Agile Advice

September 24, 2007

Agile Benefits: Five Essential Reasons to Try Agile

Although there many other benefits of agile, and although those provide us with other reasons to try agile, the five essential benefits of agile are:

Rapid Learning - disciplined application of the scientific method to explore the best ways to deliver valuable results.

Early Return on Investment - opportunity to use the results of work starting with the work delivered at the end of the first iteration.

Satisfied Stakeholders - engagement in the process in a way that allows meaningful contributions from all stakeholders.

Increased Control - mechanisms to track/measure and therefore steer the direction that work is going so that it meets goals.

Responsiveness to Change - processes, tools, roles and principles that allow a team and an organization to embrace change rather than reject, control or suffer from change.

These reasons are sufficient and apply to operations work, project work and open-ended research work, whenever humans are involved. The above links take you to more detailed descriptions of each of these benefits.

What are some of the other benefits of agile?

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 10:47 PM | |

January 27, 2007

The Freedom of Limited Capacity

Something that I would have thought impossible has happened. By understanding how incredibly limited my capacity to do work is, I am getting a greater and greater sense of freedom and contentment.

My "experiement" to run my business using Agile Work practices is starting to bear some fruit. The trouble is, that so far, that fruit is simple better knowledge of my extremely limited capacity to get things done during a single week-long iteration. I can do 3 or 4 items from my Work Queue which works out to about 15 or 20 tasks. This seems ridiculous to me! Surely one hard-working guy can get more than that done!

But I can't. I'm getting to the end of my fourth iteration and it's the same thing again!

I know some of the reasons for this: interruptions, unexpected work, unremembered work, and my general nature of being easily distracted by shiny things!

In some ways this has been quite frustrating. I have a huge queue of work I want to get done for my business. But the other side of the coin, the one that looks different than I expected, is that knowing just how limited my capacity is... is liberating! I don't feel nearly as stressed as I did four weeks ago. I have the courage to commit at an appropriate level. I can start to believe my plans. I can see - realistically - just how much I need help to achieve my goals. I can see how soon I will be able to do cost/benefit analysis on hiring vs. doing the work myself (can't do that yet). I can even start to believe that I might be able to reach my original goal of reducing my working hours from 80+/week to 50 or less... as long as I make sure that my Work Queue is properly prioritized with that goal in mind.

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I have worked with a number of teams that have gotten to this point of certainty about their capacity. I've seen this happen in others... and now I recognize it for what it is: relief. One team I worked with after only two iterations had a very clear idea of their capacity, and you could feel the comfort level of everyone with this new agile thing skyrocket. Another team I worked with got a clear sense of its capacity after only three iterations. This team settled in and then started to work to increase their capacity and did a fabulous job by using automation tools, eliminating various organizational bottlenecks, etc. They wow'ed the rest of the organization with their incredible, consistent delivery of value. One of my former students, Dmitri Zimine, gave a presentation at the XPToronto group where he talked about the incredible level of trust that developed between his team and the rest of the organization after consistently, iteration after iteration after iteration meeting their commitments.

All of this is only possible by a rigorous application of timeboxing, careful and consistent task breakdown, and good, honest tracking of results. I wrote a previous article called Seventeen Tips for Iteration Planning. Look it over and see what new ideas you can apply in your situation. If you are frustrated by a team continually over-committing, you will find a lot of valuable advice there.

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As a parting shot: consider how you feel right now. Are you stressed out? Over committed? Failing to meet your commitments? Feeling guilty? Working insane hours? Not spending enough time with your family? Killing yourself!?

What about the team or organization you work in? Is it constantly being bombarded by problems it can't handle? Surviving on pure heroics?

I can't tell you that following a careful iterative planning approach will fix your problems... but I can tell you that it will reduce your stress levels, help you (or your organization) make appropriate commitments, and let you see the reality of your situation (good or bad).

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 03:07 AM | |

January 16, 2007

The Wisdom of Teams - Generalizing Specialists

I've almost finished reading The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization. I wanted to share a couple of paragraphs that give a great example of the idea of Generalizing Specialists that is such a key part of Agile Work. Here's the passage:

The [Connectors Team] made several decisions that solidified its common team approach and sense of mutual accountability. First, it set some rules. Everyone on the team had to identify two others who could serve as backups during vacation and sick days. To eradicate the attitude of "it's not my job" from the team, it was agreed that whenever anyone needed help, the person asked had to respond even if the activity was not in his or her area of expertise. And the team also agreed on a peer appraisal system that gave everyone the opportunity to evaluate everyone else and, through [their team leader], feed it back to the person being evaluated. Clear-cut rules of behavior like these are an important element of all successful teams.

