Microsoft release eScrum tool

Finally Microsoft seems to be encouraging implementation of Agile methods across its projects, and predominantly Scrum. They have gone a step ahead and have created this Scrum tool too. Read more information about this tool here. Even though this tool seems to have been created for internal project purposes, chances are their that they can commercialize it.

Right now, RallyDev, VersionOne seems to be leading the Agile PM tools bandwagon.

Performance Appraisal - Different perspective

Here is a nice quote from Ester Derby about performance appraisal:

"Performance is *not* solely a matter of individual skills. Performance is a function of the person *and* the environment. Policies, procedures, structures (and dare I say it) the quality of management all affect individual performance."

     -- Esther Derby"

What Every Manager Should Know About Feedback

Right now many companies are going through performance appraisal cycle, and the managers are supposed to give their feedback to their team members.  How should one give an effective feedback ?.  Here is a good article by Ester Derby on how to effectively give feedback to others. This article provides a clear difference between an evaluation/judegement and a feedback.  

 

Meeting Effectiveness

Recently I attended a European-Indian business summit and I was representing my company Valtech. Many Italian, Spanish companies were visiting India and were look for possible business partners.
The meeting slots were pre planned/agreed and were circulated prior to the meeting. The time slot was time boxed for 30 minutes each. Separate stalls were set up for each of the EU companies, and during the specified time slot, the representatives from the Indian firm would go to the stall and have a discussion for 30 minutes.

3 of us from Valtech, met nearly 10 companies in 2 days. An important thing I noticed in the summit was the time boxing of meetings for 30 minutes. I have never seen such an efficient meeting happening from my earlier experience. During the meetings with prospective customers, we were able to make out if this is a make or brake deal and within the first few minutes itself.

Somewhere I read that most of the decision happens within the first 15 minutes of the meeting. So, I think any meeting intended towards making some decisions, would be effective it

• it is time boxed
• lesser the time, the better
  

More info. on meeting effectiveness
In one of the Agile forums, Mark Herschberg gave the following tips to improve the meeting effectiveness:
1) Set fixed time limits. I learned this from scrum meetings where we had a
kitchen timer with 15 minutes to force everyone to be efficient. Even for
longer meetings this has been found to be effective. Even if your meetings
aren't any shorter. the act of having a timer visible on the table and
counting down helps to focus people.

2) Have an agenda. Often meetings don't have a clear agenda. Even if
people know what the meeting is for (e.g. our weekly status meeting) it can
be a bit vague and fuzzy. Every meeting should require the following:
a) These are the issues to be discussed
b) These are the questions we will have answered by the end of the meeting

3) Have a clear understanding of when questions should be discussed. Often
people get side tracked as various issues come up in meetings and people
wander down a particular thread. By knowing when and where an issue can be
discussed, it's easier to say, "that's a very good issue, why don't we
address that in X meeting which is for such topics." Everyone needs to know
what meetings there are and what each are for. I'm debating creating a
"catch all" meeting once a week at my current project so if there's anything
we miss, we can always say, "put it in the catch all meetings."

4) Build a culture of efficient. Make everyone want to have fast, efficient
meetings, and empower everyone to be able to suggest moving a topic to a
different venue,

5) Recognize that there is value in inefficiency. Fast, to the point
meetings, while generally effective, sometimes miss that creative spark that
comes from getting side tracked, from the random threads that usually are a
waste of time, but once in a while yield a great insight. (This is one of
the reasons I'm looking at a "catch all" meeting to capture some of the free
form creativity.)

DBUnit Mind Map

From the last few days I have been testing DAOs using DBUnit. During the process of learning, I created the following Mind map. I will keep updating this mind map as and when I learn something new.

Scrum Master - Picken

A discussion on scrumdevelopment forum, whether the Scrum master is chicken or Pig, lead to one of the person terming SM as "Picken", partly pig and chicken.
In fact this article provides a information about responsibilities of SM at various instances.

Agile @ Philips Innovation campus

18th May, I was invited by Philips Innovation Campus, Bangalore as a speaker to talk to their team on Agile and Scrum method. Alexius Collete, Head PIC Bangalore was present with other senior management team to be part of this session. Saran, took care of the entire coordination and provided me an excellent support for making this happen.

I could see the enthusiasm in the management team to know about Agile and how to effectively implement the same. This is a clear indication of the support for Agile implementation from the top management at PIC(top down Agile adoption strategy). There is no doubt that Agile gets nurtured in such organizations.

During the session, I was happy to see the auditorium jam packed with Agile enthusiasts. In the recent weeks, I have been invited by many companies in Bangalore !

OST and Multiplex theater

Since I learned Open Space Technology last week, I am trying to encourage my colleagues to use this as much as possible. Some new joiners have hard time understanding OST and some people get scared away by the word "Technology" in OST.

Here is an analogy(may be modified :-) ) to explain OST.

Imagine a multiplex theater running movies in parallel. These movies are based on a theme and these movies were chosen by the people who came to see the movies. You have a global ticket to watch any movie you like, any time you want . If you don't like anymovies, you can as well walk out.

Benefits of Top down Agile adoption

My article on "Benefits of top down Agile adoption strategy" has been published on Agile Journal

Good books on Agile Methods

Following Agile related books are found to be good by many readers

• Agile Project Management with Scrum - Ken Schwaber
• Agile and Iterative Development - Craig Larman
• Applying User Stories, Mike Cohn
• Agile Estimating and Planning, Mike Cohn
• Collaboration Explained, Jean Tabaka
• Lean Software Development, Mary Poppendieck
• Agile Project Management - Jim Highsmith
  
• Managing Agile Projects - Sanjiv Augustine
• Domain Driver Design: Tackling Complexity at the Heart of Software - Eric Evans
• Working Effectively with Legacy Code - Michael Feathers
• Refactoring to Patterns - Joshua Kerievsky
• Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review - Norm Kerth
• Agile Retrospectives - Ester Derby
• Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas, Linda Rising
• Product Development for the Lean Enterprise - Michael Kennedy
• Crystal Clear by Alistair Cockburn
• FIT for Developing Software - Rick Mugridge, Ward Cunningham

Online Resources:

• www.agilealliance. org
• www.scrumalliance. org
• www.agileadvice.com
  
• www.theagileblog. net
• www.mountaingoatsof tware.com
• www.stickyminds. com
• www.infoq.com

I will keep updating this list as and when I come across good ones..

Open Space Technology

Craig Larman conducted an Open space technology event and I had the opportunity to be part of the event. This is the first time that I participated in such an event. Open Space Technology(OST) is not really like a technology, but a way of conducting events, meetings, conferences, etc.

During OST, the session could start with a specific theme. In our case, it was about Agile methods. When the participants assembled in this huge hall, Craig requested people to come forward with a burning issue related to the theme. Volunteers(conveynors) started pouring in with their burning issues written on a post-it, and pasting the same on a specific time slot.

Once the time slots gets filled, the conveynors would go to their respective counters, and interested participants can join the discussion.

some good things that I noticed:

1. The time passed so fast that, I didn't feel that it was a meeting. Enjoyed every minute of it
2. Lot of issues came up during the event.
3. participants can get full value of such events, as they can chose the topic.
4. Pretty informal setting

Note:
This might be a premature statement, but I felt that OST may not be effective if the safety and trust of participants is not built during the session. This is especially applicable if the theme is on solving burning issues.
For ex: if the team is planning to solve some people related issues of an organization using OST, senior management team present during the session might add a fear in team's mind. The fear would be due to the repercussion for being open.

It is also quite possible that, senior management by being in authoritative position, can hijack discussions. So, good facilitation skills are needed by conveynors to handle such situations.

