5 Reasons to Manage Your Solo Project’s ALM Process

So I’ve been developing software on the Microsoft stack for just over 10 years, and training and consulting on managing software development with VS-ALM (a.k.a. TFS, a.k.a. Team System) for just over 4 of those years. But in all time training and consulting, I was working with teams – from small 5 person start ups, to enterprises with hundreds of users, all using Team Foundation Server (a.k.a. on-premises TFS) to develop their methodology and align their tooling with their products.

Never individuals, though.

Over the years, though,  I’ve had the opportunity to fly solo on several software projects, some short lived, some longer, as have other ALM consultants that I know. One thing we all seem to have in common is that, while as ALM experts, we have all of the skills and knowhow to apply our own trade to the software we develop, we seldom – if ever – do so.

The Cobbler’s Children Go Barefoot…

… as the saying goes. It seems that this proverb applies to our profession as much as it does to others. You’ve seen the doctor who smokes, the out-of-shape coach, the technician or plumber whose own wiring or plumbing is faulty, respectively. Perhaps it’s the same. Perhaps its just that proper ALM is more visibly useful when multiple hands are involved and they must all communicate and interact properly with each other, than when one person holds all roles.

Solo projects seem to need no management, I believe they only seem to.

Here’s why:

1. If You Don’t Use Source Code Version Control, You’re an Idiot!

I apologize for the vehemence. Let me rephrase this. If you don’t use some kind of source code version control, you’re an inexcusably dense idiot who deserves what he or she gets when you lose your source code!!!

I guess I couldn’t rephrase it without the vehemence. Lesson learned.

Beyond the fact that having some kind of backup, preferably online, means that even if you lose your laptop, or accidentally delete your source files, you still have a copy of your code, version control means that if you make a mistake, you can still rollback to that point in time and fix whatever you did wrong. Having a historical log of the changes you made to the software can also serve as release notes of sort, and a rudimentary list of the features and bug fixes you have, and even help establish some kind of time line.

Really though, version control is about security for the code – protection against loss and against mistakes. you should use it as frequently as possible.

Note that you do not need to shell out huge amounts of money to be able to use version control. In fact, as in life, so with version management, the best things are free!

I prefer using Git. You can use it locally with any operating system (Windows, Linux, Mac OS), and there are multiple online tools that work and synchronize with Git, all free: GitHub, CodePlex, and (my personal favorite) Visual Studio Online. There are, of course, other version control systems, both distributed and centralized (Mercurial is another DVCS, Subversion is a great free centralized one).

Heck, even use DropBox or some other online-syncing file-storage, just beware that it won’t protect you from deleting your code, nor will it let you rollback – but at least you’

2. Defining (just enough) Work Upfront = Less Code Writing and Rewriting

Much like TDD tends to limit the amount of production-code you write, so does defining your work. In fact what is TDD, if not the definition of a small amount of work that needs to be done to the system, along with a definition of how to know when you’re done? The same holds true for defining a development task, a user story (a.k.a. a product backlog item, or PBI) or a feature; each is an elaboration of the higher level: Feature to user story, to task, to test. When you know what needs to be done, and you know when you’re done, you know exactly what the remaining work is. That saves time.

And let’s be clear. Just enough is key here. Too little, and you’ll rewrite anything that you haven’t properly thought out and planned. Too much, of course, and changes to the reality surrounding the project and your perception of reality will bring rewrite to your plans.

3. Project Planning Makes it Possible to Plan Releases

Unless you are truly working on a hobby for yourself, you still need to be able to answer at least these two questions:

1. When will it be done?
2. What will be done by a certain date?

Without estimating the work you have to do, more so if you don’t even know how much work you have, you simply will not be able to give more than a POOMA estimate.

Note that unless you live alone, you might still need to answer these questions, if only so your partner, roommate or parent will know when you will finally clear the garage (or dinner table) from your junk.

4. Automation Reduces Human Error as well as Manual Labor

Even if you are a solo programmer, two things remain invariably true for you:

1. You’re only human.
2. You’re only one human.

Being only human means that as talented as you may be, you are still prone to repetition based errors. You’ll forget to update the version number, or forget to set the build configuration to Release, or forget to run the tests, or any number of things. When I train new developers, especially in those early days when they feel that the fact that they’re constantly making errors, and more experienced developers must be demigods or some such, in an attempt to reassure them (and lighten the atmosphere), I tell them this:

• There are only two kinds of developers: experienced, and inexperienced developers.
• Inexperienced developers make only two kinds of mistakes: Mistakes born of inexperience, and mistakes born of stupidity.
• Experienced developers make mistakes only born of stupidity

Aside from the fact that this is inherently true (an experienced person, by definition, cannot make a mistake born of inexperience), it is important to note – experienced developers make mistakes!

Computers do not. Ever.

Another saying that I’m fond of repeating, the former statement being a key reason to do so, especially when consulting and or training clients on the use of ALM tools, is to never let a human do a machine’s work (and vice versa). Anything a machine can do, we shouldn’t.