Second, the team eliminated the two managerial positions that had retarded empowerment. This effectively modified the membership of the team because only one of the two managers whose jobs were eliminated chose to stay. The other believed he could not take a perceived demotion and left. By January 1991, however, the Connectors Team was a dramatically more effective group of people than it had been at its formation a year earlier.

Energy and enthusiasm reached higher levels as the team started pushing itself harder and in more innovative ways. One of the engineers, for example, decided to become completely qualified as a purchaser as well. Instead of being threatened, the purchasers on the team worked hard to teach her the basics of the job. The peer review approach worked so well that the team agreed on the additional - and, for many teams, difficult - step of directly providing each other feedback instead of relyinng on the team leader for this task.

There are several great points in the above story:

Backups: many agile methods do not explicity talk about this, but there is a need to make sure that the Truck Factor increases. A low truck factor can be a real problem and I strongly recommend that the Queue Master (Product Owner, Customer) in particular needs to have backup. As well, this hints at the idea that eventually the roles of Process Facilitator and Queue Master should eventually go away to be taken on by the team as a whole.

Skills: the example of the engineer learning to be a purchaser is a great example of a brave soul really taking to heart the idea of working for the good of the team by becoming a generalizing specialist. In my own coaching work, I have seen purely business-oriented Queue Masters become technical contributors to the team through a process of both deliberate and "accidental" learning. Every human being has an incredible capacity for learning. In a high-performance team, everyone takes that ability very seriously - to the point of it becoming a responsibility.

Rules: one of the simplest, yet most profound, ways that a group of people can start on the process to becoming a high-performance team is by working together to agree on some ground rules about team behavior. One team I worked with, among other rules, decided that no "stinky food" was allowed in the team room. The passage above notes the non-trivial rules. Both "trivial" and non-trivial rules are important to the team for two reasons:

1. Develop a set of expectations that individuals can hold each other to in order to avoid or deal with conflict.

2. Become aware of the team's power to set their own working conditions, independently of management or other "leadership".

Management: regrettably for most managers, in a high-performance team the value of formal, traditional management is much reduced. However, there is now an opportunity for two different types of work: the generalizing specialist work on the team, and the servant leader work of supporting the team. The servant leader is someone who is exceptionally good at problem solving, organizational change, and working through influence rather than authority.

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This book is incredible. Every time I read a few pages I think "Oh! I've got to write about that on Agile Advice!" Unfortunately if I did that, I'd be in serious copyright violation. So all I can do is encourage you to read the book.

If you have already read the book, I would love to hear your impressions, particularly if there were things about it that you really didn't like. What didn't you like and why? What are the holes in it's argument?

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 04:05 PM | |

January 15, 2007

End of Iteration 2 ("Capacity") and Start of Iteration 3 ("Automation")

This second iteration when much better than the first. I committed to an amount of work that was much closer to my real capacity, and I stayed more focused on that work. Here are the results of my demo, retrospective and planning for Iteration 3 which I am calling "Automation" for reasons which will be described below.

Demo

I committed to the following items from my Work Queue:

I also added these in the middle of the iteration (which is really a "no-no", but I did it anyway to my regret).

What did I actually get done? Here are the stats:

For Iteration 002 - "Capacity":
# Work Queue Items At Start: 5
# Work Queue Items Completed: 3
# Tasks at Start: 32
# Tasks Remaining: 17

What is scary is that my velocity is exactly the same in terms of number of tasks: I really need to start my iterations with only 15 tasks.

Anyway, what I need to do for my next iteration is schedule my "demo" with my other stakeholder (my wife Melanie). Demo'ing to myself in the wee hours of the morning is not really practical in terms of my overall goal for this project (running my business at a sustainable pace).