Usage of Tool in an Offshore Scrum Meeting

I have posted the following article on my new blog Agile offshore blog

There are number of ways how a team can conduct Scrum meeting in an offshore environment.

It is always recommended to have the answers for the 3 questions ready before attending the Scrum meeting. In an offshore environment, the Product owner sitting onsite(Ex:Australia) may not be able to attend the offshore scrum meeting (Ex: India at 10 Am in the morning) due to time differences. Sometimes, even though PO is able to attend the scrum meeting, he/she might have issues w.r.t language and accent (Ex: between French and English speakers). Such situations have taught us that, usage of tools like a scrum logger would benefit both the onsite and offshore teams.

The offshore team can make use of some tool to input the answers for the 3 questions on a day to day basis before getting into Scrum meeting. The onshore customer (who is having issue with accent or language barrier) can go through the answers daily and can get to know the impediments or any other issues without being a part of Scrum meeting.

The above scenario has been given keeping in mind that only the offshore team is part of development and the product owner is sitting onsite.

Servant Leadership and Chanakya

The servant leadership, a type of leadership development coined by Robert GreenLeaf is one which is referred the most in Scrum community. The Scrum Master is supposed to be a servant leader. Recently, while I was going through Wikipedia, I came to know that, servant leadreship is not a new concept and this concept existed even as early as 4th century. Chanakya or Kautilya, strategic thinker in India has advocated this concept in his books. As per Chankaya

the king[leader] shall consider as good, not what pleases himself but what pleases his subjects [followers]". He argued that "the king [leader] is a paid servant and enjoys the resources of the state together with the people"

Agile, Wiki and Trust

Is there any relation between Wiki and Trust ? I know it is difficult to believe, and it is true that there is !! Many organizations and teams use Wiki just as knowledge management tool Or a collaboration tool to share information across different teams spread across geographical regions. But this tool is much powerful than just a knowledge sharing tool.

The information that is shared in this tool shows the trust, the PMs have with their development team, the trust, the customers have with the software services vendor, and the top management has with their employees.

Consider that, you are an employee of a company in sales/marketing division. Can you put the day to day activities of the prospective customers you met that day, the discussions what you are having with the various customers, status of various accounts, etc in Wiki. Why not ??

If you are not doing this, it is mainly because you want to protect your customer information from getting into your neighbor who is another sales/marketing guy. You might be worried that somebody might steal all this information. You might be worried that your information would expose some of your weaknesses in handling the customers.

Consider that you are a developer in a software services firm, and can you put all the problems(as in roadblocks, to achieve goals) you are facing in your project on official wiki ? Why not ?

If you are not doing this, it is mainly because you are worried about exposing the problems of the project to public, customers and to the management and, the finally the consequences of getting thrown out of the project.

In each of the above cases, one of the main problems is the lack of trust within the team and across teams.

As we are aware, Agile methods would succeed only in an environment where people work together with no fear or favor and with trust. Now, coming back to wiki, the amount and type of information you put on wiki without fear or favor decides how much trust is present in your team and as a whole in the organization.

I have seen many organizations having a wiki with access control. It is not bad, especially in a software services firm, while working with multiple customers, NDA would force the organization to mask information from each other. But restricting access to public domain information shows the lack of trust.

If you have read Maverick , you would understand that Ricardo Semler even goes ahead and exposes the company financial information to all employees. Initially the senior management gets worked up and starts worrying about the possible leak of financial data to competitors by employees. During that time, Ricardo asks something like,

if you don't trust your own employees, why did you hire them at the first place ?

Applying Agile/Scrum practices in Maintenance projects

In many Agile training programs and conferences, common question that gets raised is, does Agile/Scrum works in maintenance projects ?

I always say "YES" and the team needs to tweak Or invent the practices to suit their needs.
Maintenance projects could be enhancement projects OR pure defect fixing projects.

Enhancement projects involve new set of development over existing one. Since the developers gets new set of requirements at the end of each iteration, one can apply the standard set of Scrum practices with little or no modification.

Defect Fixing projects involve fixing defects on closed or current projects not in development. Sometimes these projects are boring, especially if a new team has been hired for defect fixing purposes only. The customer sends a set of defects on a daily basis or weekly basis with a deadline to deliver. The development team needs to fix them ASAP and send the patch for further testing.

While coaching one of such a defect fixing projects, I found that the following Scrum practices can be applied without much modification
1. Daily Scrum meetings
2. Scrum of Scrum
3. Modeling days while solving complex defects
4. Information radiators displaying InProgress, completed, reopened, closed defects and other information
5. Usage of Wiki for collaborating with the customer
6. Requirement workshop while understanding complex defects
7. Review and Retrospective

Common problem that I have found in defect fixing projects include, setting the iteration length. Especially, if the defects are given on a day to day basis without prior knowledge of what you are going to get, it makes the life of the development team bit difficult.
This can be solved by collaborating with the customer and coming up with a plan to have 1 or 2 weeks of iteration length.

Agile Offshore Development Tip 4: Involve Offshore into Scrum meetings

I have seen distributed teams following Agile practices but each one not really sharing information with other distributed teams. For ex: Both onsite and offshore teams would be conducting Scrum meetings but skipping Scrum of Scrums.

Important thing in distributed Agile development is to include the offshore teams for all important workshops. For ex: Requirement, Retrospective, Modeling days, Iteration planning meeting.

In many onsite-offshore projects, the onsite team handles the design/architecture part and the offshore team is involved in pure development and testing. This model makes many onsite teams don't feel like involving offshore teams for Requirement workshops, modeling days.
Which in turn leads to a huge communication gap and would result in creation of a poor quality product. The above mentioned scenario would also involve lot of hand offs from onsite team to offshore team, resulting in lot of wastes being added to the system.

Systems thinking needs is the key to succeed in distributed Agile development.

TestSuites should be on Feature Themes

Many developers tend to package TestSuites to contain the tests based on technology/layers. For ex: TestSuites to contain the tests on UI layers, Dataaccess, BO.

Since we create unit tests to test a unit of functionality, the TestSuites should contain tests based on the Features/Use cases.

For Ex: TestSuites to contain Unit tests testing feature to add User Or Modify User.

Task creation for fulfilling user requrirements

At the end of the requirement workshop, first thing the Scrum team would be looking forward to is to create the tasks for the features. For the rest of the iteration, only thing they are worried is how many tasks they have been able to complete. In this process, they forget that they have to deliver the Running Testing Features(popularly known as RTF) to the customer.

One way to avoid this task creation madness could be to divide the features into smaller feature chunks that can be handled like a task. (Right now the discussion is going about this in scrumdevelopment forums)

For Ex: instead of writing a task like "Database creation", if we can rewrite it as "Database creation to fulfill the storyX" Or rewriting it as "Handling Database related work to fulfill FeatureX" could make the team to "NOT" lose their focus on features/requirements.

Applying TDD while dealing with database related actions

There are numerous thoughts about how to go about applying TDD while dealing with database access related code. Some of the common thoughts include

1. Replacing DB with Mock Objects to simulate Database
Most preferred one. Advantages include

• No need to worry about DB info, driver info,
  
• tests run faster as compared to other techniques
• No need to change any test code because you changed the database
• Easier to maintain
  

2. Using a local copy of DB
Some programmers suggest to make use of a local copy of database for testing purposes. It has its own pros and cons:

• One needs to be aware of local Database related APIs
• Keeping the local copy of DB in synch with central test DB is bit tricky, especially with a large project team.
  
• Easier to use
  

3. Use central test DB
In this case, test with the cental DB, and apply transaction/roll backs to clean up DB after the use brining the DB back to its original state

• You can be confident that your code works well with the DB
• goes against some of the unit testing principles created by thought leaders like Michael Feathers
• Easier to maintain and use
• Be aware of Database APIs, drivers, etc .