Finally, there’s the fact that any time spent on doing what someone, or more importantly, something (i.e. your computer) could do, is time not spent on things only you can do (i.e. developing the product – which you’d probably prefer to do anyway). Ask yourself this – while you’re manually doing repetitive work – who is coding? Nobody.

This holds true for building, for testing, for releasing and deploying, and basically for anything that you can (and know how to) automate.

In all but the simplest and most straightforward scenarios (usually short-term, one-shot projects), you should find ways to delegate work to a machine.

5. Defining the Work Makes Change Management Easier

It’s all great when you’re hacking away at that pet-project of yours and you’re in the zone, but a week later, a month or even three later, once you start delivering a second or third release of your software, keeping track of what was done, when – not to mention writing release notes, becomes extremely difficult, if you don’t know what your changes are or were. In fact, if you use an ALM tool for tracking features, changes and defects, and associate them with automated builds, you can generate a release notes document automatically with every build, and not have to deal with it yourself.

The other kind of change, is change of management. Today this may be your solo project. Tomorrow, who knows? You may take on a partner, give someone else the code to maintain, or decide to open the source. If the only definition of the work is whatever lies inside that wonderful brain of yours, hand-off will be a bear. Trust me. I’ve had to waste two weeks once receiving a project, and I still don’t know everything about it. Finding out stuff on my own is not the best use of my time. Having a nice set of features, tasks and bugs (past and open both) shortens the time, and makes discovery pains all but gone.

Conclusion

In summary, I’d like to state my opinion that in most (again, all but the simplest and most straightforward one-shot) software projects, proper ALM is as useful and important when flying solo as when developing with a team. Lack of communication issues (though see point #5) are balanced by the increase of work of having to do it all by yourself.

Just do it right the first time. You’ll thank me for it.

Best Regards,
Assaf Stone
Occasional Solo Developer

Technorati Tags: ALM,Software,Development,Testing,Building,Code,VCS,Git,Solo

One Team’s First Sprint Planning Session

This post is a bit different than my usual ones. Instead of orating off of my soapbox, I’d like to share a moment of agile bliss that I had today. One of the teams I work with at my customer’s company conducted their first “truly agile” sprint planning session. This post is a recount of the experience.

What Came Before

About a month ago, I began working on agile methodology training for a few teams at my client. The focus of the training was team work-process, mostly using Scrum as a template for how we will do things, with a few Kanban inspired overrides. In my first few sessions, I focused on what a user story is, what a task is, and the concept of focusing the team’s energy on completing user stories as fast as possible.

What I taught them boiled down to a few key take-away points:

• A user story is an independent increment in functionality that is valuable to a stakeholder, that can be completed by the team in one sprint
• A task is one developer’s day of work, on one component of the system that is affected by its user story, or work that needs to be done to meet the team’s quality standards.
• Each team member pulls an unassigned task from the most important, unfinished user story

Initially there were arguments on all points: “Our stories are too big for one sprint”, “What if a task takes more or less than a day?”, “It’s easier to assign a story to a developer”. I had to convince them that these basic ideas are important and valuable, or at least to give them a try.

The Man’s Too Big…

What we did was take one “too big” user story, and look for some way to break them down in to thinner vertical slices. We ended up with stories that use naïve implementations, or serve a smaller set of clients, or handle a smaller set of scenarios, with further stories that cover the difference in robustness, clients and scenarios.

With regard to the tasks, I suggested that we simply split tasks that feel too big, or join tasks that feel to small, and not to worry about their actual length. We’ll measure the averages and variance after the end of the sprint, and look for better ways to be more predictable as needed. It was more of a let’s simply try it solution.

The Man’s Too Strong!

The longest argument was over whether the first story warranted having multiple developers swarm on the tasks until the story is complete. One developer felt most strongly that it’s a waste of time to have multiple people learn the story, since we’re certain to complete it in time either way. Another developer didn’t want to be pegged in just the server (or client) coding tasks of each story, and felt that owning a whole story gave her more satisfaction. She also expressed concern over the pain of complex merges. Incidentally, it was mostly the QA engineers that immediately accepted the value of working on one story’s tasks in parallel.

Here are the points I made to alleviate their concerns:

• Having multiple developers learn a story is a great benefit, as it will allow flexibility in task assignment now, and further down the line in future sprints that may have related stories
• Having more people understand the story will eliminate bottlenecks (and increases the team’s bus factor – a good thing)
• Regarding the perceived focusing on one component, some other team member chimed in, suggesting that nothing would stop her from taking a client-side task in one story, and a server-related one in the next. I was really happy that other members joined the discussion; it was no longer a teacher-class relationship, but a team of peers
• I also reminded the team, that since we define a task as the work on one component for a day, and since we focus on completing one story before moving to the next, we are actually reducing the chance of two developers having to manipulate the same object at the same time – which of course reduces the merge conflicts! Further effort can be made to remove the rest of the edge cases almost entirely
• I further mentioned that there will be at least two members working on each story in any case: one coder, one tester.