Retrospective

Here are the things that went well:

- Came much closer to getting everything done that was in my iteration. This was great - I continued to use Tiddly Wiki to track my Work Queue and Tasks.
- Felt less stress. Although I still worked very hard, I was not worried nearly as much about the things still on my Work Queue that weren't in this iteration. I also decided on certain boundaries to work: generally work 4 to 6 hours during the day and another few hours after lights out (usually after 11pm).
- The prioritization worked well - didn't feel impelled to do too much that was _not_ in the iteration. Althought I did take a couple more items in, it was more because of opportunity than anything else. My brother Alexei wanted to help me with my book (for example). Next time around, perhaps I should be more explicit about negotiating with myself about taking something out of the iteration if I bring something in.

Here are the things that need improvment:

- Get even better at judging capacity and committing to an appropriate amount of work. The numbers speak loudly! This next iteration I have to limit myself to 3 items from the Work Queue and about 15 tasks. I have to remind myself that I can always bring more work in if I complete my work early and I still have time.
- Care with long term scheduling - made a mistake in my scheduling with a Client - hopefully it will be okay! This is a bit of a nit, but I need to keep my daybook up-to-date even with long-term stuff.
- Spending time with my family - e.g. playing with kids, helping around house, assisting with homeschooling. This was better than I was doing in Dec., but I need to continue to improve here. I would really like to work with Justice and Haifa on learning Chinese. We've got tons of materials to do it, just need the discipline to get through it together.

Planning

Okay, maybe I'm a glutton for punishment, but I've decided on four items from my Work Queue:

Client2 Invoice
Client2 Work
Automate Listing of Scheduled Courses on 3 Sites
Client3 Statement of Account

The key one is the automation since that will be an investment to save me time later on. In my task breakdown it looks like this (tasks with an "x" are already done from the previous iteration):

So, that's 4 items from the Work Queue and 17 tasks (the ones with "--" in front of them are sub-tasks... not sure how to handle those, but for now I'm not counting them separately.

I'm really excited about this. It sucks to see that I get so little done in a single week, but on the other hand, knowing my capacity allows me to understand just how much work I have on my plate and how badly I need two things: automation and assistance! I'm going to start with automation, but I'm also looking for assistance. The trouble is that I can't affort to hire someone on a salary... (if you know anyone who would be interested in working on commission/revenue-sharing basis, I would love to talk!).

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One final note: I did manage to include my wife Melanie in my planning for this iteration. She seemed pleased :-)

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 03:09 PM | |

January 08, 2007

Planning Iteration 0002 "Capacity"

I've completed my iteration planning for my second iteration. As a reminder, I'm doing this because I want to be working only 50 hours per week by July 2007. My sole improvement item from last iteration was to use get better at committing to an amount of work within my capacity. Here's what I have planned:

I have included my complete list of work to be done broken down into tasks. It is anonymized:

Client1 Proposal Writing
- 1 day intermediate team course
- phone consult details
- QA/tools coaching
- email proposal
Client2 Invoice
- get template from them
- collect hours
- collect receipts
- image receipts
- currency convert receipts if needed
- type up hours
- type up receipts
- email/submit
Client2 work
- 4 hour task
- 4 hour task
- 4 hour task
- 4 hour task
- 4 hour task
- 4 hour task
- 4 hour task
- 4 hour task
India Training
- ping Contact1 "V"
- ping Contact2 "N"
- ping Contact3 "M"
- ping Contact4 "S"
- ping Contact5 "V"
- air reservations
- prepare visa application
- submit visa application
- hotel reservations
Client3 Statement of Account
- equipment
- invoice 1
- invoice 2

As you can see, I have committed to only five items off the Work Queue for this iteration and they add up to thirty-two tasks. This is more than I indicated last night in my retrospective results. I'm nervous about this in two ways. One, I think that I am under-committing and that I'll get into huge trouble if I don't do more than this. Two, I think that I'm over-committing and that with my brother visiting, even doing this much smaller amount of work will be challenging. Still, I have tried to make both the items from the Work Queue and the tasks smaller than in my previous iteration. I guess I'll see in a week!

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:01 AM | |

First Interation Ending

My first iteration using Agile Work for my business development has come to a close. Here is what I did for a "demo" and retrospective.

Demo

This was simple. I looked at my selected Work Queue items and my tasks and check to see what I had accomplished (finished or partially finished). Here are the statistics (grim and discouraging as they are):

For Iteration 001 - "Beginnings":
# Work Queue Items At Start: 11
# Work Queue Items Completed: 2
# Tasks at Start: 43
# Tasks Remaining: 28

From these numbers, for my next iteration I should probably be hesitant about committing to any more than 2 items from the Work Queue and any more than 15 tasks.