4. Use an in-memory DB (like HSQL) Or any other faster databases

Not recommended much

• Again this goes against unit testing rules
  
• easier to use
• You are not sure whether your SQL queries tried against in-memory DB works with real DB
  

Group Thinking clouds decision

Recently I read this article, "Group Thinking Clouds Decisions" on live Science.
"http://www.livescie nce.com/humanbio logy/070221_ friends_memory. html

As per the above research, "People have a harder time coming up with
alternative solutions to a problem when they are part of a group, new
research suggests." and also, "When a group gets together, they can
miss out on good options,"

As agile practioners we encourage people to come together and make decision as a team. I am not sure, what is the impact of above research on Agile practices. I have put this question in Scrum development discussion forum, and one of the respondants came back with the following response

There is a natural tendency for groups to seek a sort of median, but
with a group of exceptional people, that can be a fairly high mark.
A single study does not decide much in science


Even I am not sure of the impact, but time could decide !

Agile Retrospective meetings for new scrum teams

Retrospective meetings are the heart of agile methodologies. Scrum teams follow this religiously at the end of each iteration.

When a team starts practicing Agile methodology, how should they conduct the retrospectives, what should they cover during their first retrospectives ?

Here are my thoughts
1. Take the help from an agile coach if you are doing the retrospective for the first time

2. Do the +/Delta analysis for the time already spent on the project in the past i.e. cleanse the past !. This session might take anywhere between couple of hours to a day, depending on how large the past is. Let the team select important times lines from the past(release dates, company meetings, customer visit presentations during project kickoff,etc) and create +/D for those events. At the end of retrospective, the information can be merged together.

3. Let the participants spend some time on thinking about the past events before attending the retrospective meetings. Let them have a brief summary of things that went well, and didn't go well and things to improve. This would save some "thinking" time during retrospective sessions.

4. If the managers are coming from command and control background, it would be better to do a separate retrospective for managers and development team. Read Diana Larsen's book on Agile retrospective for further information.

Semantic Diffusion

A nice article by Martin Fowler about thoughts, trends and future of Agile. He discusses the topic, if Agile just a buzzword ? where are we right now ? Are we on the right track ?

Testing Private Methods

Testing private methods was posted here

agile Vs Agile

Here is a nice article on Agile Journal trying to differentiate between Agile Vs agile

Traditional Planner Vs Agile Planner

How do you differentiate a traditional Planner Vs Agile Planner. Here are some of my thoughths about them.

Traditional Planner during planning

• Considers that the developer works 8 hrs per day.
  
• Allocates tasks to the development team and allocates features to fit into 100% of resource budget available

Agile Planner during planning

• Takes Ideal Engineering Hours (IEH) into account. It could be anywhere between 6 - 61/2 hrs per day (from my personal experience)
• Allocates tasks only between 70-80% of the resource budget available. For ex: if there are 6 developers working on 2 weeks iteration. He would then plan for 70% of (6 * 10 d * 6 IEH). (ofcourse, keeping holidays, planned leaves into account)
  

The 70-80% buffering is context dependent. Even though there is no standards available, Mike Cohn suggests, 70% of the planned effort needs to be targeted. There are various techniques to calculate the size of the buffer, and one of them quite often referred by Mike Cohn is "Square root of sume of squares" approach. I felt this is too mathematical and complex to apply during planing and many people have felt it is time consuming.

I have created a rule of thumb, if the iteration length increases, then the buffer needed to handle uncertainty needs to be increased accordingly.

I have tried with 80% planning in a 2 week iteration period, and it worked well.

One of the columns in Product Backlog(PB), we have been using at Valtech is "MoSCoW rule". This rule is extensively used in DSDM community. This column is being used to prioritize the requirements. These rules are very handy and easy to understand, as comapred to "High, low, Medium" Or "1, 2 and 3" numbers. It is advisable to fill 70-80% of the PB with Must Have requirements, and the rest with Should/could have requirements. Customer needs to be made aware that, if new tasks get discovered during iteration, the 20-30% of lower priority(SCoW) would be dropped.

More info. on MoScoW rule is available here

Tips during Requirement Workshop

While I was coaching one of the teams on Requirement workshop at Valtech, I jotted down some ideas, and here they are:

1. Once the feature team completes their "Questions", "Assumptions" part , ensure to do the Show and Tell exercise

2. During Show & Tell (ST) exercise, ensure to remove the duplicate questions/assumptions immediately as soon as they are found. This would help the team to consolidate in the end

3. During ST, If anybody in the team answers the questions(from the questions column), and found to be accepted by others, move the same to "assumptions" section.

4. If you are working on UI related application, keep the mock or prototype of the screen handy. This would immensely help the teams to visualize validations/screen structure, etc

Features and Tasks

I have seen many programmers getting confused between Features and tasks. Features are going to be part of Product Backlog and Tasks, are added by the developers into iteration backlog.

Features/Requirements are given by the Product owner. Iteration Backlog should contain only those tasks that would add value to the customer. There are certain tasks that need not be mentioned explicity. For ex: Refactoring, if you are following TDD.

It is assumed by default that Refactoring is going to be part of TDD(TFD + Refactoring). But, until the team gains profeciency in this area, they might have to explicity mention it in iteration backlog.
Similarly, Unit testing. If you are following TDD, then adding a task like "Coding..." would imply by default that, unit testing is done.

Nice Article on Agile Contracts

Here is a nice link on various types of Agile Contracts (Fixed Price, T&M, etc)

Software Development Vs Construction of the house

A house is being newly constructed in front of my house. I have been watching this from the last few weeks. One day, I saw the owner with the architect at the site discussing about something for a long time. I am assuming the owner was trying to explain his requirement to the architect. After few days, I could see the plan with the architect and he discussing the same with owner and making corrections. After a while, I could see some construction workers starting their work by digging the foundation, building the house wall by wall. I know that this is pretty much the same process everywhere no matter where you are. Most of the time, the house gets constructed within the budget and within the time.

I was wondering, why can't we follow a similar process in Software development. In software too, we have the product owner, architects, etc. Why can't we deliver the software within the budget and on time (atleast 50% of the time).

I know we can't in software, here are some of my thoughts:

1. During house construction, there is mostly freezing of requirements during the initial stages

2. In waterfall model, freezing of requirements was tried and we know it was a failure. In agile methods, we tend to keep this open and ask the customer to prioritize and give the requirements.

3. Advantage in software development is, the customer can change his requirement at any time. So, there is a huge responsibility on the software architect to have a flexible architecture.

4. During house construction, since the requirements are frozen, there is a little room for the owner to change his requirement once the foundation is laid. It does not mean that the customer should not Or cannot change. But the key point to note here is "Cost of change" in house construction is more than in software development (assuming robust architecture is in place !!)

Good Books on Agile

Here is the list of some of the good books on Agile software development and related areas. I am hoping to keep this list updated:

1. Agile and Iterative Development by Craig Larman
2. Agile estimation and planning by Mike Cohn
3. Extreme Programming Explained
4. Test Driven Development by Example
5. Pair Programming Illuminated
6. Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Shwabber
7. Agile Project Management by Jim Highsmith
8. User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn
9. Rapid Development
10. Crystal Clear
11. Goal
12. Critical Chain

Scrum Vs Traditional Project Management

Here is a nice article comparing Scrum with Traditional Project Management

Traditional PM Vs Scrum Master

When agile methodology(specifically Scrum) is introduced into an organization, first question that is discussed is about the scrum roles. Many of the Project Managers(PM) get worked up about their new role as Scrum Master(SM) and lack of clarity around this new role(SM).