Planning the Sprint

The rest went by rather smoothly. The team calculated how many expected work days they have in the sprint. I suggested that we simply add them up, rather than trying to split along the lines of coder / tester days & tasks.

I noticed that the backlog had some free-floating tasks, i.e. not related to any user story. I asked the team about those, stating that unless there is some value to a stakeholder, the task may be a waste of time. The team told me that it was technical debt. After some discussion, we agreed to deduct the tasks from the available work days, rather than creating fake user stories – we have to own up to the fact that we are paying back a debt to the system, not adding value to it.

The team-leader-turned-part-time-product-owner gave a rough stack ranking (there were several items high on the list with the same rank). I suggested that if he doesn’t care which of the same-rank stories we complete first, I’ll set an internal rank by the order that they appeared in the spreadsheet. He accepted.

Next we started explaining and breaking the stories. Traditionally, the PO explains the stories in the planning session’s first half, and the team breaks them down in the second. Since the PO in this case is a team member, and fully savvy of the product and solution, I suggested that we simply run down the list until we have as many tasks as we have work days (see how that works out?).

The first story was easy. We created 4 coding tasks and 2 quality related tasks.

Break it Down!

The second story was a whopper. We knew it would take most of the sprint. One developer suggested that we split the story by data source – one part retrieving one source’s data, the other part retrieving the second source. the team leader shook his head. “The customer needs both”, he said. There is no value in supplying just one. We’ll split it some other way, if we have to”.

You couldn’t erase the smile from my face with truckload of erasers. I knew for sure that he got the idea of what a user story is!

With the second, larger, story, the team leader frowned and looked at the task list. “This doesn’t feel right” he said. When asked what the problem was, he said that one task is too big – it will take longer than a day. The team then split it in two parts, and added a third task.

And we were done estimating and committing. Just like that.

All in all, we spent about an hour of planning, 2-3 minutes of which were spent “estimating”, which is to say deciding how to split that “too big” task.

An Agile Manager in a Brave New World

At the end of the meeting, the team leader expressed his regrets that we don’t have a full-time technical-product-manager (TPM) which is the closest role they have to a Product Owner. The group manager, who was present for the Sprint Planning picked up the impediment and answered “Let’s take it offline; I’ll try to get one to join the team ASAP”.

Yes sir! The manager became the Scrum Master’s Scrum Master, as per my suggestion in my previous post.

Here’s What We Didn’t Do

There are several things the team didn’t do:

• Defining proper user stories – I didn’t bother following the ceremony of form with the stories, declaring the reasoning and the interested party. I ignored this because I wanted to avoid too much change-shock at once. Next sprint we’ll focus on that. For now, I felt that understanding the concept of value was more – well – valuable
• Estimate the effort involved in the stories. Personally? I hate estimations. I think they’re useless, most of the time. I noticed that most of the time spent in a sprint planning session is wasted on planning poker, story points and ideal hours, and in the end – they don’t help the project’s predictability in any noticeable way. Instead, we’ll measure, and seek a low-variance way to split the tasks. That will be better. and cheaper

In the End

All in all, it was a great first “agile day” for the team. It was fast, to the point, and everybody participated in every part of the session. Tomorrow I will work with them on building their Scrum-board, and walk them through their first “real” daily meeting. I can’t wait!

So, what do you think? Want to hear more such experiences? Is there anything I did that you like? Something I could have done better? Please drop a comment. Don’t be a stranger!

P.S. A special thank you goes to Mark Knopfler, lead vocals and guitar legend from the Dire Straits, for inspiring the titles of two sections, in his wonderful song.

Technorati Tags: Agile,Scrum,Sprint Planning,Estimation,User Story,Task,How To,Team

Why Should I INVEST in User Stories?

INVEST is a another great acronym from the Computer Sciences industry, Department of Agile (yes, DOA, and I’m well aware – thank you very much); It stands for Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Sized (or Small), and Testable. Those are indeed valuable attributes of User Stories, of any kind of requirements at all, and the acronym itself implies some effort on behalf of the creator of user stories (i.e. the Product Owner), with a potential return on investment.

But that isn’t good enough. A catchy name may be enough for most developers to try something new (seriously, when does a developer ever need a reason to try something new?), but not so for management. To many managers, however, this can sound like Impossible, Not-gonna-deliver, Vague, Everything-is, So-what, and Test-the-whole-goddamn-project!

In this post, inspired by a twitter-conversation I had a while ago, I hope to explain what this INVESTing in user stories really means, and why it is worth doing.

I is for INDEPENDENT

In my opinion, writing independent user stories will be your single greatest return on investment (no pun intended – this time). In one of my recent posts, I described how work items (stories, tasks, features, etc.) are far more likely to complete later rather than earlier if they more than one dependency, while having just a single dependency (i.e. starting the new item is simply dependent on completing the previous one) will  increase the likelihood that it will complete on time.