Considering how many work hours I have in a week, 43 tasks is absolutely ridiculous... unless they are really small, which many of them weren't. For example, I had one task as "Integrate part one of Alexei's feedback into my eBook" which when I did it actually took about three hours. Its just one sample, but 3 x 43 is 129 hours and is just not possible for a single human being in 7 days.

Aside from the value-oriented items from the Work Queue, I also did the work to finish a more complete Work Queue. It now has 37 items including those which remain un-finished from this first iteration. It is poorly prioritized, but that will improve over time. As well, I suspect there are quite a few things missing that I forgetting. I should probably get my wife, Melanie, to look over it and make some suggestions. I also have some old "to do" lists for my business which might remind me of some things to add onto it near the bottom.

Retrospective

I did a little mini-retrospective to find the three things that went well this iteration, and the three things that need improvement. I also decided on a clear action item to take to try to improve my next iteration. (Another clear reason to use Card Meeting - worked great for my retrospective :-) .)

Three Things that Went Well:
- Referred to my iteration tasks frequently. I kept my TiddlyWiki up in my browser and checked it several times a day.
- Spent time with my family and friends despite huge workload. We had guests and family visiting and I got some good time in with them. I also spent a good amount of time with Melanie and my kids. I had to make a conscious effort to do this, but since this is the goal of my using Agile Work (to have a good life/work balance), I figured I might as well start making some progress on it right away!
- Had courage to do some development work which required changes to other developers' work. I ran into a problem with some of the work I am doing as a contract. I dug around and realized that any fix I made would be felt by other parts of the codebase as API's changed. I made the fix and then tracked down the dependencies and fixed everything up. Fun!

Three Things that Need Improvement:
- Pay more attention to my schedule / calendar so as to reduce problems with work/family boundaries. Still a loooooong way to go on this one!
- Spend more work time "on-task", rather than on things not on my list. I ended up doing a bunch of work stuff that wasn't in my iteration plan. Partly I did it because I got bored of what I had planned, and partly becuase I forgot to focus on my plans. It would probably help if I had a Process Facilitator breathing down my neck :-)
- Make realistic plans given my capacity for work. This is the biggie! It is going to be very hard for me to keep to a small commitment. But considering the my brother is visiting from Beijing with his wife this week and next, I really have to try to get this right.

It is that last point that I will use as the basis for my next improvement. For my next iteration planning meeting (to be held in the morning after a far-to-brief sleep), I will commit to a maximum of 3 items from the Work Queue. This may mean breaking the items down into smaller bits. I'll talk with the Queue Master (myself) tomorrow morning about it :-)

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 04:37 AM | |

January 03, 2007

My First Challenge

Wednesday is nearly done and I'm looking at my list of tasks and cringing! I've only done a few out of the forty for this week. What's going on?!

Well, for one thing, I'm over-committed, and I know it. This is why my goal is to eventually time-box my effort to 50 hours per week. As it is, I expect I'll have a few more short nights this week in order to get even a reasonable amount of my commitment done.

Also, I've been cherry-picking. I'm doing the easy/nice/comfortable tasks first. I'm avoiding the paperwork tasks. I'm avoiding the administrative tasks. These are the ones that I hate and I always procrastinate about. (Hmm... writing this is actually procrastination too... just a few more words and then I'll get back to work.)

Finally, I've got some obstacles which I'm not sure I will overcome this iteration. First of all, I'm spending less time on work than I anticipated. Secondly, I'm getting distracted by tasks that are not directly related to my work items, but which seem to be pre-conditions. For example, I need to do a bunch of administrative follow-up for recent courses I have delivered. Part of that is to send of images of the attendees license forms. I've got the images on the SD card in my digital camera. I've also got a lot of other images on there. So, instead of focusing purely on the task at hand, I am actually cleaning up the whole card. Which is getting rid of technical/administrative debt, but it is slowing me down. Hmm... "administrative debt"... that's gotta be a common theme for the procrastinator!

Anyone out there want to write an article for Agile Advice about administrative debt?

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 05:16 PM | |

January 02, 2007

Top Ten Most Popular Entries from 2006

If you are new to Agile Advice, these are not just some of the most popular articles, they are also some of the best! Take a look around; you will find ideas to inspire you, challenge your thinking and maybe that one little thing that will make the difference in applying agile methods in your situation.