There are a lot of misconceptions and misunderstanding about role of SM. Most of the questions comes from the statement that "Scrum Master has no authority". It is the inherent nature of human beings to "Control" things around them. PMs start connecting that "No authority" means "No control". They feel powerless.

Some of the common functions executed by traditional PM include:

1. Assigning tasks to the development team
2. Estimating the features and tasks(by sitting with architect or tech leads)
3. Resolving conflicts among team members
4. status update on behalf of team members with the customer
5. Time sheet management
6. Resource management
7. Change request management
8. Single point of contact for the management for anything related to project
9. Single point of contact for the on site team for anything related to project
10. Leave approval

and many more...

Responsibilities of Scrum Master include

1. Ensuring that everyone follows the scrum rules
2. Bringing the scrum team and product owner together
3. Removing the impediments from the project
4. Helping the team to move towards self organization
5. Servant Leader
   

If you compare the roles of PM with SM, you could see that many tasks are missing in SM. Who would do those tasks ? Everything lies with the team. This is exactly the reason why self organizing team is critical for success of projects practicing Scrum.

It is critical that traditional PM is convinced and has understood the roles of SM properly. Any misunderstanding leads not only failure of the project but also, failure of the entire team in implementing agile. Traditional PMs with half baked knowledge of Scrum Master role would be causing more harm than anything else.

Can velocity be used to measure Productivity ?

I have heard many managers in software companies trying to measure productivity based on Velocity of the team. I think it makes no sense.

Here are some of my thoughts:

1. Velocity is measure of team's capacity to deliver certain functionality within a specified interval. This definition makes it clear that, one cannot use the velocity as the stick during appraisal and performance evaluation for individual members.

2. You cannot use velocity to measure the productivity between teams also. Reason being, each team is different. Two teams with 10 developers each, cannot be compared. Each team would come from varied years of experiences, domain knowledge, maturity, support from product owners, communication skills, etc.

Toyota and moment of Zen

Here is a very good article for all who would like to improve on a daily basis. I could related many of the practices in this article to scrum meetings and retrospectives. Must read for entrepreneurs and managers to create a learning organization.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/111/open_no-satisfaction.html

Velocity and more

Here is nice article from Mike Cohn about Velocity

I find that one of the most common mistakes teams make is to use the
term "velocity" to refer to both
--the number of points (or ideal days) finished in a sprint
--the amount of planned work completed in a sprint

It is far more useful to use velocity to refer to the amount of
points finished in a sprint. The amount of work planned in a sprint
will be relatively constant sprint to sprint. This is essentially the
Y (vertical) intercept of a sprint burndown chart. If you need a term
for that call it "capacity." The tough concept for some teams to get
is that capacity (# of hours of work planned into a sprint) isn't
clearly correlated to the # of hours worked in a sprint. To make it
simple, consider me a team of one doing a one-week sprint. I will
work 40 hours this week. If I'm a perfect estimator (impossible) I
can say "I'll answer email for 20 hours this week (I wish!) and spend
20 developing; let me pull in 20 hours of work during sprint
planning." However suppose I'm not perfect and that my backlog items
have some uncertainty. Over time I may find that when I see a pile of
work and say "that's 15 hours" that this is the amount that perfectly
fills up my 40 hour workweek. I may get 25 hours of time on task to
do what I called 15 or I may get the 15 done in 12. It won't matter.
What matters is that what I call 15 fills up my week. That's how to
plan sprints and to work with capacity.

Pros and Cons of conducting retrospectives

Here is a nice article about retrospectives

Retrospectives

Written by willem

Tuesday, 14 February 2006

After an event or project, all the stakeholders come together to celebrate the successes of the project, and learn from failure in a constructive manner without finger-pointing. After a retrospective participants have concrete actions for the next event or project, and can contain broader organisational change. Retrospective benefits: Closure Learning from our own mistakes Learning from someone else's mistakes Acknowledging aligned practices and accomplishments Rewriting organizational stories Learning a healthy ritual Discovering strengths of the organization Clarifying aligned roles for players Allowing to connect emotionally Challenging each others assumptions Providing an overview of what's actually happening in the organization Building trust across boundaries Clear results, that lead to realistic commitments Retrospective risks: Emotional upset Unrealized expectations Lack of follow up leading to frustration and distrust Last minute sabotage Repercussions and retaliations Loss of control at the top Increase in awareness of personal responsibilities and accountability And of the chasm between responsibilities and accountability Can be a life style changing event Discovering that you waited too long to do aretrospective Discovering some of your assumptions are invalid Risks of not doing retrospectives: Emotional upset piles up Repeating mistakes over and over again Carrying forward unhealthy relationships Not using an opportunity for sustaining and reinforcing best practices Lack of adaptivity Less access to hidden wisdom Not having your assumptions challenged Would have could have should have thinking Learning organization is not learning Getting stuck in causality loops Less access to hidden resources Retrospectives can provide lessons on architecture, planning, communication, product information flow and possible early intervention points.

Tips on Iteration Planning

Stumbled upon the 17 tips to iteration planning . Even though there are more to it, one can add, but definitely these are the ones to start off with !!

Dos and Donts during Planning Poker

Here are some of the tips that could help during planning poker estimation sessions

1. Ensure that all developers show the estimation cards in one shot. If the cards are shown serially chances that it could lead to "estimation influence" factor.

2. Don't sit in crumpled space during this session. Try to use a large room, and people sitting in such a way that they can see each other

3. People who have no idea of use case or requirements can opt out of the session. They need not be forced to be present.

4. Have a spreadsheet open and the computer connected to a projector ready. This would help all the team members to see the requirements clearly.

Please note that, Planning poker estimation, even though more light weight and accurate than other estimation techniques, it could lead to in accuracies. The inaccuracies results from inadequate estimations in the technology or domain that they are working on.

Pair Programming benifit in a short sentence

Pairing takes about 15% more effort than one individual working alone, but produces results more quickly and with 15% fewer defects [Cockburn & Williams]. Fixing defects costs more than initial programming [Boehm], so pair programming is a net win. -- Jim Shore

Relation between Sales men, Process and project delivery

Is there any relation among sales men, Process and project delivery. Whether you agree it or not, I strongly see a relation here. Consider a scenario where, the sales person bids a project for a software organization, and gets the project. Now, the job of the salesperson is over, and the next step is for the delivery team to take responsibility and deliver the project on time to the customer.
As we are aware, project delivery is controlled by the scope, time and cost. Any change happening to one or more of the parameters has impact on others. If the time is committed to the customer as in fixed bid fixed time project, then we need to ensure that scope and cost are also in line. If the sales person has gone and committed a particular time line to the customer making assumptions on estimations, it is going to directly impact the delivery and the developers have to go through terrible stress (assuming he is over committed) during implementation.

Let us talk about the impact of above two parameters onto process. Let us take the project following agile methodology. Estimation in agile projects is done using IEH(Ideal Engineering Hours). In the projects I have seen, IEH is anywhere from 6-61/2 hrs per day.
What if sales person is not aware of the IEH and sells the project with 8 Hours per day in mind ? Who will work that extra 1 1/2 hours committed by the sales person ? How do you compensate for this ? I know that you know the answers to above questions !!!!

Eye contacts in Scrum Meetings

I found this nice article by a blogger Abrachan:

When a team is transitioning from the conventional predictive project management to the adaptive style based on SCRUM method - very often it is like releasing a parrot under captivity. Suddenly the parrot gets absolute freedom and at the same time it is not conditioned to enjoy the new found freedom. It still thinks that it is under captivity. It has to strengthen the muscles required to fly in a world of unlimited freedom and opportunities to excellence.

