In a great blog post from Coding Epiphany from 2015, cross functional Scrum Teams were compared to RPG parties, mainly focused team makeup, skill specialization versus crossing roles and forming a team as you go. It’s awesome and nerdy. I had a similar idea, but instead of that comparison, I wanted to compare a Scrum Team to Team Mechanics from online gaming, mainly MMORPG or maybe some team based shooters. Continue reading
Agile
The Case for Dedicated Scrum Masters
“All our Scrum Master, Bob, does is sit around all sprint. I mean, he’s there for our Daily Scrums, and Sprint Planning. He goes to our Sprint Review and watches the stakeholders, and he asks a lot of questions in our Retrospectives, but what does he do the rest of the time? It’s not like he’s writing code…”
Have you heard something similar to that before? Maybe even said it yourself? It’s a pretty common refrain, and one of the driving forces behind the idea that we can have part time Scrum Masters, and still be as effective as we think we should be. Continue reading
Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto – Part 1: Satisfaction, Changes and Frequency
Hello everyone! I’m back with another installment in my Back to Basics series. If this is your first look at the Back to Basics posts, or want a general overview of the Agile Manifesto and its principles, please check this post. This time, I’ll be talking about the first three principles listed, which will likely make this a series of four posts, covering a few principles each time.
Customer Satisfaction
Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
Well that’s a good way to start. We’ve already identified the most important thing, no matter what you’re making, building, or doing: Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, what your job title is, or who you report to. Every job, position, project or undertaking has a purpose behind it, and generally that purpose is to help someone. That someone is your customer. If your highest priority isn’t to satisfy that person, someone else will. Of course this principle also goes into how we can provide satisfaction: early and continuous delivery of value. Even if you’re not in software, this can still apply. Instead of holding all the value until you have a “complete product”, deliver working pieces of the product as soon as possible to ensure the customer is on the road towards satisfaction, then continue to deliver to keep that relationship positive.
Change is Power
Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
This ties right back into the first principle. If we want to satisfy our customer, then if the customer needs something to change, we must make adjustments. Regardless of how good a plan one has, or how long you’ve followed it, the plan is not valuable if it does not represent true value in the present. If your requirements seem to be fine, but then a sinkhole opens in front of you, are you going to change your plan, or jump right into the hole? This seems simple, but changing momentum is hard, and having the courage to do so is even harder! Those who can harness change, however, will find greater satisfaction with the product, knowing that the best product possible was delivered.
High Frequency
Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
Once again, we’re tying right back into principle numero uno here. Deliver early. Deliver often. The shorter the time between delivery points, the more likely you will be to know what your customer needs. If you’re on the right track, they’ll be happy. If you’re not, you’ll change, and then they’ll be happy. Some Agile teams deliver value so often, they are continuously integrating new features, taking even less than one day to complete and deliver a feature!
In Summary
The first 3 principles of the Agile Manifesto focus on delivering value and increasing customer satisfaction. By delivering early, often and frequently, and by allowing requirements to change whenever it is needed, we can ensure we deliver the most valuable product to our customers, thereby increasing the customers’ satisfaction! Happy customers make for happy workers!
Thanks for reading, more will be on the way soon. Please feel free to leave comments below!
Responding to Change: If You See An Iceberg, Change Course! Agile Manifesto Value #4
Welcome back to my continuing Back to Basics series. This time I’ll be covering Responding to Change: Agile Manifesto Value #4. If this is your first look at the Back to Basics posts, or want a general overview of the Agile Manifesto and its principles, please check this post.
Harnessing the Power of Change
In the last post, I talked about the need for collaboration with customers, and how original, fixed contacts stifled flexibility. This is the flexibility I was talking about. As you collaborate with your customers and get their feedback, you will learn things. Sometimes you’ll make small adjustments, but sometimes you’ll find things that require a major change of course. It seems silly, but often people can see danger coming, yet refuse to change course. Not in Agile. When we see an iceberg, we alter course, and we check course often enough, that even if we do crash, hopefully we can correct instead of sinking.
Everybody’s Got a Plan Until They Get Punched In The Mouth
Like Iron Mike said, everybody makes a plan. However, most plans fall apart as soon as they hit adversity. Even if you try to plan for adversity, you’re going to get hit with something you didn’t expect. So why do we even value planning at all? Well as Dwight D. Eisenhower put it “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” We plan so we know what parts of the plan can change, and what this will effect. If we don’t plan, we don’t know what’s coming. We have to make a plan, knowing it will change.
