On Responsive Development

Statistical Large Scale Planning

2009/09/07 in Agile | No comments

In larger organistations it seems more difficult to get acceptance for the agile estimation and planning. By agile estimation and planning I mean measuring velocity of a team and using burndowns or other methods to forecast finished stories or functions at the time of the deadline. There are many good places, blogs and books to read about this.

This reluctance is probably related to the larger number of people focused on the number crunching of traditional resource allocation and planning, but also because the size of features are bigger.

Traditionally we have always hoped there was a way to find the “true” and absolute cost of some development early. Usually the thinking goes along the lines of thinking and planning really long and hard. That will never happen… and we know that more thinking will not help. Those that get their initial estimates fairly right is using statistics to adjust them over time to match historical observable data. Some companies actually collect data about the relation between some initial estimate and the “real” number of worked hours. Let’s call this the estimation factor.

This factor is based on statistical, empirical evidence, and includes any and all effects that influence the “real” outcome: de-scoping, requirements creep, features not realized up-front, difference in skills etc. All which are normal effects in any development and should be expected. In any particular case the factor may be off by a mile, but overall it will even itself out. That’s what statistics is about.

However, statistics only work if you measure the same way every time. If you re-estimate in the middle of development, you can’t reliably use the same estimation factor, because you are not in the same position as when you first estimated. You have more knowledge about the actual required functionality, its complexity and some of the work has already been done, possibly with de-scoping and just realized required additions thrown in.

So if you mix and match these numbers and throw in some “converted agile estimate” too, you will get a number which will tell you nothing.

Actually, the estimation factor, if used correctly, is exactly what the team velocity is: a factor between some guestimated effort (points) and some empirical data (points per iteration) that can, if used correctly, help you to forecast future outcome. The estimation factor is on large objects like features and whole departments, the team velocity is on stories and a single team.

I am not a beliver in converting team velocity to hours, and I am sure that planning and follow-up could be extremly simplified (and de-mystified if some agile techniques where applied. Agile is about making things simpler, not more complicated.

Plan Well

2009/08/31 in Agile | No comments

I don’t consider myself a Toyota/Lean-expert, but there is an interesting saying that I have heard is used within Lean, “Plan Well to Execute Fast”. And that might sound very much like BD/PUF (Big Design/Planning Up-Front, if you didn’t get that…). Empire State Building Steel Delivery Schedule

But isn’t this exactly what the Agile and Lean techniques are trying to help us with? We plan the days work carefully in the daily meeting, in the iteration planning we plan the content and do the design necessary to execute the stories fast.

I consider the view that you should plan before you do to be embraced by most people. If you do this you can focus on smaller pieces at the time and get more focused and efficient. The parallel with personal productivity techniques like Pomodoro and GTD are, to me, obvious.

“Waterfall” is a, failing, attempt to do the same thing. But it is not always easy (or good) to break down a complete project to tasks small enough that people can focus on them, particularly if you are not knowledgeable in the area (as the case usually is for a specialist in project planning). So “Plan Well” has been become one big plan/design/do-anything-as-long-as-it-is-not-real-work-phase before the real work can start. And for some areas it might still be necessary to do, if you are building a new factory plant for example.

But the trend seems to be clearly visible, that in many areas, the insight is spreading. It is possible, and often even very benefitial, to plan and design, and execute, a much smaller part of the work at a time. More opportunities to do it present themselves if you focus on a small change in the “product” that you are changing, instead of on the task and the “human resource” allocation. There are examples in building construction (all the way back to the early skyscrapers, picture is the steel delivery schedule of Empire State Building, with floors on the vertical axis), road and bridge construction, budgeting as well as in systems- and software development.

Companies and people that will not get this shift will be stuck in “waterfall”, “command and control” and “human resource allocation”, miss out on the financial survival advantages, and, like the dinosaurs, soon become extinct.

XP2009 Coaching Workshop Summary

2009/05/30 in Agile, Organisation | No comments

XP2009 was a nice experience. The Flamingo Hotel outside Pula in Sardinia might not have been on par with a normal Scandinavian hotel when it comes to Internet Access, hot water, and definitely not on par with Italian restaurants when it comes to food. But as usual the people visiting (139) are exceptionally experienced, nice and willing to share and contribute.