When the daily scrum meetings happen, most of the members - if they are new to the team, still follow the reporting attitude - and keep reporting what I am supposed to do, What I did and the problems I faced - to the SCRUM master only, without any eye contact with the rest of the team. Even if the SCRUM master do not want to be seen as a command and control freak, the rest of the team still see him as a command and control freak - which is hang over from the previous predictive project management styles he/she was practising. One of the very effective tactic (fix) to de-promote this behavior by the rest of the team is to avoid the eye contact with the person who is `talking to you' in a SCRUM meeting, thus forcing him/her to look at the rest of the team members - contributing to the 'self directed team' spirit. :-)

Agile Offshore Development tip 3: 3 Key tools in Offshore development

From my experience, I found that the 3 key tools that are contributing towards improved communication in offshore development using Agile methods are:

1. Wiki (Any wiki should be fine, and we use Confluence by for the best wiki I have seen so far)

2. IMs (Skype, Yahoo, MSN)

3. IP phones (We use Cisco IP phones)

Does Agility improve design of the product ?

Like Waterfall model, Agile methods are also grouped under "process" umbrella. In fact, Agile methods are much more than this. Waterfall model provides a set of steps and guidelines on how to do software development and it has no impact on what technologies you use, and how you design or architect the software. But, Agile methods in turn has a huge impact on how you design and architect software.

In agile methods, Features are built incrementally in iterations and it is expected that the components are also built incrementally. This in turn forces the designer and architects to make conscious decisions for building modular and cohesive systems. At the same time, the less experienced designers would get entangled in their own web of coupled components and have to struggle to refactor for a longer period of time. They have no escape route !! At the same time, Big Upfront design is not the answer.

Good quote by Guru from Google

Here is a nice quote by Ram Shriram on hiring:

Hire only A people, and they’ll hire other A people. If you hire the B person, they’ll hire C or D people. Someone asked a good question: How did Shriram decide who are so-called “A” people? Grooming is a part of it. “I try to find out who their mothers are,” he said. If they are raised well, they’re more likely to make good citizens, employees and entrepreneurs.

History of Scrum

I was preparing the presentation for the new comers in my company, and thought of doing some research on history of Scrum. I found some interesting information:

1. Scrum is a variation of Sashimi

2. Sashimi originated with the Japanese and their experience with the waterfall model

3. Scrum was named as a project management style in auto and consumer product manufacturing companies by Takeuchi and Nonaka in "The new new product development game" (Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb 1986)

4. First Documented in 1993 by Jeff Sutherland, John Scumniotales and Jeff McKenna

5. 1995: Ken Schwabber Formalized the rules for Scrum.

How XP(Xtreme Programming) got its name

I found this nice information on devx explaining how XP got its name:

XP got its name when its founders asked the question, "what would happen if we took each technique/practice and performed it to the extreme? How would that affect the software process?" An example of this is the practice of code reviews. If code reviews are good, then doing constant code reviews would be extreme; but would it be better? This led to practices such as pair programming and refactoring, which encourage the development of simple, effective designs, oriented in a way that optimizes business value.

80% of the requirements are clear, do you still need agile ?

Here is a project where the product owner has given a huge set of requirements. Let us say, X, Y and Z. He has given a time limit to the development team saying, you do whatever it takes but I want to see X,Y,Z at the end of one year. The team that has been following traditional waterfall model, decides to move towards agile methods. Inspite of knowing that the requirements wont change much, is it really necessary to follow Agile method ? Or just do whatever it takes to reach the goal ?

Before putting my thoughts on solutions, let me tell you that, this kind of model is mostly seen in product development companies, who already have an existing product and they are looking at enhancing them over a period of time with new versions.

Coming back to solutions:
1. First and foremost ensure that the estimations are in synch with the reality. It should not be that X,Y,Z takes 2 years to do it, and the product owner has given a deadline of 1 year. No matter what process you follow, this product would be a failure

2. Since, Product owner is not available for clarifications and collaboration on a day to day basis, one needs to identify a proxy who can make decisions on behalf of product owner

3. This sample case of product development can never follow all the values and principles of agile. But, they can certainly practice some of the core agile practices.

1. Daily Scrum meetings
2. Scrum of Scrums
3. Product Backlog --> Created initially by the product owner
4. Iteration Backlog --> Proxy making decisions during each iteration
5. Daily builds
6. Continuous integration
7. Usage of information radiators
8. Test Driven Development
9. Feature teams
10. Cross Functional teams
11. Team can work on Self organization
12. They even can have a scrum master
13. Pair programming
14. Usage of dual monitors
15. Velocity based estimation and/or any other estimation techniques

But remember, don't blame agile if you don't succeed in this kind of project environment, as agile methods needs customer collaboration. Without buy in from customers and stakeholders, don't expect agile methods to succeed.

Agile Offshore Development Tip 2: Keep translation time in mind during estimation

If you are working on a distributed development project with teams in countries speaking the same language(For example English, between India and US), you won't face much of problem. But if you are working in a different environment otherwise (Say, between India and Germany OR India and France, etc where they don't speak the same language), you would need to keep the language barrier in mind during estimation. (This sentence is really mouthful !!!)

For example, you might receive a requirement document in German. The customer in Germany assumes that you would do the translation to English before writing the test cases or whatever. The problem here is, the same customer also assumes that as soon as you receive the requirement document you would start the work. Which is not really so.

This is how it works: Let us say the customer hands off the requirement document on Monday, and it takes nearly 3 days to translate the same to English(or local language). (Assuming that you have an inhouse translator). Then ensure that you keep this buffer in mind while doing the estimation. Not only that, if you have a poor translator it would add much more chaos.

Testing team needs to be very cautions in this situation. Sometimes, the testing team might have to struggle for days to get the actual requirement translated to their local language, before writing the test cases. This might add undue pressure on testing team during release days.

Couple of solutions:
====================
1. Try to have as many face to face interactions and conversations as possible with the customer. Try to write the test cases based on "Drop-in meeting" principle. Basically, you can keep updating the test cases in small iterative cycle after every conversation with customer.

2. Bring the culture of using acceptance testing framework like FIT into the team.

When would agile fail ?

Following are some of the situations where agile methods would fail:

1. When Development team is interested in agile methods, and the product owner and his team is not aware of anything about agile. For example, consider an offshore project where the development team is practicing waterfall model. Suddenly one day, one of the leads feels they should move towards agile. The offshore development team start practicing some of the practices bit by bit. They would try explaining the benefits of agility to the customer, but in vain. But the team continues practicing in bits and pieces without informing PO. This would lead to failure. Basically, one needs complete support from the management, PO and other stakeholders for a successful implementation of agile methods.

2. When development team is managed by "traditional" project managers. For example, consider a situation where the development team wants to practice agile methods. If the management is not aligned with it, the team would fall apart. I have heard of a story, where the development team was practicing some of the agile practices. Due to change in project management, the new project manager with a traditional/CMM/Waterfall background started demanding the team to do more work, and started giving them deadlines to finish work. The team almost fell apart.

Ensure that the management is convinced about the benefits of agile methods.

3. Don't practice without a coach. Passion is a critical aspect to implement the practices of agile methods, but one needs to be aware of the value also. One should know the dependency of some of the agile practices. For example, practicing "just" refactoring without TDD cycle would add more problems than any benefits. In such situations, coach could add lot of value to the team

4. Don't try to implement all agile practices at once. Take one practice at a time, play with it for some time before taking on the new ones.

Practice which works in one organization may not work in the other.

Agile Offshore Development Tip 1: Estimate cautiously immediately after a release

I am planning to start a series of "Tipping" session on Agile Offshore development. I work with offshore development teams practicing agile methods day in and day out, and so I keep seeing challenges in implementing some practices.

