agile by the book ?.
Software Project teams do a lot of Agile tweaking during the journey of implementing Agile to fit the company’s culture. Since, company’s culture cannot be changed so easily, they tend to modify Agile practices to fit the companies needs. Here are few and funnier ways of tweaking that I have observed :
1. Have start and end dates of project carved on stone, and all the requirements are then tried to fit in between the dates. But, the coding, design and Test are done in 2 or 3 weeks cycle. All the new requirements that emerge during iteration has to be implemented no matter what within the duration
2. Measure Velocity week after week and set a goal for the team to achieve the velocity
3. Measure velocity of all the Agile teams and standardize the Velocity number (like number of story points to be delivered in an iteration) across organization
4. Project Manager would be renamed as Scrum Master after the CSM training and he/she would continue doing what they were doing earlier
5. Testers are separated from the main team
6. Testing is done at the end of all iterations with a dedicated testing iteration
7. While signing the contract with the customer, sign the fixed bid contract based on the number of stories
8. Having an iteration duration of > 6 weeks
9. Staffing the project with all senior people with the assumption that Agile projects need only “matured” people. See more myths here
Photo credit: http://www.rgbstock.com/photo/mhAT2b2/so+happy+2
Finally the PMI, big dinosaur as per agilists, is offering the Agile certification. Even though PMI is famous for its waterfallish process support, but its team looks like finally has woken up by the noise Agile methods like Scrum, XP is creating in the universe.
Take a look at PMI’s Agile website for more details.
On and off, we keep hearing about Agile certifications being offered by Scrum Alliance and other well known organizations. However, so far many of them have either not taken off successfully or have died down after a brief hype. Now PMI, too seems to be planning to offer Agile Certification, need to wait and see if it gains popularity. check out the PMI’s Agile Certification FAQ from here.
PMI seems to have taken help from Agile thought leaders like Alistair Cockburn, Mike Griffiths, Michele Sliger, etc in making the Agile certification happen. These people carry a lot of credibility in the Agile world, and so, we could definitely expect a quality Agile certification from PMI in the end.
I still believe that these certifications will improve the knowledge but can’t change a man(or a woman)
Between 11th and 13th of February 2001, the lodge at Snowbird ski resort in the Wasatch mountains of Utah gave the space to Agile Manifesto to be born. The
17 people at this logde were not merely talking, relaxing and skiing. They were brainstorming about the issues that software developers (including themselves) were facing every day. The final day took the birth of Agile Software Development Alliance.
Read the story of Agile Birth here.
Now after 10 years of Agile invention, Alistair Cockburn had organized a reunion event.
In addition, 16 out of the 17 signatories will take the stage on Aug 8th at Agile 2011 Conference.
During this conference, attendees will enjoy open access to all 17 stages hosting speakers, classes, workshops and special events, plus a stage dedicated to Open Jam: a place for problem solving and collaboration where anyone can convene a session, share questions and quandaries, talk to the experts, demonstrate software and techniques, and experiment with emerging Agile practices and ideas.
Agile2011 promises a stimulating week of learning, collaborating, brainstorming, and sharing problems and solutions while networking and making valuable connections
There are a lot of articles on the net explaining the differences between Agile Vs Lean. There are eternal debates about them too. But this article AgileVersusLean by Martin Fowler gives the most simplistic explanation about the subject.
In the above article, Martin ends by saying I think of lean as a strand of thinking within the agile community, like a pattern in a rich carpet.
Picture courtesy: http://www.popgadget.net/2008/02/flexible_hanger.php
As per the Harvard Business Review professor Tiziana Casciaro, an expert in Organizational Behavior
“Working with similar people leads to limited perspective and heterogeneous group brings different perspectives to the table and bring truly innovative approaches to solve a task”
I guess this could be one of the key reasons of having cross functional team practice in Scrum. In most of the Non-Agile projects, the teams are formed based on architecture layers.
For ex: UI team, Database Team, Middleware team.