My workshop ran on Monday afternoon as planned with dozen+ people. The workshop was presented in the program with its initial title and description, so me acting on the workshop commitees feedback never made it to the actual program. But me and Andreas ran it using staying on the topic listed in the program, “Coaching Agile in Large Scale Development” as well as the ideas and discussion topics of the participants. Jutta Eckstein participated and contributed much of her extensive experience.

Jutta proposed a discussion around “Creating a Agile Community”, supposedly as a means to inject Agile thinking and that way creating or sustaining an Agile Transition. This actually became the most important topic and after extensive discussions about what a community actually is and how to create a special one on Agile topics, we actually concluded two important things:

First, don’t try to create a new Agile community to initiate change. A new community is hard to start, and you will get limited leverage by talking to believers. Instead find the communities that already exist, and there probably are a lot already. A community is a set of people with some relation to each other, for example that they share some interest; the development team, the lunch buddies, the java experts, the sci-fi readers and the art club. Not everyone of these can be leveraged for an agile transition, but you could probably find something from the agile toolset or value base that you (or someone) can inject in most of them. But you probably shouldn’t advocate agile as such in each and every one, but stay on the topic of the network, for example talk about jUnit and how to leverage that on the Java Expert Community. And of course we talked about using the techniques from “Fearless Change” by Linda Rising and Mary Lynn Manns.

Secondly, try to create a new Agile community, but not to initiate change. Use it to make sure that the belivers, the coaches and the change agents have somewhere to draw strenght and inspiration from. Change isn’t easy so the people that try to sustain change need every piece of support they can get.

Coin Sorting with a Twist

2009/05/24 in Agile, Learning, Management | No comments

pile_of_swedish_coins500x750 I went to Budapest last week to do a workshop with the local management team of one of my customers. The goal was to talk to them about how they could move into the agile way of working. This was triggered by a move of some substantial product development from Sweden to Hungary. In Linköping, Sweden, I have been coaching a dozen teams in a transition to Agile, and I was asked to help the management to ensure that the transfer retain as much as possible of the Agile way of working that we have established.

I decided to select a few exercises, and add a set of scenarios that we could analyze together. I was hoping that the exercise would give them first hand expericene in the values of Agile and that this and the scenario analysis would spawn good discussions. And it did. Actually, I did only use one of the exercises I planned.

The exercise that I used was from Tasty Cupcakes and is about sorting coins. We use that exercise extensively in our Agile training, so I knew it would work, but I decided to add a few twists.

The exercise is to ask the group, preferably divided into teams, to estimate how long it would take them to sort a set of coins. The team with the lowest estimate actually get to do the sorting. This raises the level of competitiveness in the group.

I decided to add a “Requirements Specification” to the game. Instead of telling the team what it was about I had prepared a document stating that they would get a number of coins of various value, how high piles could be, how far apart they where allowed or required to be placed and some other facts. (An unplanned complication was that I had stated distances in millimeters and a couple in the group where actually Irish…)

So after a “pre-study” period the bidding commenced. As often happens one group had a low bid and the others said “Let them do it!”

The team were actually done on time, which is kind of a bonus. Because the kicker is that almost always the coins are sorted according to value although that has never been specified.

I think adding the written “Requirements” shows how easy we are thrown of track by something written. It’s not just the fact that written communication is narrow-band, it is also very often misleading since if someone has spent so much time writing the document, specifically if it also has been reviewed and approved, the truth must actually be in there somewhere. And everything in it must be equally important, right?

Of course, the 10,000$ question that someone should ask is how you actually want them sorted. (Occasionally this question is actually put during the bidding and then you can either try to be undecisive, misleading, or you can just take it from there.)

But the billion dollar question that I really want to hear is “Why do you want them sorted?” I had prepared an answer: I want to be able to sell piles of coins as birthday presents so all the coins should be from their birthyear. I hope that I will someday do this exercise and have to use this answer.