Of course, most of the work in writing good user stories is in this part as well. You are required to reimagine how you think of your work. You need to do away with layered one-shot thinking that is probably necessary in every industry except software. Since the actual construction of the software is for all intents and purposes near-instantaneous, you can (and should) think about vertical increments of value, when you come up with your requirements. Each such story should be worded so as to be independent of any previous (or forthcoming) stories.

In some cases, you may find it impossible to break a story’s dependencies, no matter how you try. In those cases, try to look at the story with its dependencies as a single story. Find the commonality of them and reimagine it.

To summarize – Independence in your stories will translate directly into increased probability of delivering on time!

N is for NEGOTIABLE

Let’s get one thing clear: This attribute is not a copout for developers! A story’s negotiability does not give developers the right to decide not to do it. The developers do not decide what the story will be, what its scope is, when it will be delivered, and what is required to make it complete. Oh, the developers can and should discuss the story and its impact with the PO, and the PO may decide to change the story based on developer input, but it is ultimately the PO’s right (and responsibility) to make any changes to the story.

The full meaning of negotiability, is that the contents of the story (i.e. scope, priority, requirements) can be changed at any time, from the moment they are introduced, and up until the the developers commit to it (i.e. the beginning of its sprint).

This is perhaps both the easiest attribute to add to your user stories, and the hardest. It is easy, because it requires no extra work from the PO or team. It is hard, because it may require you to let go of any preconceptions you may have of the story (i.e. those you had when you first wrote it). It requires you to allow people to move your cheese.

The return on this investment is quite valuable, however; Your stories will be rejuvenated, and will be more valuable to the customers and user, because they have been recently revalued, evaluated and updated. This attribute is particularly synergetic with the next one:

V is for VALUABLE

You’d think that given the high premium on the time of developers, and the fact that most projects are running late, as it is, it would go without saying that everything we develop is valuable. Unfortunately that is not the case. According to the CHAOS Report, by the Standish Group, fully 64% of developed functionality is rarely or never used!

All of these features have something in common: They were added without any consideration of their value or necessity to the users or the customers!

The valuable attribute of user stories helps reduce these numbers, by making sure that anything and everything the team develops has value to the users. When the PO comes up with a story, and cannot find a way to describe its value, it is possible that there is no value. Our tendency to add these valueless stories to the product comes from the traditional idea that you have to define everything upfront, or it won’t be in the project. Thanks to negotiability, it is possible to focus only on what is valuable.

This attribute also protects the system from developers’ desires to build a framework (we all love developing frameworks – it’s a conditioning or something), or do any work that doesn’t translate into value to the customer. If some technical work is required for some story, add the work as a task to that story, not as a technical story; this will more clearly radiate to management what is required to complete a story, and will give the PO the ability to consider this extra work and its impact when evaluating the story.

E is for ESTIMABLE

There is a lot of good literature out there on how to estimate properly. While there are several, equally viable techniques out there for estimating, everyone pretty much agrees that relative estimates are easier than absolute ones, and smaller items are easier than larger ones. For more info on how to estimate properly, you can read my previous post on the subject, here.

There is more to it, though, than just the techniques. The story should be clearly scoped. There should be a beginning and an end.

Imagine a story such as “As a user, I want a text editor, so that I can take notes”. How much will it take to develop that? I have no idea. If the user only needs a multi-line textbox with persistence capabilities, then I can probably have it done in a few hours (yes – a few hours, because nothing ever takes just 5 minutes!). If the user is expecting RTF capabilities with copy and paste, it’ll take longer, and if he’s looking to give MS Word some serious competition, it’ll probably take a few man-years (just guessing here; It’s too big for me to give a good estimate).

I see estimability as the culmination and grounding of the next two attributes, Size and Testability (see below).

S is for Size

“Sized Appropriately”, or “Small”, as some call it means that the story is small enough to estimate. In Scrum, and other time-boxed methodologies it is expected that the story will be scoped in a way that makes it possible for the team to complete a few of them in one sprint – at the very least, they should be able to complete one story.

This attribute requires the PO to define in detail what it is that he wants the team to deliver. In many cases, the actual user stories that the team works on are the elaboration of the broad scopes defined in the “Epics” or “over-stories” or “super-stories”.

What the PO gains is the ability to release early and often. The team get the ability to create less complex solutions, because the problems are smaller.

Remember, the story should be defined in terms of their business value, not the implementation details! The details are to be left to the developer tasks, and are of no interest to the users or customers.

T is for Testable

Testability basically means that it is possible to test the product to see if it fulfills the requirements of the user story. A testable user story has a finite and measurable set of acceptance criteria, by which it is possible to prove the validity of the product.

This last, but most certainly not least of attributes serves everybody who has a stake in the product:

• By defining the story’s acceptance criteria, the PO has the opportunity to define more specific demands of the story, than what appear simply in the “title” (“As a… I want… so that…).
• Both the Developers and the QA gain an understanding of what the scope of the story is and what it is not, thus reducing a great source of contention about whether something is a bug, or a new feature (if I had a penny…)
• Stakeholders gain an understanding of what they are going to receive by the release.