1. How Two Hours Can Waste Two Weeks - 25,617 unique views
This little hypothetical story by Dmitri Zimine was very popular on Reddit, and Joel on Software ranted a bit about it.

2. The Case for Context Switching - 2,936 unique views
My rebuttal to Joel's rant. Goes well with Dmitri's article. Emphasizes the idea of building trust in an organization.

3. The Qualities of an Ideal Test - 1,579 unique views
Six qualities that will help make your tests as valuable as can be. Similar to the ACID properties of databases or the INVEST properties of user stories.

4. The Pros and Cons of Short Iterations - 1,555 unique views
A few words that will help you decide how long to make your iteration length. This is an important decision, and most teams and organizations don't know the factors involved.

5. Five Signs of Trouble in an Iteration - 1,489 unique views
A good howto on using burndown charts to discover problems in an iteration.

6. Seventeen Tips for Iteration Planning - 1,427 unique views
A good list of hints and tips that can make the difference between struggling with iteration planning and having it go smoothly and effectively. This is a key part of the Agile Work process, so getting good at it is a high priority for any team new to Agile Work.

7. Change is Natural - "Embrace Change" - 1,397 unique views
A short riff on the universality of change. Also introduces the idea of the "horizon of predictability".

8. The Art of Obstacle Removal - 1,287 unique views
This is a good reference article on types of obstacles and methods for removing them... a critical practice for Process Facilitators.

9. The Seven Core Practices of Agile Work - 1,285 unique views
Agile Work is really quite simple. This is a concise list of the practices that make up this effective methodology.

10. Interview with Alistair Cockburn - Agile and House Renovations - 902 unique views
Applying agile methods to home and garden renovations! Learn a bit about how this luminary of the agile world has taken agile practices out of the software world and into the hardware world.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 06:32 PM | |

December 31, 2006

Sustainable Pace

I'm learning by example - bad example - my own!

I have been running myself ragged over the last few months. I rarely get more than seven hours sleep, and it is usually more like five or six hours. I'm keeping busy with writing, coaching, training, new product development, business development and other work. I'm trying to maintain a decent semblance of a family life. And I have administrative duties with my religous community.

All of this going on is not sustainable.

Luckily, it is now a couple hours into January 1st, 2007 and I have the opportunity to partake of the traditional New Year's Resolution.

So here goes:

I resolve to timebox my personal effort on work related activities to no more than 50 hours/week starting July 1st. I will do this by using Agile Work methods to organize my work, by removing obstacles, by automating repetitive tasks, by finding team mates, and by focusing my efforts on a clear business vision and objective.

You would think that I'd already be doing all this... and in some ways I am. But these efforts need to be consistent, systematic and wholehearted, rather than something I do as the exception. My current state of affairs is more chaos and crisis than I would like. And considering my admonitions to my clients to be truthful, I better be truthful myself about my own current state.

Just as a point of reference, I expect that I spend close to eighty hours per week on work currently.

I'll keep everyone up-to-date on how it's going. After a good sleep tonight, I'll do an iteration planning meeting. I might not bare all, but I'll certainly provide some concrete examples of the sorts of things that I am doing and trying.

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By the way... I feel compelled to point out that I actually celebrate "new year" in March according to the calendar of the Baha'i Faith, of which I am a member. However, living in the West, I still feel the power of some of the cultural traditions, and in particular the changing of the year is one that for some reason resonates with me. I think it's the beauty of highly significant digits in the date changing. Anyway... good night and I hope everyone has a wonderful, challenging, joyous 2007!

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:10 PM | |

June 14, 2006

Agile Work Artifacts - Tasks

I recently described the Work Item List. The second type of artifact used in an Agile Work environment is the Task. At its most basic, a Task is a simple description of how to do some bit of work towards completing an item in the Work Item List. However, there are some important things to remember when using Tasks.

What is a Task

Normally, an item from the Work Item List is broken down into multiple Tasks. These Tasks are all the things that need to be done or built to get the item into a deliverable state.

In general, the process of creating a bundle of Tasks for a given Work Item is a design or analysis process. It is a problem-solving process. The Tasks themselves represent the solution: the building blocks of the structure of the Work Item. Tasks do not normally represent the problem solving or analysis process.