By the way, at the end of the workshop one of the managers said “So I think we cannot wait for the transfer to be done and then start becoming Agile, we must do this now”.

Workshop on XP2009

2009/04/30 in Agile | No comments

I will host a workshop at XP2009 in Sardinia, Italy, titled Agile in Large-Scale Development Workshop : Coaching, Transitioning and Practicing. At least that is the title in the proceedings, in the conference program it still goes under the proposed name of Coaching Agile in Large Organisations. The format will be lightning speeches and Open Space to enable listening, sharing and networking early on in the conference. The Agile Café of XP2007 was a great idea, perhaps we could build on that.

The Story on Velocity

2008/11/20 in Agile, Management, Retrospect | 2 comments

Chances are that you are calculating your Velocity the wrong way! The Velocity is the speed with which a team can deliver new, valuable, finished and tested features to stakeholders. This blog is about why the common way to handle estimates and planning does not give you that. And how applying a Lean view on the matter can show your real Velocity.

Background

Agile Estimation and Planning relies heavily on Velocity and Relative Estimates. They are all based on the concept of Story Points, a relative estimate of the effort it takes to implement the functionality of Story.

The Velocity is the rate with which a development team delivers working, tested, finished functionality to stakeholders. In the best of worlds this is the customer or user directly, however, in many cases there are still some separate testing activities carried out before this actually happens.

To calculate Velocity we cannot estimate in hours or days, because that would make Velocity a unitless factor (hours divided by hours). It is common estimate in Story Points, where User Stories are compared to each other and some known story as the prototype story to compare to. The idea is to decouple effort from time and instead base future commitments on empirical measurements of past effort executed per time/iteration.

The Stories are found in the prioritized list of Stories to be implemented (what Scrum calls the Product Backlog). The Product Owner should prioritize in which order the wanted features should be implemented.

Signs of Debt

Technical Debt is a term, alluding to the financial world, describing a situation where shortcuts have previously been made in development. In some future situation this will cost more effort, like bug fixes, rewrites or implementation of automated test cases. In situations where an existing organisation is transitioning to Agile there is usually a substantial Technical Debt that needs to be repaid. This is often signaled by

the team struggles to find ways to handle trouble reports
rewrites, often incorrectly labelled “refactorings”, are listed in the Product Backlog

The Trouble with Trouble Reports

Of course Trouble Reports need to be addressed as soon as possible. But in a legacy situation many Trouble Reports are found in the late stages of integration and verification, which can be months after that development was “finished”. The development team has moved on or even been replaced. So many of the Trouble Reports must first to be analysed before a correction can even be attempted. This makes them impossible to estimate. So putting them in the Product Backlog can only be done after the solution, and an estimate, is known.

A technique I recommend is to reserve a fixed amount of resources for this analysis. This limits the amount of work for Trouble Report analysis to a known amount. The method of reservation can vary from a number of named persons per week/day, a specific TR-day in the sprint or just the gut feeling of the team. The point is that the team now knows how much of their resources can go into working of the backlog. And adjustments can easily be made after a retrospective and based on empirical data.

This technique has a number of merits:

known and maximized decrease in resources
only estimatable items go in the backlog
all developers get to see where Troble Reports come from
team members are relieved from stress caused by split focus (“fix TR:s while really trying to get Stories done”)

Once a solution has been found the Trouble Report can be put in the backlog for estimation and sprint planning. (But the fix is often simple, once found, so a team might opt to not put the fix in the Product Backlog. Instead the fix itself can also be made as part of the reserved Trouble Report resource box. This avoids the extra administration and lead time.)

But, if the Trouble Reports are put on the Backlog and estimated as normal stories, we give Velocity points to non-value-adding work items!

Rewrites are Pointless

A system with high technical debt might need a rewrite of some parts. More often than not, these has been known for some time but always get low priority from project/product managers. And rightly so, they do not add any business value.

They still need to be done, though. The technical debt need to be repaid. So, what to do?