The acceptance criteria, like the rest of the story, should be worded in the product’s domain language, which means that they should be defined in the users’ terms, rather than the developer / QA terms.

The return on your INVESTment here should be obvious: The PO gains a tighter control of what will be produced, without unnecessarily elaborating on the technical solution, while the developers and QA have a better understanding of what they are required to do.

In conclusion

I think that every part of the INVEST model has value. Stories that you have invested in will be:

• More likely to complete on time
• Current and updated
• Valuable to the customer and / or the users, with less unnecessary technical fluff
• Clearer, with less dissonance between POs, developers and testers
• Less complex to develop, easier to test, and quicker to get feedback as well as quicker to deploy
• Easier to prove and validate and quicker to gain acceptance by the customer / user

That’s all. I think it’s a worthy goal, well worth the cost. What say you?

Technorati Tags: Agile,Scrum,User Story,INVEST,test,estimation

Do Agile Estimation Techniques Really Account for Scrum Projects’ Successes?

After several years of experience working with, training and coaching teams on Scrum, I have no doubt that agile (empirical) estimation techniques are better than classic, predictive estimation techniques. One question that kept nagging me over time is whether or not using story points, T-shirt sizes, or ideal hours truly explains the increased success of Scrum based techniques?

It took me a while, but I finally figured it out. And the answer is a definite ‘NO’!

All Estimation Techniques are Merely Guesses

At the end of the day (or at least, at the end of the planning session), any estimation is just a guess: sometimes its more, and sometimes its less. This means that the distribution of the actual time versus the estimation should be pretty much normal: In large numbers, about half of the actual results will be less than the estimation, and half will be more. On average, according to the Law of Large Numbers, it evens up.

The better the estimation technique is, the steeper the curve will be, i.e. the closer actual results will be to the estimation.

My experience is that agile techniques are in fact better at predicting the actual results, but the fact remains that if you make enough of these predictions, then regardless of the technique, the variance should cancel itself out and the sum should settle on the average!

This means that the quality of the technique used to estimate each task has little or no impact of the success of estimating the time to complete the entire project!

Then Why Do Estimations Fail?

If estimations behave “normally” whole project estimations should not fail. I don’t buy into all that “programmers are notoriously optimistic” sentiment; I’m a developer myself and there is not a single soul alive that will call me optimistic, and yet, non-agile projects I worked on overran their deadlines, like everybody else’s. Something must be out there, that either changes the normal distribution, or invalidates the law of large numbers or both. And it has to be something that is present in classic waterfall-ish projects but not in agile ones.

It Is All About the Independence!

The main difference, in my opinion between agile and non-agile projects is how they are planned and constructed. An agile project plan is basically a stack of user stories, with no* dependencies between them, whereas a waterfall project plan is a Gantt chart describing tasks and their interdependencies.

Why Is This Important?

Let’s assume a task that has two dependencies. Each were estimated, and each have a normal distribution of the actual amount of time to complete vs. the estimated time. The following figure describes such a “plan”:

Each task has a 50% chance to be completed before time and 50% to be completed after (There is of course no statistical chance of being completed “on time”). Now, let’s say we’re interested in calculating the probability of Task C to be completed before time, or not to finish late. For the sake of ease, we’ll assume all three tasks to have the same estimated duration. For Task C to begin early, it needs both of its dependencies to complete early. Since the chance of each to complete early is 50%, the chance for both is (0.5 * 0.5) = 0.25, or 25%. The chance for this not to happen, i.e. for at least one of them to be completed late is 1-0.25 or 75%. this means that there’s a 75% for Task C to complete late, and of course it has its own probability of being late, which means that the chance of Task C completing late (and making the whole project run late) is more than 75%!

It is easy to see that the more complex a project is, the more dependencies each task has the greater the chance of being late is; The distribution of the actual duration of tasks with dependencies is a negatively skewed distribution.

Scrum User Stories Have No Dependencies

With this in mind, Scrum user stories have no* interdependencies. If two stories do have a dependency, they are should be joined to be treated as one (and if they are too big, they can and should be split again, though in a way that doesn’t create dependencies). With no dependency (or, if you wish, a single dependency that is the completion of the prior story), we get a plan that looks like this:

The chance of B starting early, which is the same chance of A ending early, is 50%. The chance of B completing early is still 50%! Even better the variance is reduced, which means that there is an increased probability of the total project duration being close to the the estimate (i.e. a steep probability distribution).

What Does This Mean?

This means, that while a project with multi-dependent tasks has an increased skew towards lateness with each added task, a project with no dependency (beyond sequence) has an increased tendency towards the mean, or the estimate.

This means that by the very nature of what we are estimating, agile projects tend to succeed (i.e. be on budget and on time), than non-agile.

Moreover, the actual estimation technique doesn’t matter – it is the estimation of independent units of work that makes the difference.

Therefore, my conclusion, and advice is that the very first change a team needs to make is to start working on independent features – call them user stories, features, or MMFs – it doesn’t matter; just keep them independent of each other!