Not Just For The Software
More than any of the other values, this one applies more than just the software being created. Being Agile means we need to identify not only changes in plans for software, but for plans in how we work as well. Setting up a team is an act of planning. We plan for these people to work together on projects. Are we just going to stop if one team member gets a new job and moves on? As we identify things need to change in the business, we respond by working to ensure these roadblocks are removed. If we stick to the plan, indulging in the “that’s the way we always do it” mentality, we do ourselves a disservice continuing to do things we know are wrong. Again, it seems like common sense when we say it out loud, but its surprising just how willing we all are to stick to the plan even when we know its wrong. I could continue to write about that, but there’s no way I could do it better than the book “Who Moved My Cheese” by Dr. Spencer Johnson. I won’t tell you that you have to read it, but I highly recommend it.
Summing It Up
In Agile, we value responding to change when we find we need it. We value plans, but more for the act of planning then the actual plan that was produced. We must always be vigilant that we do not stick to plans just for the sake of the plan.
Did you plan to leave a comment? Respond to more than just change below! Thanks for reading!
Customer Collaboration: No Magic 8 Balls Here? Agile Manifesto Value #3
Welcome back to my continuing Back to Basics series. This time I’ll be covering Customer Collaboration: Agile Manifesto Value #3. If this is your first look at the Back to Basics posts, or want a general overview of the Agile Manifesto and its principles, please check this post.
Nostradamus Doesn’t Work Here
There is a shortage of functioning crystal balls in the world, and most fortune tellers are more concerned with your love line and your lucky numbers, not telling you what software will work for you once it’s built. When we talk about customer collaboration, we have to look once again at how projects are traditionally made. With traditional software projects, it turns out you needed all of that comprehensive documentation from value number 2, because how else could you make a proposal to earn the contract for the project? Contracts needed to spell out exactly what you wanted, because you were going to give it to a company and they would take it, go away for a while, make some magic and poof, its software! I hope you and Doc Brown came back from the future knowing exactly what you need, otherwise chances are what you’ve asked for isn’t going to end up being what you need, and that’s assuming the magic men making your software are able to return exactly what you asked for with no issues.
With Agile, we value not only our own interactions like back in value 1, but interaction with the people who will be using what is being produced. We not only want to know what they think they want in the beginning, but we want to work hand in hand with users as often as possible. As we create, we constantly want customers to work with us, refining their vision of what will be useful based on what’s been created. It may so happen that with a few small changes, the customer may determine they may only need a portion of what they originally thought to meet their goals. Seems wasteful on both parties to continue at that point, doesn’t it? It may also happen that the customers are completely wrong about what they thought they wanted, or a major change in their industry completely invalidates their plans. Once again, without collaboration, they would receive (and pay for!) something completely worthless.
New Types of Contracts
We obviously still value contracts. After all, from the developer point of view, we want to know we’ll get paid, and how much. However, we now value new types of contracts, which allow flexibility and collaboration to ensure useful software is created and time is used efficiently. Contracts based on time and materials, flexible contracts with out clauses, and contacts based on incremental delivery are just some of the new forms of contracts that have come out of the Agile movement.
Summing It Up
Working software is only half the battle. Working software that doesn’t do what’s needed is less than useless, it is costly and wasteful. Comprehensive contacts are far more likely to produce software that doesn’t do what’s needed.
Working Software: Much Better Than Software In Paperwork. Agile Manifesto Value #2
Welcome back to my continuing Back to Basics series. This time I’ll be covering Working Software: Agile Manifesto Value #2. If this is your first look at the Back to Basics posts, or want a general overview of the Agile Manifesto and its principles, please check this post.
Working Software: Just As Simple As It Sounds
In Agile, we value working software. That sounds like a no-brainer, right? Who doesn’t value working software? Taken out of context, this doesn’t really tell us much. So lets contextualize it. If we value working software, then we infer that we do not value software that doesn’t work. Taken to its logical conclusion, software is only valuable once it works, or in other words, once it can be used.
Now to the layperson, you might be tempted to take that to mean that software is only valuable once every single feature is complete. After all, how can you use software that’s not complete? Let’s examine that. Take your favorite piece of software. For our example, let take a word processor like Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word has loads and loads of features, some you might not even know existed (for example, Word can convert a table to a graph without any external software. Who needs Excel?). How many of those features do you actually use when you’re writing a document? Could Word be valuable, even if all you could do is type words, or type words and print? Sure it could, that’s why Notepad exists.
So what is “Non-Working” Software? Well, that’s a little bit harder of a concept. After all, code will generally run when executed, and a database exists once you create it, right? Here’s the “Tree Falling in the Forest” question for that: If a database exists, but nothing is connected to it, is it really working? What is more valuable, one table connected to an input form, or 100 tables connected to each other and nothing else? All this is not even getting into testing, ensuring that your “working software” actually works like you think it should.
Comprehensive Documentation
Beyond the context I talked about above, the Agile Manifesto contextualizes this value in contrast to “Comprehensive Documentation”. Let’s examine why.