I am taking this as an opportunity to provide some solutions(what I think as right) for these recurring problems.

Tip 1: If your team is new to agile methodology, then ensure that the iteration planning for the "new" release is done cautiously. The reason being, most of the time the estimation and planning is done based on the velocity of previous iterations. But, when you release a new version of the product to the customer, you could expect some priority defects. These "unplanned" defects needs to be fixed in the upcoming iterations. These defects might have escaped the dragnet of TDD, functional testing, etc. So, consciously take such eventuality into consideration and plan it without just relaying on previous iterations velocity.

TDD Injection in legacy code

In a typical agile team, the team practicing TDD would write the test first, plug the business logic, make the test to pass and refactor the code (RED-GREEN-REFACTOR). This luxury may not be available for teams (legacy teams) who are new to agile methodology, and have a huge code base developed without TDD. This article explains some of the techniques that could help introducing TDD into legacy development teams.

TDD Injection in legacy systems
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1. First step is to, identify the code smells that you would like to attack. You can do this by running any of the freely available code smell/quality identification tool (Checkstyle, PMD,JCosmo, etc)

Once you have the list ready, prioritize the list for developers to refactor. For example, "reducing the lengthy methods" could be of priority than the "replacing the magic numbers with static code".

According to me, not all the code smells could be tackled by the junior developers (2-4 years of experience) alone. Some of the code smells need extensive object oriented programming and design skills. For example, replacing "inheritance by delegation", needs a careful thought. In such cases, the senior members of the team Or developers with good OOAD/P knowledge needs to be involved.

2. Next step is to, consider each of these high priority code smells within each iteration. Allocate time to fix them and in parallel, write the unit tests for those parts of the refactored code. Writing the Unit tests at this point of time and automating them ensures that, the refactored code has not broken the behavior of the system. I would like to call this as "TDD injection" technique.

The reason for "TDD Injection" technique is to not only introduce TDD in the middle of development, but specifically refactoring the legacy code.

3. Some teams specifically allocate”Cleanup iteration" just before each milestone release. This is really not a good way to do agile development, but if the project planning is poor Or in a dysfunctional team, the developers might rush delivering the code to customer without TDD. In such situations, one can reserve a day or two “or” may be an entire iteration (2 weeks, say) for clean up activities.

=== "Something is better than nothing".

Technical Debt

Here is a definition of technical debt got from KenMar's article

Technical Debt is simply deferred work not directly related to new functionality but necessary for the overall quality of the system . Examples of this include:

Some examples include:
1. Refactoring
2. Upgrading the database version
3. Upgrading any other software
4. Getting new plugins

Increasing the length of iteration for right reasons

We follow 2 week iterations and a good rhythm has been established. Recently one of the team member came and told me to increase the iteration length to 4 weeks. The reason he gave me was, "he is not getting enough time to test thoroughly". This is not the first time that I keep getting such requests, other reasons I have got so far are, "I want to deliver more features to give good visibility", "I am not getting enough time to understand requirements", etc.

One thing we have to understand is, increasing the iteration length will not solve the problems. One would end up in similar situation and problems but of a bigger size. We need to look at the root cause for the issues before increasing Or decreasing the length of iterations.

If a team is not getting enough time to understand requirements means there is inherently bigger issue with planning, estimation Or communication.

Key question in Scrum meetings: Impediments

I keep reviewing the scrum meetings of teams around me. One thing I have noticed so far is, the team enthusiastically answers the first 2 questions. When it comes to third question, which is on "impediments", either they say everything is okay Or won't bring up the problems.
There is a lot of value in answering the "roadblocks or impediments" question. The idea here is, if the team member says, he has some roadblocks the rest of the team members are supposed to jump in and help me in solving the problem. The reason being, until the road block persists this particular team member would become the bottleneck in the team reducing the throughput.

Some of the common roadblocks I have seen with teams is:

1. They have not understood the requirements properly
2. They have not understood the framework or a particular technology
3. Computer hitch
4. Network problems
5. Issue with one of the colleagues which is ultimately blocking his/her work.

Traffic Jam and Theory of constraints

While I was driving to work today, I noticed that there is a huge traffic jam. I noticed that the vehicles are moving slowly and intermittently. I was curious to know whatÂ’s happening and so peeped out of my car. I found that there is this huge public transport vehicle carrying tons of people with many hanging out, is not able to move beyond 20KM per hour. Since the width of the road is small, each time it stops at the bus stop to pickup people, everybody behind that vehicle has to stop and wait for it move.

The first thought I got was from theory of constraints. One of the principles in TOC is,

the system throughput is dependent on the bottleneck.

.
In the above case related to traffic jam, the public transport bus is the bottleneck and the speed and fate of the entire traffic on the road is dependent on how fast the bus moves.

Introduction to scrum: video by Ken Scwhabber

Ken Schwabber visits Google, and gives an introduction to Scrum. Here is the 1 hour video worth watching:

Pair Programming to avoid quick naps ?

Here is another article by Obie, a thoughtworker, who thinks that pair programming has helped him warding off, his "pairee" to stop unwanted works such as instant messaging, blogging, etc. He thinks this has resulted in improved productivity(including his own).

Pair programming has been one of the most controversial topics from the day I heard about XP, sometime during 2001-2002, and even till date it is the same. There are no numbers to prove the it works. But, nowadays I am finding tweaked version of pair programming. In some organizations they use pairing for a short while to bring junior developer upto speed on the technology/frameworks,etc. There is no rule for such pairing. But still they call it pair programming. Till date, I have personally not seen companies practicing pair programming(by the book), and the only place I have seen is on the pictures scattered around the web.

But I agree with Obie on the fact that, it restricts the usage of IMs, Phone calls, Blogging, News paper readings during office hours. Again there is a clause here, either the pairs would be productive or, unproductive(if they have good understanding between each other).

Is this really a good way to use pair programming ? I don't think so. If an organization uses pair programming to ward off unproductive usage of office hours, they are doing a big mistake. There is fundamentally a big flaw in managing projects.

Bringing Large Scale Change

Here is a good quote from Kent Beck on bringing large scale changes to the organizatio:

When I am in a situation where I want to change my environment, I try to
remember that I can only change myself. However, as soon as I change myself
I also change the way I relate to those around me, and that changes my
environment. That's how large-scale change starts, with one person choosing
to relate to the world differently and having that change spread.

Hesitation behind TDD

I have seen many people finding it difficult, even to start TDD. Key thing behind TDD is not testing but the design. Many programmers have no clue about OOAD Or OOP, then how can anybody expect them to do justice by practicing TDD ?

It is critical for the developers to be aware of OOAD before jumping to practice TDD.

Polarizing people

Today I got a chance to chat with Tim Snyder in Dallas office. He said something which was very powerful. He said

Don't be afraid to polarize people

Be brave to stand up and tell what you beleive as true.

People spend most of the time trying to be politically correct and not to offend people, and this leads to losing out on values.

Lean thinking next wave, are we really ready for it ?

I have been traveling from the last couple of days attending conference, meeting up with customers ,agile gurus, would-be agile managers. From this travel, what I see is that ,lean thinking is kind of catching up peoples' attention. Everybody talks about Muda("waste" in Japnese), they talk about Andan systems, etc. Are we really ready to bring lean into organization ? . If you ask me, No we are not. As per the statistics, barely 10% of the software organizations are practicing agile. I think if you have not mastered the art of agility, then moving directly to lean practices from traditional development would not only be difficult but might not succeed. Ask me why ? Lean thinking provides set of principles and values. Practices needs to be derived based on these fundamental principles and values. The team practicing waterfall model,has no clue about how to derive the practices. But an agile team has some clue about the practices that could reduce the waste. For ex: TDD, Refactoring,etc. This leads me to conclude that the team practicing agile methods have greater chances of implementing lean practices rather than the traditional development teams.