Here are two contrasting (somewhat contrived) examples of Tasks generated for a "Home Office Addition" to make this clear:

Example 1 Bad:

• determine requirements for home office
• design home office layout
• check home office layout with client
• choose furniture and decor
• build home office
• install furniture and decor
• unpack books and files into home office

Example 2 Good:

• 300 sq. ft. maple hardwood
• 4' x 7' custom desk
• Aeron chair
• red leather sofa
• 16' custom bookshelves
• 22" double French doors
• 8' 4-panel vinyl triple glaze bay window
• 36 2x4x10' metal studs
• ... drywall
• ... other building materials and furniture and decor

Generating Tasks

The whole team works together to come up with the Tasks for every Work Item being worked upon during the iteration. The majority of the Tasks are determined during the timeboxed iteration planning meeting. Sometimes, the iteration planning meeting is not long enough to get all the Tasks defined. Sometimes new Tasks are discovered during the course of the iteration. Either way, it is fine to make changes to the bundle of Tasks as the work proceeds.

Special Tasks

Due to the timeboxed nature of the iteration planning meeting, a Team will sometimes find itself knowing that there is more analysis or problem-solving needed for a given Work Item. In this case, a special Task can be created to indicate that this analysis work needs to be completed. For example, the task might be labled "Finish analysis for Work Item 62", or it might say "Team meeting to finish Task generation for Work Item 62". Other ways of writing these Tasks include "Research...", "Solve..." or "Discuss...". Everyone needs to recognize that these tasks represent risk and uncertainty about how to get the work of the iteration complete.

Sometimes work needs to be done that is outside of the control of the Team. The Team should always try to find creative solutions to avoid this situation, but it is almost inevitable that Tasks will come up for which the Team does not have the expertise or the authority. These Tasks need to be treated very carefully since they can seriously hinder a Team's forward progress. The Process Facilitator should usually consider these Tasks as obstacles to be removed.

Working on Tasks

Typically, a single person takes responsibility for a single Task at a time. A person may end up working on other tasks for two reasons. First, if the Task he/she is responsible for has an unavoidable wait, then that person may go find someone else to assist until the Task is ready to be worked on again. Secondly, another person may have an urgent need for assistance and call other people away from their current Tasks.

Tracking the Work

In their most basic form, Tasks are assumed to all be roughly the same size or effort and small enough that they are only done or not-done. Therefore, tracking the work on the Tasks throughout the course of the iteration is kept very simple: how many tasks are remaining to complete in the remaining time of the iteration? There is no ambiguity: Team members report on completion of tasks to the Process Facilitator who updates a burndown chart to show the quantity of remaining work.

Gotcha's

Tasks must be written to avoid including wait time. For example, a Task that says "Get the parts delivered" actually includes three steps: make the request for the parts, wait for the parts to be delivered, receive the parts. Since it is often hard to predict how long a "wait" will be, it is important to break this down into two separate tasks: "order the parts" and "receive the parts" and then treat the wait time as an obstacle to be removed/minimized.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 09:34 AM | |

June 02, 2006

Cueing Agility - Creating a Supportive Environment for Agile Teams

In Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell, there is a chapter that describes a number of fascinating experiments. These experiments show how we can be influenced by very subtle cues in our environment. This is a very important lesson for us to apply in our work environments and in particular in our agile work.

In one experiement, researcher John Bargh designed a scenario to test how sensitive we are to written cues that are structured in a way that we are not consciously aware of being cued. Bargh created two lists, each composed of five words per list item. Of the five words, four were chosen to form a sentance, and the fifth word was selected so that it would not fit with the other four. Then the five words were jumbled.

For example:

rang phone peace the loudly

The people who came as subjects of the experiement were given one of the two lists and told to go through their list as quickly as possible and un-jumble the sentances.

Unbeknownst to the participants in the experiment, each group of five words also contained a word that was selected to suggest a feeling or attitude. In the first list, each group of five words contained one word that would suggest impatience, rudeness and aggressiveness. The second list contained words to suggest patience, politeness and calm.

All the subjects of the experiment were also given additional instructions to come to a particular office once they had completed their lists. At the office they were to receive final instructions. At the office, each participant encountered the experiment administrator deep in conversation with another person. Neither the administrator nor the other person acknowledged the just-arrived subject. Now the real purpose of the experiment was tested: how long would the subjects wait before interrupting the ongoing conversation?