Hope this helps,

Assaf.

Technorati Tags: Agile,Estimation,Scrum,Sprint Planning,User Story

10 Signs that Your Team Isn’t Really Agile

[UPDATE – This post was recently translated by Choepidiui (I hope I got the name right) into Korean. For the Korean version of this post, please go to his site]

With all the hype in the software industry about Agile, Scrum and so on, it is no surprise that many companies hear or read about the virtues of these methods, perhaps at a conference or in a technical white paper, and think “we need this here”. Unfortunately, some organizations are not as ready to make the mental shift required to embrace the agile way of doing things…

Below is a (by no means conclusive) list of signs that your team waded in toe-deep, rather than going the whole nine yards:

You might not be truly agile if…

1. Your team is not responsible for the entire story

Perhaps the most important aspect of an agile team is that it is cross functional. This means that the team, as a whole, have all the skills required to deliver a valuable product increment. If a team has only client developers, then all server-side tasks are probably relegated to a different team. In this case, the team is not handling a story from end to end; when they complete their work, no value has been added to the product – not in the eyes of the customer! Teams that work like this resemble a factory where the product sits on the conveyor belt and different layers are added to it by different teams. At no moment till the last team does its thing is the feature (or product) done.

It is possible to have a successful development process without cross-functional (feature) teams, but it simply isn’t agile.

2. Testing is done by another team

Another equally important quality of an agile team is the ability to deliver a working product increment. If the developers call a feature that has merely been coded and not tested “done”, then there is a serious flaw with their definition of done. This is often another example of not being cross-functional: QA is simply another team. In order for a team’s work to be considered done, it should be tested and integrated and ready to use.

3. You are not INVESTing in your user stories

INVEST, is a mnemonic acronym coined by Bill Wake that describes the values of a good user story: Independent of other user stories, Negotiable scope up to the sprint in which they’re developed, Valuable to the end user or customer, Estimable by the development team, Sized appropriately so that the team can complete a few of them in one sprint, and Testable so that the team can prove that they have successfully completed the requirements.

Only if the product owner INVESTs in the stories, will he be able to order them by their value to their customer, and be able to promise that when each is complete, the customer will receive a valuable increment to the product. Likewise, the team will be able to deliver these increments rapidly, and with confidence in their quality.

4. Tasks are assigned to team members by a manager

In a truly agile team, each member can pick which tasks he or she will work on next, as long as it pertains to the next most valuable user story. Traditionally, project managers or team leaders would assign tasks to team members, often months in advance. Even though this is done for the sake of optimizing a project schedule, it is a wasteful process that can’t possibly take into account how the entire project might change over time, nor what the team members’ skills and desires might be at the time.

A team member may want to focus on improving his skills, or try to learn to do something outside his comfort zone. A responsible, self-managing team will find a way to make sure the tasks get done as soon as needed and in line with the reality of the project as it is at the present. The best the manager can truly hope for is to get out of the way. Besides, he has more important things to do.

The only time a project manager should expend the effort of allocating resources is when a task requires a resource that the team doesn’t have. Those should be few and far between. If this is a recurring issue, it is a sign that the team isn’t cross-functional enough (see the first point, above).

5. Your team is told how much work to commit to

If a PM gives the team a certain set of resources (members), a deadline (release or sprint), and then tells them how much work they should commit to (or vetoes their commitment), then the project manager is guilty of attempting to break the iron triangle. A team should be able to commit to as much work per iteration as they believe they can (and should base their estimates on past experience).

If this isn’t the case, then there is nothing agile about the plan; the plan was set in advance, etched in stone, and you aren’t willing to renegotiate it, even at the implicit expense of quality.

For a team to be truly agile, it must be accepted that the plan might be delivered with less than all of the stories originally planned (and it should be the least valuable ones that get booted).

6. You are reporting rather than discussing your progress

A subtle and insidious sign that you aren’t really agile is that you report your progress to the project manager scrum master, not to the team, at the daily stand up meeting. The meeting is there so that the (entire) team will have a sense of what each other is doing, what they are stuck on, and what they are planning to do.

Despite the seemingly managerial nature of the three questions asked (“what did you do since then last meeting?”, “what are you planning on doing till the next one?”, “what might block your progress?”) , the questions are not there for the manager to keep tabs on the team, but to elicit another team member’s thoughts on the matter (“can I help?”, “does this affect my tasks?”, etc.).

Each team member should be addressing the rest of the team. The PM should be there to listen, and perhaps answer questions; he should not become the focus of the meeting.

7. You are not focusing on completing the most important user story

Sometimes, a team may divide their work into stories and break them down into tasks, but instead of swarming on the topmost story and divide the tasks among members, the stories are divided. This has two un-agile consequences:

First, at a given time, all of the stories may be partially completed (regardless of value), instead of part of the stories (based on value), totally complete. This transforms the team and the iteration plan into a waterfall-ish plan, rather than an agile one, as its success is based on the premise (hope) that everything will be completed on time, otherwise, nothing is.