Decrypting "tools" in agile manifesto

As I am preparing presentations for the upcoming Valtech days conference, I am convinced that the tools are integral part of software development and it should be used thoughtfully.

The first value in agile manifesto says:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

.

As per the value mentioned above, the agile gurus' valued "individuals and interactions " more, than the processes and tools. They are not saying don't use tools Or processes, but use cautiously. The tools and processes should not drive the project but should complement them. Another evidence is from the book Goal, the highly efficient robots in the factory didn't increase the output. Similarly, having more number of tools in an organization or a project, does not make any difference to output, but using the tools effectively will inturn increase the throughput.

Taking the above evidence to the processes (Whether it is XP,Scrum,etc),they should not drive the project. They should be used to help the individuals to deliver the product to the customers.

When programmers get excited about agile methods, they get obsessed with it and start looking at these processes as magic wand to solve all their project related problems. Which is totally untrue, and most of the time, problems are due to people problems rather than process !!

Blogging from Hyederabad airport

I am quite amazed to see indian airports becoming hi-fi day by day. On my way to Dallas, while waiting for my next flight I could see many people browsing in the lounge. I wanted to give it a try, and upon switching my laptop I could clearly was able to get atleast 2 signals, and one of them helped me to blog this post !!

During my journey from Bangalore to Hyderabad, I was able to read some 20 pages of Goldratts book Goal. The book kind of takes your through a trance, you will forget your surroundings !

Importance of coaching in distributed agile development

When an organization starts a new practice or introduces a new process into software development team, there would be some slack time before it really sees some gain. This is true especially when an organization decides to move from traditional development to Agile methodology. The practices like test driven development, refactoring are not so easy to learn without a coach in place.

In a distributed agile development scenario, one needs to be careful about the gap about the knowledge of agile methods between onsite customer and offshore customer. More the gap, more resistance resulting in reduced productivity. Generally this type of productivity problem happens, if both the onsite customer and the offshore team are new to agile methods. If one of them has really mastered agile methods then the gap can be reduced fast and there would be a productivity gain.

For Ex: if the onsite team coordinator "thinks" TDD is good, and starts pushing offshore team to practice "TDD". The offshore team, which is new to TDD would not only resist this, but also will try to write code to make the coordinator happy. This results in overstepping the values behind TDD or any other agile practice for that matter.

Agility and maturity

I keep hearing from people time and again that agile methods are for matured teams. My immediate reaction to such conversations is, agile makes the team more matured. I have been applying agile methods from the last two years, and each one of the team member (including myself) had come from CMM (or synonymously called traditional water fall model) have changed a lot after certain time. When I say change, it is not only the ability to deliver quality software but a mindset to learn and adapt. The reason being, the key practice, I would like to put it as "heart" of any agile methods practice is the "iteration". The rhythm and responsibility that gets created within an iteration makes the team more responsible and matured.

I am becoming more and more confident with great stories to prove that, one can apply agile methods to any projects and any "type" of people, and the result from it is always going to be something positive "on" the mindset of the team.

Valtech Days Conference Dallas Oct 2-3

I have prepared couple of presentations to share at Valtech Days conference going to be held on Oct 2-3. I would be presenting paper on "Monitoring distributed agile projects - tools comparison". I would be leaving India on Sept 29th and planning to be back by mid october.




I have done enough research in the last few weeks comparing various Agile PM tools available in the market(both open source and commercial). I was amazed to see that there are nearly 20 tools available and in various stages of development.

Valtech cockpit is tremendously ahead of other tools when it comes to third party integrations.

What is Agile

I know that you would be surprised to see the title !!! But, if you read the article by David Anderson you would definitely realize that most of us are forgetting the goal that was created to create agility in software development.

Just to summarize the point from the above article,
A process is agile if it

* enables companies to easily respond to change
* delivers working code to market faster (than previously or with other methods)
* delivers high quality working code
* improves productivity
* improves customer satisfaction
* and provides an environment for a well motivated team with high job satisfaction

Here is a good comparison between defined process and agile from Mishkin Berteig

Agile Axioms: We are Creators, Reality is Perceived, Change is Natural
Defined Process Axioms: Humans are Resources, Reality can be Legislated, Change is Bad

Agile Disciplines: Empower the Team, Amplify Learning, Eliminate Waste
Defined Process Disciplines: Enforce the Process, Avoid Experiments, Eliminate Variance

Looks like I am able to blog again

From the last couple of days, the entire blog thingy was working weird. All my posts seemed to get into some kind of black hole not able to see the outside world. Hopefully this should work now.

Benefit of tools in Software development

Today we were having a great debate on features and flaws of several tools. One thing I noticed during the discussion was, tools are being developed to control the people and process. I am feeling there is something terribly wrong in this concept. Even though I have been using several tools from many years, I had never noticed such a huge influence of tools in software development.


Many a times, the management decision to use a particular set of tools in the organization forces the development team to constrain themselves to adopt to the tool. This constraint reduces the creativity, productivity and enthusiasm in teams.

Difference between Test First programming and TDD

I have seen people using the words "Test First Programming" and "Test Driven Development" interchangeably, which is wrong. There is a subtle difference between the two.

In Test first programming, you just write the test using xUnit family(mostly) and then you write your code. There is not much rule associated with it.

Test Driven Development is a special case of test first programming where there are certain rules defined. For Ex: You write the test first, ensure that the program fails, then you write the code to make the test work, and finally refactor. This cycle is continued.

Fake Email Server for TDD

I found this nice tool called Dumbster which is a fake SMTP server. This can be used for unit and system testing applications that send email messages.

Agile 2.0 ?

Recently buzz about Agile 2.0 is going around in agile community, looks like sponsored by Microsoft. Here are my thoughts about Agile 2.0

1. From the above article, it looks like MSF is concentrating on agile practices. This would the right recipe for failure. Agile manifesto never talked about practices but only on principles and values which are global and constant. Practices needs to be tailored to individual project environments based on principles and values. A practice that works in one environment may not work on the other

2. Name Agile 2.0 itself is a misnormer. In continuation of point 1 above, there was no such thing called Agile 1.0 before !! We had just agile principles and values.

Law of diminishing marginal returns

I found this nice article on wikipedia about law of diminishing returns.

Quoting from wikipedia:

The "law" of diminishing marginal returns says that after a possible initial increase in marginal returns, the MPP(Marginal Physical Product) of an input will fall as the total amount of the input rises (holding all other inputs constant)

Here are some of the examples from software development environment where we can see the above law in practice:

1. Addition of new team members to the project "seems" to increase productivity marginally but reduces over a period of time.
2. Developers excited about implementing the new technology, and after a while losing interest in it. For ex: implementing Webservices

Software development and mass production mentality

In the last few decades the mass manufacturing industries went on a spree to create "intelligent" machines. The intention of this creation was to solve complex industrial problems quickly, and reduce the manufacturing defects. The only thing the "isolated" worker would do in the assembly line, was to pickup the parts from one line and feed it to next. There was no need to "talk" or "communicate" to the fellow worker. Can you see any similarity between the above example and, "traditional" software development teams ? . The traditional software development is plagued by "mass production mentality". The requirements team would feed set of documents to analysts, who in turn analyze and feed to design team. The design team would feed the high level and low level design docs to development team, etc. Each team has there own specialty and is happy doing the routine work !.