Each of the above is a homogeneous group and there is less innovation.
However, most of the Agile methods recommend team formation based on the story or Requirement as opposed to the architecture layers. This would encourage having team members from UI, Database, Middleware, Testing, etc. working together leading to formation of heterogeneous team. Heterogeneous teams are found to bring different perspective to the table and thus bringing creativity
According to recent survey data by Forrester Research, Agile methods are now the predominant development approach. Their success is due to their promise of both delivery speed and business value. But agility is more than short term speed.
Short term speed can actually reduce long term business agility.
This reduction of agility is illustrated in the simple metaphor of “Technical Debt” which describes how short-term decisions that aid speedy delivery can, over time, end up drastically slowing down your ability to deliver value.
Agility means achieving the right balance between speed today and speed tomorrow.
Hear Dave West, principal analyst at Forrester Research discuss how organizations are striking the right balance between delivering fast yet keeping their Technical Debt down so that they can remain truly agile.
Dave will cover the following topics:
· The state of Agile development – drivers and current practices
· The rise of Technical Debt
· The elements necessary to achieve the right balance between speed and Technical Debt
· A checklist for Agile success
Date: Thursday, January 27th
Time: 11AM EDT (5PM CET, 4PM GMT, 8AM PDT)
Please register for the webinar here: http://www.castsoftware.com/Worldwide/events/012711.aspx?gad=blogger
Recently Mike Cohn presented the summary of his book Agile estimation and planning during Las Vegas Conference.
The deck covers different types of estimation and levels of planning in detail with very good easy to remember examples.
The pictures in the slides speak thousand words. One can download the deck from here
Definition of poka-yoke (as given in Wikipedia) is, any mechanism in a lean manufacturing process that helps an equipment operator avoid (yokeru) mistakes (poka). Its purpose is to eliminate product defects by preventing, correcting, or drawing attention to human errors as they occur.
Googling around on the benefits of Poka Yoke would throws up tons of results with astonishing numbers. People have reported nearly 98% increase in accuracy in their system , 0% error, 98% cost savings etc.
A very good introduction about Poka Yoke is available here.
The popular methods in Mistake proofing include:
1. Contact Method
2. Fixed Value Method
3. Motion Step Method
You can get more details about each of the above methods here.
At the end of the day Poka Yoke is all about finding ways to stop mistakes or identify the mistakes before they occur. Even though it was initially invented for the manufacturing industry, it is being applied to other industries like software too.
Some thoughts about applying Poka Yoke in Software development can be found here and here. Automated software testing practices applied on Unit, Component and Integration testings are classic examples of Poka Yoke in software development.
Recently I came across this website where the author has offered some tips about applying Poka Yoke for mistake proofing marketing. One can also download free presentation about the concept on the same website.
This website is dedicated about Poka Yoke with wealth of materials about this concepts, certifications, etc.
Check this SlideShare presentation which gives a very simple and animated introduction about lean and Kanban.
3 days of highly enriching sessions in Oracle Open World 2010 is keeping me occupied in San Francisco. Most of the sessions ending or beginning with Security, Scalability, Performance were sold out. It was tough to get seats for these sessions. Apart from attending Larry Ellison’s Keynote, I attended many sessions. I am listing a few of them here, and once I am back in India I am planning to blog about other sessions in detail on my architecture blog
1. Hadoop vs. Relational Database: Shout-out Between a Java Guy and a Database Guy. This session focused on few tips around choosing Hadoop and when to choose RDBMS. Very interesting session
2. Mission Critical Enterprise Cloud Application
3. Journey to the center of Java Universe
4. Keeping your options open even if the cloud is not
5. More Best Practices for Large-Scale Websites: Lessons from eBay
and many more…
Nearly 41,000 developers from all over the world participated in this event and as part of appreciation, Oracle had organized the Rock concert. I enjoyed listening to Don Henley and Black eyed Peas before heading back to the hotel late night.