Second problem is that each member’s work has less impact and import to his team members. It is not their story he’s talking about, after all. The other members have less of an incentive to listen and help. The daily meeting becomes a mere progress report that can easily be replaced with a query to the chosen ALM tool.

For a team to be agile, they have to be geared towards working on the same problem, and put all their effort into cranking out complete features, as quickly as possible.

8. You changed to agile last year, and haven’t changed a thing since

Here’s a tricky one – you think you nailed it; you may have brought in an expert way back then, and we worked out a plan, and it seems to work, and now it’s etched in stone and  nobody can change it. Well guess what – you’re missing on an important part of being agile: Actually being agile! Reality changes, new ideas and new influences come up all the time. There’s always something that could be done better.

An agile team holds retrospectives on a regular basis, where they put their heads together to think of what they did right since the last meeting, what they could do better in the next iteration, and what visible actions need to be taken to improve.

These visible actions most often manifest as a change to the work process.

Note: If you are using an IT-based ALM tool to manage your work process (e.g. TFS, Greenhopper, etc., Version One) you should take care to account for the impact of the change on the tool.

Time to Publish

Sometimes there are unforeseeable problems that mean you reach the deadline, and you haven’t completed all of your planned work. If you storm your stories and make sure you deliver one complete story at a time, ordered by priority, you will likely have a good enough product (yes I know I made this point before, but it’s worth repeating…)

So it’s time to post. I know I promised 10 signs in the title, but it turns out that I can’t. At least I came through with the most important ones, fully ready on time, no?

Well, if you don’t feel that way, and you think it is more important to deliver everything, than it is to meet a deadline, then here’s sign #9.

9. You are not ready to release on time with an incomplete scope

If you can’t organize your work in such a way that you’re ready to deliver the most important features, those you’ve completed, at any given moment (especially at the deadline), then your plan isn’t agile. You are likely building your product in layers, like a house, rather than in vertical slices, of product value increment.

An agile product is built one user story (or value increment, or minimal marketable feature – doesn’t matter how you call it) at a time. For more on it, read my post on how to plan agile releases.

Here’s another one:

You can always release the remaining features at a later date, with a minor release increment…

10. You are not getting customer feedback every sprint

At the end of every sprint, an agile team demonstrates the latest increment to the product. The audience may include any and all stakeholders in the project, it definitely includes the product owner / project manager and should, when relevant, include the customer. Some teams use this as some formal milestone to show their progress, and continue with the (original) plan for the next sprint – regardless of the results! This is not agile.

A truly agile team will leverage the demo to elicit comments from the stakeholders about the recent development, to make sure that they are on track, and that if the requirements or environment changed during the last sprint, these changes will be reflected in the product backlog and potentially in the upcoming sprint backlog!

Remember, and agile team embraces change, rather than avoiding it.

Summary

There. That’s 10 signs. I hope you found them enjoyable as well as educating.

So do you have any more signs that should be added to this list? Please add them in the comments.

Assaf.

[EDIT]

11. You’re not agile if you can’t deal with a change in the original scope.

Now, I know I said there’d be (only) 10 signs, but based on early, prerelease feedback, I was asked to add another one. I showed them to a friend of mine before posting, and he liked what he saw. In fact, he liked the idea so much, that he suggested another one that I might add. After the release however, he suggested I change the wording. I hope you like this one better..

Technorati Tags: Agile,Definition of Done,Scrum,User Story

Demystifying Agile: How to Plan Releases with Scrum

The agile release process might sometimes seem like voodoo (or even dark voodoo) to some managers and developers, particularly those more accustomed to the traditional way of planning processes used in waterfall projects. This post will explain the inherent problems with waterfall projects, how agile methodologies such as Scrum overcome these problems, and of course, the reasons that the agile release planning method works.

You Can’t Control Everything

The PMBOK call it the project management triangle; the agile community call it the Iron Triangle. Regardless of the name, it is a real and hard constraint: Of the three aspects of the project – scope, resources (or cost), and time you may pick and control any two. The third cannot be controlled without harming the quality, and is calculated (roughly) by the following formula:

This means that if you have a project where the budget is fixed, and there is a hard deadline (i.e. release date), then you cannot control the scope that will be delivered by the team by the time of the release.

Moreover, Brook’s Law, states that adding people to a late (i.e. already started) project will only make it later. According to this, since the cost of a software project is mostly the cost of the team members, the resources must remain fixed for the project (or release).

Nevertheless, traditional project managers seem to try to define the entire scope of a project, define the releases and milestones (i.e. the time), with a fixed preset budget (i.e. cost).

It is simply doomed to fail. According to the Standish Group and the Chaos Report, most projects (68 percent) do.

Why do Projects Fail?

According to Martin Fowler, it is not the projects that fail, but rather the estimates that fail; it is our attempt to calculate how much time it will take to deliver a certain scope with a certain amount of resources.

I would argue, that the failure to estimate is the reason that projects fail. We really don’t know how to estimate. Projects fail because they rely too heavily on the estimates.