In the lean enterprise, the employees would talk and take help from each other while solving complex problems. They would make use of big visible "andan" systems to constantly monitor the status of production, defects, inventory information. This leads to better communication, leading to creative solution.

I have become Scrum Master HEY !!!

Craig conducted the course on "Scrum Master Certification" in Taj Gateway on Residency road. We were around 40 people, mostly from Valtech India. It was fun and also learnt a lot. Since, I have been working with Craig from the last 6 months, I knew many of the concepts and much more. I was really moved when Craig gifted me the Critical Chain book. Looks like he is asking me to start looking towards next wave coming up in process improvement !!

Finally I can call myself as "SCRUM MASTER" HEY....HEY.. I am just excited about this.

Agile journal article

My article on Benefits Of Tool Integration In Distributed Agile Development was published, and so far received good feedback from friends and well wishers !

Technology experts rescuing process team

From the last couple of months, I have been working closely with Craig Larman and I got a chance to learn not only about Agile methods but also a lot about OOA and OOP. I am also a big fan of people like Martin Fowler, Ron Jefferies, Jeff Sutherland who have contributed a lot to Agile methods. If you carefully observe their past life, they all come from technological background rather than the pure process background. This is leading me to believe that a person with both technology and process background could contribute more to software development world than being purely in one of them. I would like to quote one of the real world examples, I was having a chat with group of SQA team, and still they think TDD is testing rather than a design !!. I saw today Craig checking the code of a team member and smoking code smells out, and I don't think this could be handled by a "pure" QA person.

Motivation behind scrum meetings

Scrum meeting is just not "Standing up" ,"meet" and ask 3 questions. There is certain motivation behind this meet. While reading an article I found one of the motivation to be:

When one team member shares an obstacle in the Scrum meeting, the entire team’s resources come together to bear on that problem. Because the team is working together toward a shared goal, every team member must cooperate to reach that goal. The entire team immediately owns any one individual’s problems. [Rising and Janoff, 2000]

This is also in accordance with the lean thinking, Toyota way !!

Agile Pit fall

Even though Agile methods are supposed to reduce the risk of the project, improve the quality of the deliverables, one thing I feel which would complement agile is "measuring the quality in each step". Agile principles and values never talk about any particular "measurement", and the Agile methods who have tons of practices have not given much importance to "measurable result".

Quality

I am sure you would be using the word "quality" hundreds of times a day if you are in software industry. Even though there are various definitions of quality from various school of thoughts, for example:

Quality is conformance to requirements.

and the other one here

Quality is the capacity to remain robust and conformant, while adapting to new requirements.

.

I strongly agree with the second definition. The reason being, I can write my program to conform to requirements but what if, the design is poor ? what if the code is crappy ?

Toyota Way and the Stand up meeting

I remember somebody telling me that, in Toyota manufacturing plant and in the assembly line if somebody discovers some fault in the product, immediately they would raise an alarm. This in turn signals everybody to stop what they have been doing, and approach the person who raised the alarm. All of them in that shop floor in turn would discuss and help the person in resolving the fault he/she has seen.

I believe the same principle is being applied in our daily stand up meeting. Most of the time, the daily stand up meeting is considered as "status meeting". In fact it is not, especially if you look at the third question "Any obstacles stopping the developer from proceeding further?". The reason I believe behind this question is to make the other team members aware of this issue, and in turn all of them can jump together in helping this person out. This is in line with the Toyota manufacturing analogy shown above.

Until we don't understand the principles behind practices, practices remains as practice !!

Discussion with Craig Larman

Nowadays I am working closely with Craig to get a deeper understanding of Agile and Scrum. Here is the summary of key what I understood

1. There is nothing called agile "method". Agile provides principles and values. There are agile methods like XP,Scrum,etc

2. Most of the time people who go through scrum master certification end up becoming "Project managers having Scrum master certification"

3. Scrum Masters are obstacle removers in a project rather than managers controlling the project. I can clearly see in my surroundings, how difficult it is to achieve this particular goal. The reason being most of the people are coming from "Project Management" background !!

Becoming a scrum master is not "practicing some things", it needs total change of mindset, the way we lead life at work, the way we think.

I have started working on implementing "Virtual Lava Lamp", and it looks like a lot of configuration changes needs to be done while integrating Cruise control with lava lamp.

Good quote from Ron Jefferies

The greatest mistake we make is living in constant fear that we will make one.
-- John Maxwell

Why some teams hesitate to maintain charts

I was reading Jim Shores blog, and came across an article where he has recommended to put some thought process if your team hesitates to update the "Big Visible Charts". I am not going to rephrase what he already said, but going to paste his words here:

he first question to ask is, "Did the team really agree to this chart?" An informative workspace is for the team's benefit, so if team members aren't keeping a chart up to date, they may not think it's beneficial. It's possible that the team is passively-aggressively ignoring the chart rather than telling you that they don't want it.

If people won't take responsibility, perhaps you're being too controlling.

I find that when no one updates the charts, it's because I'm being too controlling about them. Dialing back the amount of involvement I have with the charts is often enough to get the team to step up to the plate. Sometimes that means putting up with not-quite perfect charts or sloppy handwriting. I like pretty charts, so that's hard for me to do... but it pays off.

Manual Testing Vs Automated Testing

I have seen posts on the web debating about ONLY in favor of automated testing. My view is we need to have a balance between the automated and manual testing. Couple of points

1. In order to have the tests automated and working with cruise control, a sort of maturity and experience is needed. I have tried implementing TDD with my team, it took really a long time for them to grasp.

2. Even if somebody is trying to automate testing, till date I have not seen anybody implementing them for the entire features. What I have observed is, developers would start writing unit tests and at some point of time, either to meet deadlines or for some reason they would skip writing tests and get into coding straight.

I always think it is a good idea to automate as many tests as possible and also keep manual testing continued.

Manual Testing Vs Automated Testing

I have seen posts on the web debating about ONLY in favor of automated testing. My view is we need to have a balance between the automated and manual testing. Couple of points

1. In order to have the tests automated and working with cruise control, a sort of maturity and experience is needed. I have tried implementing TDD with my team, it took really a long time for them to grasp.

2. Even if somebody is trying to automate testing, till date I have not seen anybody implemeting them for the entire features. What I have observed is, developers would start writing unit tests and at some point of time, either to meet deadlines or for some reason they would skip writing tests and get into coding straight.

I always think it is a good idea to automate as many tests as possible and also keep manual testing continued.

EJDC 2006 Conference

I was planning to post this blog from some time.
on 25th I had been to EJDC conference as a speaker and shared my thoughts on Agile best practices and metrics at EJDC Conference. It was supported by Kushal a non profit organization helping poor children in India.

My presentation was mostly towards the best agile practices that are in town and also some of the most popular agile metrics. I got my presentation reviewed by Craig Larman on thursday and got very good suggestions on usage of some of the "terminologies".

Overall I feel the presentation went very well. First half of the conference was devoted to technology related topics(mostly on SOA).

Humane Interface Vs Minimal Interface

I am very new to Ruby(In fact I am trying to understand what it is), and today I stumbled upon an article by ' Martin Fowler ' which is an eye opener for me and I beleive, this could be a good start for me to start visualizing why there is so much hype about Ruby !! I have suddenly started seeing coding in Java/J2EE as x86 programming !!

Traditional "Done" Vs Agile "Done"

I found this interesting post on the web. Here the author williamcaputo is trying to describe the "thinking" of "done" by the traditional team Vs Agile team.


Traditionally 'done' means "We won't have to work on that anymore - and if we do, somebody must've screwed up." For Agilists 'done' means "We have accounted for what is known. If the situations changes, we expect to revisit this work."

Thus the two approaches have different goals: One is to finish, the other is to keep pace with change.