Here is a good article describing how British Airways IT department have started applying Agile methods and have started seeing a lot of benefits.
Couple of points I liked in this this article include :
1. If you are interested in implementing Agile in your organization, start with a pilot project with a small team
2. Try to employ a coach to help you to begin the journey. They might be expensive but worth having them on board
3. Put people who are interested in Agile as part of initial pilot team rather than pessimists
4. Scale the Agile projects slowly to rest of the IT organization as opposed to scaling it quickly.
Many scrummers have been implementing Scrum practices outside of Work but silently.
My own example of
* Using Information Radiators to track progress of tasks at home,
* Prioritizing the work,
* Retrospective with my family, etc.
Recently I came across few blogs where Scrum practitioners are sharing info about applying Scrum practices outside work.
Check them out here
* Scrum For Kids
* Scrum in Schools
You can also see few pictures of how Saturday Chores could be handled in Sprints
. Don’t miss reading the details about how Sprint Planning was done, tasks picked by kids, etc just below the picture.
It is fun to see all this and at the same time good perspective of how Scrum can be applied outside work.
Are you getting any new ideas now to apply Scrum @ home ?
The recent news that Google is officially shutting down “Wave” came as a shock. Even though I never expected this to happen, I appreciate Google’s courage to shut down the product built with considerable amount of effort and money. This courage reminded me of the courage, one of the core values in Extreme Programming(XP).
Courage in XP is explained with as example as :
Courage is knowing when to throw code away: courage to remove source code that is obsolete, no matter how much effort was used to create that source code
After re-reading the core values, I have been getting more questions than answers !
Do we really practice Courage in our projects ? What fear do we have ? Why do we hesitate to take risky decisions ? Who influences our decisions while we are on the project ? What do we need to change to practice courage ?
Coming back to topic of Google wave, the reaction to the Google Wave shutting down news has been pretty much mixed. Broadly the reactions were of 2 categories:
One really bashing Google for not thinking through and finally shutting down the product
ppreciating Google’s courage and ability make quick decisions
I felt that these two reactions could be compared to Waterfall thinking and Agile thinking respectively. The reason for this analogy is, Waterfall mentality is to force every one to think through all the possible things and create a plan engraved on stone. Agile being incremental and iterative in nature gathering constant feedback taking quick decisions every day.
Even though waterfall way theoretically looks to work, it never does. Agile thinking is all about quick action, getting the feedback and making course corrections, which I think Google did it as in the case of Google Wave.
Keeping the Google’s cue in mind, if one key value like courage is injected in Agile projects, then Agile teams will get an additional teeth to be more innovative. Without Courage, they would end up stuck with Waterfall thinking in the guise of Agile.
I have come across many projects claiming to be Agile, however they are really doing nothing more than mini-waterfalls. They do the Requirements, design, coding and Testing incrementally and in a bi-weekly fashion. If you carefully observe, still testing is done during the last days of sprint/iteration.
What is not Agile Testing ?
Testing within Sprints in projects following Agile methods is not Agile testing.
It is disheartening to note that, many people give a little or no value to the testing in Agile projects. According to me, Agile testing is important as a practice as Scrum Meeting or retrospective.
Myth around Agile Testing
There are still some myths around Agile testing.
* It is a myth that in Agile projects all the testing would be done by developers.
* Testers role would become obsolete in Agile projects
Additional factors that are given importance in Agile testing includes
1. Testers are no more reactive, they are proactive.
2. The testers are not in the project to identify defects but to build the quality in the product
3. Testers participate in all the activities of software development, right from Requirement analysis to design, architecture and till the end.
4. Testers play the role of Generalized Specialists taking one or two additional responsibilities apart from testing.
5. Test Automation is given importance than the manual testing
Agile Tester
With so many additional factors involved in Agile testing, is it really possible for traditional testers to switch gears quickly to accommodate the new changes ? Answer is “NO”.