How do Agile Methods Reconcile with the Iron Triangle?

Given values such as courage and honesty, it is no surprise that agile methodologists simply acknowledge that estimation is not a good basis for a release plan, and search for alternatives.

Given the Iron Triangle, Brook’s Law, and the fact that most customers demand a hard release date, an agile PM accepts that he cannot control the scope that will be delivered; that is, while the PM may make guesses (i.e. estimates) as to the content that will be delivered on the deadline, he cannot be sure that every last task will be completed.

What he can promise, and make certain of, is that he will deliver the best product possible on the release date, with the rest of the desired features in consecutive releases.

How do Agile Methods Deliver the Best Product on Time?

By slicing the entire scope into vertical slices, small increments in valuable functionality (often called user stories), the agile PM now has a stack of user stories to be released, or a product backlog. By defining the stories in such a way that they have as few interdependencies as possible, the PM may order them as he desires. The PM will of course, choose to order them by business value to the customer.

The development team, in turn, will swarm on each story, by order of value (priority), and focus on completely delivering one story at a time (completely means coding, testing, integrating and anything else required).

In this way, at any given moment, including the release date, the team has a product that is shippable and is the most valuable product they could possibly develop.

Is the Best Product Possible Good Enough?

While the best product might not be everything that was envisioned, because again – that is simply not possible: not with waterfall, not with agile, not anyway – the “Best Product” will have the capabilities most valued by the customer.

The findings of the Standish Group show that only 20% of the features in any given product are frequently used, while 64% are rarely or never used. Therefore, statistically speaking, even if you only complete 36% of your scope, you may still have a good enough product!

Of course, assuming that you aren’t slacking, and the project’s deadline isn’t insanely short, it is more likely that you will complete a significantly larger portion of your scope. It is even possible that you will have a “good enough” product that you can ship even before the deadline! There is not a single customer that will say no to reducing time to market!

So I’d say, yes – the Best Product is good enough.

And that’s how it’s done. I hope

How about your products? Do you work this way? Are your experiences similar? Share!

Thanks,

Assaf.

Technorati Tags: Agile,Estimation,Scrum,User Story,Release Planning,Sprint Planning

How to Break a User Story into Tasks

One of the vaguest aspects of Scrum is breaking stories into tasks, which is done in (the second half of) the Sprint Planning. Most of the questions I get when training or coaching boil down to one question: “How do I break a user story into tasks”?

Defining The Problem

My favorite definition for a user story is that it is a thin, vertical slice of functionality, describing a small increment in value to the user (or customer).

A task, on the other hand is a step taken by the development team, required to fulfill the requirements of the user story. I further like to define, as a rule of thumb, that a task should take half a day to 2 days to complete.

The question therefore should be what are the steps the team needs to take for the story to be considered complete?

Look at Your Architecture

Explicitly or implicitly, your project has an architecture. It might be anything from a master piece drawn out in painstaking elaboration by a the architecture team, to a high-level conceptual architecture diagram. You should look at the components in your system, and ask your self which components do you need to modify (or add) for the story.

For example, Let’s say that we have a product that is a social networking web site of some sorts. given a story such as In order to broaden my network, as a user, I want to be able to import contacts from Gmail. Looking at a typical architecture for such a product, my tasks could be something like:

• Add a new Import Contacts page
• Add a service to get contacts from Gmail
• Modify the contact class to accommodate Gmail specific data (let’s assume such exists)
• Modify the contacts data schema

Assuming these tasks are right-sized (4-16 hours), that’s it. If one of these tasks is bigger, break it down. If a task is smaller, merge it with a related one (if such exists. If not, don’t sweat it. My 4-16 rule is just a guideline). We now have all the tasks for us to complete the coding of the story.

Look at the Definition of Done

Of course, just coding your story isn’t sufficient for the story to be truly done. In Scrum, “done” means ready to ship, or as I like to define it: the story is as it will be received by the customer / user. Agile teams have a list of requirements that should  be true for any story they complete. You should look at your Definition of Done (DoD) to see what tasks remain.

For example, let’s say your DoD includes the following:

• Code Complete
• Automated UAT (User Acceptance Tests)
• Documentation is updated
• Added to shipping package (e.g. InstallShield)

In this case, you should add tasks that help you achieve the story’s DoD. For the above example you might do the following:

• Write UATs for the story
• Document the Contacts Import feature

Assuming you didn’t have to add any new assemblies (i.e. libraries, packages, DLLs, executables, etc.), to your installation, you probably wouldn’t have any need to modify your packaging tool. No need to add a task for that.

That’s It!

You now have 6 tasks for the story:

• Add a new Import Contacts page
• Add a service to get contacts from Gmail
• Modify the contact class to accommodate Gmail specific data (let’s assume such exists)
• Modify the contacts data schema

• Write UATs for the story
• Document the Contacts Import feature

You can now estimate how much time each one will take, and are ready to move on, and break down the next story.

Technorati Tags: Agile,Scrum,Tasks,Sprint Planning,User Story,Definition of Done