It’s important to remember that the Agile Manifesto was not created in a bubble. At first, software projects were treated like every other kind of project: write out all the requirements into “Comprehensive Documentation”, and then complete each stage of creation as a discreet step, for example design then develop then test. There was only one problem with this. It didn’t work. Development took so much time to match the features, and when it couldn’t the documentation needed to be updated. Testing got pushed so far out, there was no time to actually develop fixes for bugs. Even if you did complete all the features you documented, there’s no guarantee what you created is useful, since you took a year to finish everything. The world can change in a blink of an eye, and while you were away building all that comprehensive documentation, Google came by and already did it faster and better.
Projects do not need to be documented up front. Some projects don’t need more documentation then commented code and a list of user stories. Agile says its always better to create what you need now than what you think you need someday, and that includes documentation.
Summing It Up
With Agile, we value something tangible that works, as opposed to a theory that might work. Even if your “working software” doesn’t end up being the real solution, the sooner you find out, the better. Anything that is not real is still imagination, and its really hard to use imaginary software.
Like what I’m saying? Don’t like it at all? Leave me a (working) comment below!
Indviduals And Interactions: You Mean I Have To Talk To People? Agile Manifesto Value #1
Welcome everyone to the first in my Back to Basics series: Individuals and Interactions: Agile Manifesto Value #1. If this is your first look at the Back to Basics posts, or want a general overview of the Agile Manifesto and its principles, please check this post.
Individuals
It’s easy to look at a company/department/team as a box or machine. You input the instructions and materials(most often money) and out comes a product. Of course, this is not really the case. What ever this group is, it is made up of individuals. With Agile, we value each individual for all of their real and potential contributions. Without the individuals, the group does not exist, and nothing can happen. Humans are not resources, and shouldn’t be treated as such. However, individuals working alone can only get you so far, which leads to…
Interactions
Interactions are fun. Much like chemical reactions, we take individuals, and mix them together. The results can be mundane, or they can be amazing, or even explosive! This stems from a single idea: communication is the key to success. The frequency and value of interactions and communication between individuals determines just how good any output from said individuals will be. If your people don’t interact, then no reactions can take place. If people do interact, then as with chemistry, the whole can become much more than only the sum of its parts.
Interaction Killers: Processes, Tools and the Oxymoron of “Agile Processes”
So if we value the interaction of individuals, what does that have to do with processes and tools, and why do we value them less? First off, let’s be clear: there is still value in processes, and there is still value in tools. However, when processes and tools interfere with individuals interacting, the processes and tools lose their value. Let’s take some concrete examples. Jira, RallyOn and the like are great tools. Many an Agile team have used them to great success. However, if a team were to allow these tools to interfere with interactions, say by using task tracking in place of speaking face to face, the tool looses its value. Strictly defined processes, the cornerstone of the Waterfall SDLC, can destroy interaction, as we continue to act on others instead of interacting together.
So what is an Agile Process? I’ve seen it stated that there are no “Agile Processes”, only Agile teams and the environment for the Agile team to be Agile. I believe that teams will come up with their own processes internally, and if done with an Agile mindset, these processes will define how that team is Agile. There is no one size fits all process that will make a team Agile. Even Scrum, the most popular incarnation of Agile in software, is just a framework. It’s a restrictive framework which enforces the values of Agile (including Individuals and Interactions), but the processes the team comes up with to be Agile are their own.
Summing it up
Agile values the interactions of individuals over anything that will cause interactions to be interfered with. There are great tools and processes out there, but if they interfere with people working together as a team and interacting, they can be damaging.
Want to interact with me? I welcome your feedback. Leave me a comment!
Back to Basics: The Agile Manifesto and The Principles Therein
OK, so I’ve been doing this blog thing for about a week now. I’d say it has gone pretty well. I’ve got a few posts under my belt and even gotten a bit of positive feedback. So I figure now is as good a time as any to go back to basics and perform what is probably a rite of passage for all Agile blogs: covering the Agile Manifesto and its 12 guiding principles, while remixing it a bit with my own input, anecdotes and opinions. Well, maybe it’s not a rite of passage, but let’s do it anyways.
Over the next, oh let’s say 1 or 2 weeks, I’ll make a series of posts about each of the value areas of the Agile Manifesto, and each of the guiding principles of Agile. But before we get into the nitty gritty, lets look ahead to where we’re going, and take a look at the values and principles of Agile, all courtesy of The Agile Manifesto.
Values
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a planThat is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.
A pretty clear list, if I do say so. One important thing to note, is that the existence of value in all of these items is not disputed. There is value in everything on the right, but the items on the left will be more valuable. We’ll get into why as examine each item more in depth in it’s own post.
Principles
Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
Working software is the primary measure of progress. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
Well, that is quite a list. Each item is a powerful statement in and of itself, many with multiple nuances leading to different practical applications within the Agile world.
This will be a lot of ground to cover, so stay tuned and stay patient, and thanks for reading!