First I usually ask the developers if the suggested rewrite really is the smallest step to improving the situation? Often I find that if I push sufficiently hard, they can back down a bit and a smaller improvement presents themselves. This is good news since the smaller improvement is easier to get acceptance for. And once they are small enough, they can be kept below the radar of the PO.

If the rewrites are indeed put on the Backlog and estimated as normal stories, we give Velocity points to non-value-adding work items!

The Point of the Story

And this brings me to the core of this blog entry. Trouble reports and rewrites are things that need to be done, but a product owner should never need to see them. The team should be able to address these issues by themselves. They should be delivering working, tested, valuable software. The Product Owner should prioritize the new features.

This indicates that neither rewrites nor Trouble Reports should go into the Product Backlog.

How would a team know what to commit to then? Well, the (smaller) rewrites and the trouble reports (if put in the backlog) need to be estimated. We could do that the same way as previously. But there should be no points earned for these items.

What would this strategy mean then?

The Product Backlog should not contain Trouble Reports or rewrite “stories”
The Team should include a limited amount of necessary non-value-adding items in the iteration
The Team needs to estimate non-value-adding items
The Team commit to a number of points including non-value-adding items
The Team Speed is calculated from all Done Done items
The Velocity is calculated only from value-adding stories

With this technique you will probably see an increase in Velocity as your Technical Debt is repaid. Something which I find very Lean.

The Real Velocity

The only Velocity that is really worth measuring is the speed at which a team can add business value. Then we need to make a difference between value adding work and extra work disguised as such.

Names of tests

2008/10/09 in Agile, Testing | No comments

At my new customer there are a number of various types of testing, BT, BIT, FIT, EST, FT, ST etc. etc. You can imaging how hard it can be to get a grip on what all those acronyms actually mean. And more than that, even if you can decipher the acronyms, what to they really mean? Is Basic Integration Test “basic” with respect to what is integrated or does it imply that there is only some basic tests run? System Test is testing which system?

As we are introducing Agile techniques here, many people are asking me what is the difference between “acceptance test” and xT? (Where x can be almost any combination of letters…)

In my mind there are only two levels of tests: unit tests and functional tests.

We all know what a Unit Test is, a test verifying that the implementation of a small software unit, usually a class, matches the expected behaviour. And it should run fast. This means that unit tests should decouple the unit from almost every other unit. However we may define a unit to be some small set of classes that interacts, but a unit could never include a database or the network. (As we all know, in the “real world” we need to make compromises all the time…)

A Functional Test is a test that verifies some function of the product from a user/customer perspective. It should demonstrate some Customer Benefit. (This is probably not the only definition of “Functional Test” that exists, but I reused it instead of trying to invent another name for tests…)

But the funny thing is that Functional Tests are Acceptance Tests. At least until we are confident that the functionality is actually implemented. Then they becomes a Regression Tests. And running such tests for functionalities that require other applications makes them Integration Tests? And if we run the same tests in an environment simulating a real environment, then they become System Tests!

So there are at least two dimensions when we are talking about Tests. One is on granularity, units or the whole as percieved by some user. The other is in which environment and for which purpose are we running the tests. I find it helpful to talk about Tests when I talk about test cases, either or unit or functional level, and Testing when I talk about the environment and purpose running some tests.

So in Implementation Testing we usually run all Unit Tests and all Automated Functional Tests, typically using Continuous Integration in a development environment. The purpose is to catch errors in logic, setup and data.

System Testing is about running Functional Tests in an environment as close to a real environment as possible. Usually your application is not the only one which is exercised at the same time.

Performance Testing is about running many Functional Test at the same time to find performance bottle necks and errors caused by limited resources etc.

Its all in the name.

Tags: Testing

Measuring Business Value

2008/09/11 in Agile, Management, Measurements | No comments

Measurements is a two edged sword. On one hand you cannot see and compare something that you have not measured. One the other hand there are evidence that it generates dysfunction. Conciuosly or unconciously we tweak our ways to get good numbers. We all know and love the story about the development organisation that was to be measured on the number of comment lines in production code. The tool to insert the correct number of comment lines was available just a few days later.