It takes its own time and in the sense, it could take sometimes months. The rate of change depends on the support given by the management to the testing team. More the support, smoother and quicker would be the change.
Some of the mindset changes needed by Agile testers include
1. More stress on improving the communication skills
2. Courage to drive quality in by taking charge of projects
3. Proactive mentality rather than reactive
4. Eagerness to learn new technologies and framework to become generalized specialists.
In Summary: Agile testing is all about change in mindset and focus on building the quality in the products.
I have been awarded as the Most Valuable Blogger(MVB) by DZone. I am very excited about this news.
During the touring lecture in 1972, Edsger W. Dijkstra talked about the topic “The Humble Programmer”. During this lecture he makes a statement, which I think is really revolutionary….
Those who want really reliable software will discover that they must find means of avoiding the majority of bugs to start with, and as a result the programming process will become cheaper. If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging – they should not introduce bugs to start with.
Is he not talking about avoiding the wastes of Product development, one of the lean principles ?
Is he not talking about the Test Driven Development ?
Complete excepts from his lecture could be found here.
Even though such pointers to TDD has been propagated by thought leaders since 1970s, it is very sad to see hardly a few programmers follow this great practice even after 3 decades.
Recently I read Mark Levison’s article Science of Learning:Best approaches for brain. He takes an example such as why many developers find it hard to grasp topics like Unit testing.
As trainers, coaches and mentors many people tend to use traditional way of presentations(i.e. power point) to train people. However, these presentation ways of coaching gets into short term memory.
In order to make an abstract idea stay in long term memory, several techniques are available. For example, making the training more visual, asking leading questions and sharing concrete examples that relate to what the audience already know.
In my Agile training programs, I have been already applying some of them concepts. For example, asking the trainees to think about solving the issues in their projects and then relating it back to Agile values and principles.
Image courtesy : http://getfreeimage.com
There are several ways to prioritize the requirements in the backlog. Some of the most popular ones include,
MoSCoW
M - MUST have this.
S - SHOULD have this if at all possible.
C - COULD have this if it does not effect anything else.
W - WON'T have this time but would like in the future.
Each requirement will have the priority which would be tagged to MSCW. “M” being the highest and “W” being the lowest.
This site gives a very good explanation about this technique.
Business Value Based
In this case, each requirement carries a business value it could potentially generate to the company. The business value would be decided either by the Product Owner or the Product owner team.
The requirement with highest business value is implemented during earlier releases .
In this method, requirements are prioritized based on the risk associated in implementing it. The risk is typically based on the technology.
The requirement with highest technology risk is implemented during the earlier iterations.
Kano Model
In this method, the requirements are prioritized based on the customer preferences.
You can read more details about this model here
In this method, the requirements are selected such that minimal carefully selected end to end features are built within a short span of time.
In this method, features are chosen based on the highest market risk i.e. some thing that is not experimented yet. Release it to the market, get the feedback and apply the learning onto the new feature.
This deck gives a good view about validated learning in the context of lean startup
I have been reading
Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products (2nd Edition) and in this book, Jim not only refers to a few good quotes by other authors but also has made many impactful statements. The book provides views on Agile Leadership, Team Management and Agile Project Management.
A few good quotes that I liked from the initial few chapters include
* Traditional managers view the plan as the goal, whereas agile leaders view customer value as the goal
*
Commanders know the objective;
leaders grasp the direction.
Commanders dictate;
leaders influence.
Controllers demand;
Collaborators facilitate.
Controllers micro-manage;
Collaborators encourage
* Leadership is what crosses the frontier between what we did yesterday and what we’ll do tomorrow. We’ll argue…that the real mark of a leader is confidence with uncertainty—the ability to admit to it and deal with it.” - Phillip Hodgson and Randall White
* Agile project leaders help their team balance at the edge of chaos—some structure, but not too much; adequate documentation, but not too much; some up-front architecture work, but not too much. Finding these balance points is the “art” of agile leadership