Coming up next: Individuals and Interactions
Paint the Fence, Daniel-San: Thin Vertical Slices and the Economy of Movement
I’m not the first person to equate Mr. Miyagi’s method of teaching Karate in “The Karate Kid” to Agile. Jeff Gothelf equated Miyagi’s use of rote repetition and skill mastery to Agile and Lean UX. Ed Wong gave a talk to his Scrum User Group about how the learning from an expert is very similar, whether its Scrum or Karate. I’m sure there are many more out there. Continuing on that thread, I’d like to look at this in the context of story splitting, different methods of ‘painting the fence’ and how rote repetition can allow us to improve our skills and apply them in new and unfamiliar ways.
In this particular example, the fence is a section of our project. It’s clearly defined, relatively uniform, and can be painted with many different methods. Each board in the fence is a feature.
I’m not very good at art…
If we were painting via waterfall, we’d be painting horizontally, applying changes across multiple features. We would get a certain distance, and then need to come back, painting more parts of these features,
Look at how much work has been done here, and nothing is even halfway complete. Some planks couldn’t be painted in the same way, since they weren’t uniform. What happens if we want to change colors? Or pull out some fence posts? We might have a vague idea of what a finished product will look like, but nothing concrete. All of these features are linked now, to finish, we really have to finish them all. We might have saved a little energy by not having to switch levels as often (front end, back end, database, etc.), but we wasted a lot more going forward on features, then going back and touching all those features again.
On the other hand, lets take a look at the way Agile would have us do it, in thin, vertical pieces, or in our examples, plank by plank.
Here we see each plank completed on its own. Irregularities in size or composition no longer create issues. We can see what a completed post looks like, and extrapolate what the fence may look like once complete. If we decide to make changes, it is easier to adjust or remove completed work, while maintaining uniformity. We may move up and down more often, but we complete more often, and we reach more natural stopping points to review our work. As our muscles(skills) in this area improve, we become more efficient at this vertical movement, needing to expend less energy to do so. The smaller the slice, the less energy we have to expend to complete it.
Once we are efficient at doing so we can then apply these skills to other areas, even areas which are unknown to us. Just like when Mr. Miyagi had Daniel apply his fence painting skills to blocking, we can now look at a new project, find the features and apply all of those now-engrained skills, and flex our agile muscles. You can also begin to work on new skills, such as refactoring and communication or punching and crane kicks.
So get out there, and paint those fences!
The Agile Master
Catchy? No, I’m not proclaiming myself a master at Agile… actually I wanted to pose a question. In Scrum, there is a role called the “Scrum Master”. It’s very unique, and it speaks to what that person is all about. They will (in a manner of speaking) master the Scrum. Not the Scrum Team, but the Scrum itself. They facilitate, lead, coach, and in general do what needs to be done to facilitate the Scrum for their team, so that the team can focus on delivering value.
However, once you get outside of Scrum, does that person disappear? Just because you’re running some other Agile flavor like Crystal or Lean Software Development (maybe supplemented using Kanban to control work-in-progress) on a DevOps team, does the need for a “Scrum Master”-like person disappear? The most common title I’ve seen is the “Agile Coach”, which is a great title as well. One of my favorite books (indeed, my coaching bible) is Lyssa Adkins’ Coaching Agile Teams which uses Agile Coach as the title of this role. However to me, “Agile Coach” can be both too narrow and too broad of a description or role. If only interacting with a team, this person does far more than coach. Like the Scrum Master above, this person will not only coach and teach, but facilitate, remove impediments, resolve conflicts, and solve problems. On the other hand, I’ve seen Agile Coach thought of and described as a coach/mentor for a group of “Scrum Master” like people, be they actual Scrum Masters on Scrum teams, or other such facilitators.
There is a distinct difference which seems to go unaddressed. Scrum Alliance makes a distinction between the Scrum Master/Scrum Professional level and Scrum Coach/Scrum Trainer level of certifications. Scrum.org does not, but they do make a distinction for experts which they list on their site. Agile as a discipline at large does not seem to do so. Scrum Master sounds focused, Agile Coach is kinda nebulous, and doesn’t speak to your team’s discipline.
Maybe we can just add “Master” to the flavor of agile your team most closely resembles? That sounds fun!
- The XP Master! World of Warcraft here I come! Or, a Windows guru from last decade.
- The Lean Master! I can lean at any angle! 30 degrees, 32 degrees, you name it! (OK I know it’s supposed to be bend, bite my shiny, metal… ahem.)
- The Crystal Master! New age hippy, or reject boss from the Legend of Zelda series?
- The Agile Master! I don’t know, sounds like it outranks a mere Coach…
At the end of the day, it doesn’t really amount to much, mostly semantics and curiosity. As with many things, I don’t know the answer, I just pose the questions. What do you think? Leave me some comments!
The Zangile Manifesto 