We need to measure, but most organizations seem to measure the wrong things. I think Systems Thinking and Lean can teach us a bit about how to measure in a meaningful manner. Systems Thinking (and Gödel for that matter) keep pointing “one level up”, i.e. don’t measure inside the system, instead measure the system.

Lean (and Scrum and XP) indicates in various ways that we should prioritize according to business value which seems like a good proposition. So I try to convince managers in my client organizations to measure flow of value through the development organization, and as Lean puts it, measure the whole. (Which in itself can be hard, but at least it is not only the development team!)

However, the notion of business value is a fluffy one. And it is usually very hard to get anyone to assign dollars and cents to a customer request in the general case. (Unless you’re a contract developer, when it’s kind of easy, but probably wrong!)

So what I am trying now is to use business value points. In the same way as Story Points work for effort estimation, Business Value Points can be used to let marketing people, business analysts etc. assign relative values to requirements or features.

One complexity still left to address is the fact that at early stages requirements etc. are fairly large and later broken down and re-prioritized. This means that a complete “requirement” is seldom delivered. So the Business Value Points needs somehow to be split when a requirement is split into Epics and Stories.

But if we could measure the flow of value we can also optimize the whole and avoid sub-optimization and measurement value tweaking.

Agile Anti-Pattern: Over-Generalisation

2008/09/02 in Agile, Agile Anti-Patterns | No comments

This is the first in a series of posts in which I will try to collect my view of problems in introducing Agile techniques in an organisation, forces that work against Agile and traps that are just waiting to catch the unwary agile practitioner.

Slogan

Generalization makes useless

Applies to

With the obvious risk of falling into the Agile Anti-Pattern: Over-Generalization this Anti-Pattern can apply to many different types of items:

Goals
Definitions of terms
Requirements
Plans
Stories
Definition of Done
Tasks
Implementation

Examples

Programmers often feel a need to write robust source code. If the exact circumstances in which the code will be executed is not explicitly stated, it is tempting to generalise, second-guessing any future and currently unknown situations.

Exactly the same thing might happen for requirements. A stakeholder might be very broad in his description of the need. But it must be broken down into more and more concrete examples. We know that “The system must react fast to any user input …” is not a requirement usable for development. It might be usable for validation in system test though, because it is a value articulated by the users, and as such can be subjectively validated. But it does not give the concrete information to know when it is actually done.

Over-Generalization in definitions of terms is also common. I have seen it often in planning of business change programs. Particularly in large organizations, where there are many different types of products, situations and projects, definitions of practices easily becomes to generalised to be useful.

For example, in a transition to Agile, the practice “Continuous Integration” might be taken to mean

all tests and integrations are automated
there are no manual tests
system tests are done automatically

… and more. It is not that these goals are bad, in fact they are excellent. But at the core “Continuous Integration” probably means something like “giving programmers concrete feed-back of every change as soon as possible by running builds of as large part of the whole product as possible and as large set of tests as possible as soon as possible after every change to any part of the source code”. As for any change that is to be implemented we need to know exactly what we are trying to implement.

Often people want to include their particular situation, need or interpretation into a definition. The mostly generates bloat. This might also be one of the causes of “requirements creep”.

If a definition is taken to encompass everything related, the definition becomes useless.

Remedy

The best way to handle Generalisation is of course to break down to concrete or less general items. For source code this is already addressed in Agile software development techniques. As the saying goes, don’t implement anything that the current set of tests doesn’t require. This makes us do the simplest thing that could possibly work. This is good advice in any circumstance, and at the core of Agile.

However, sometimes this is not accepted by some of the people involved or affected. A common pattern to this resistance to simply is that it could be perceived as making one persons particular definition or need out of scope. One technique here is to separate that particular part of the definition out into a separate item. It is important not let this come across as removing it, particularly to infer less value in it. This way it is usually possible to get a concensus on a set of tighter, more concrete, items.

Once a set of more concrete items has been agreed upon, a prioritisation process can commence. So it is important to have this prioritization step when handling all types of items. This separates the assignment of importance from the concretisation.

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Statistical Large Scale Planning

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