The results were astonishing: those people who were cued with the list containing words suggesting impatience, rudeness and aggressiveness

eventually interrupted - on average after about five minutes. But of the people primed to be polite, the overwhelming majority - 82 percent - never interrupted at all. If the experiment hadn't ended after ten minutes, who knows how long they would have stood in the hallway, a polite and patient smile on their faces? (p 55)

Gladwell gives several more similar examples in his book. I strongly recommend reading this book to see just how powerful this cueing or priming effect can be.

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For organizations, teams and even individuals, this effect can be harnessed. The most obvious ways include using posters, screen savers, banners etc. to constantly impress people with positive messages about teamwork, effectiveness, creativity and other values and qualities that might be deemed valuable. This should obviously go hand-in-hand with a conscientious removal of all negative messages.

For agile teams, there are some particular values that should be emphasized: truthfulness, courage, creativity, teamwork, trust, cooperation, hard work, learning, adaptability.

The message can also be communicated in more subtle ways - and this is actually likely to be more effective! Incentives, the power of exemplary behavior, and the physical environment itself all can contribute strongly. In Built to Last : Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Collins and Porras, there is a whole chapter dedicated to the idea of "Cult-Like Cultures" where everything in an organization is focused around that organization's core values. The authors found the following four characteristics of successful, visionary companies:

• Fervently held ideology...
• Indoctrination
• Tightness of fit [for employees]
• Elitism

(p 122)

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Interestingly, agile methods do tend to require "buy-in". In order to fully feel comfortable in an agile environment, people need to understand and fully accept a small number of very important beliefs:

The Agile Axioms

(These are the generic, non-software version of the Agile Software Manifesto.)

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See also: Optimizing a Team Room

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 11:26 AM | |

May 17, 2005

The Qualities of an Ideal Test

These six qualities of tests describe how to make a test as effective and as useful as possible. The qualities are similar in style to the INVEST qualities of user stories - but they don't form a nice acronym.

Decisive: The test contains all the information required to automatically determine success or failure. Manual inspection of test results is not necessary to determine success or failure. The test is expressed in a way that produces a pass/fail answer rather than a numerical or qualitative result. Decisive tests are often expressed as assertions.

Valid: The test produces a result that matches the intention for the work artifact under test. Test failure indicates failure in the artifact under test and test success indicates correct operation or configuration of the artifact under test. Simply put: the result of a test should be true.

Complete: The test contains all the information it needs to run correctly with a given test harness and work artifact under test. The test performs all activities and provides all the data necessary. The test does not require any input outside of itself in order to run.

Repeatable: The test always gives the same results if the test harness and the artifact under test are the same. The test is created in such a way that the result is deterministic. Even if the system under test is not deterministic, the test should be created to account for that (possibly with statistical analysis) and produce a deterministic result.

Isolated: The test result is not affected by other tests run before it nor does a test affect the results of tests run after it. The test and the test harness work together to clean up after every test is run. A collection of tests can be run in any order and always produce the same results. Any test that depends upon the results or side-effects of a previous test is not isolated.

Automated: The test requires only a start signal in order to run to completion in a finite amount of time. No manual intervention is required after the test is started. Tests that are automated can be put together into a test suite and run one after another without human intervention. Automation of tests requires the creation of a test harness system.

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Update 20060106

I've added a little bit more detail to the above qualities. I also wanted to say a few words about my experience with testing:

I first started doing test-driven development almost seven years ago after reading the book Refactoring by Martin Fowler. I picked it up in Windsor Ontario while I was driving to San Francisco for my first contract position as an independent. I had to stay the night there due to the immigration office being closed so I read a lot of the book in my motel room that night. By time I got to California four days later, I was totally convinced that I should be using JUnit and refactoring for everything I did. Fortunately my project was ammenable to this approach. Over the next four months I built a Java JMS layer on top of Tibco Rendezvous. In the process I discovered methods for doing unit tests for asynchronous multi-threaded distributed functionality. And my tests satisfied all the above qualities. I delivered code with 100% test coverage and zero defects discovered until more than two years later when a very rare and obscure deadlock issue was found. Suffice it to say, I was convinced from a quality perspective.

But there is more. To build tests that follow all the above qualities, you need code that is testable. I have come to believe that testability is the most important architectural attribute of code for most software. The implications of having testable code include code that is easily changed, that is verifiable, and that is easy to understand. Refactoring plays a big role here too.

For getting a basic but very practical sense of test driven development, I strongly recomment Test Driven Development: By Example by Kent Beck.

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I have also written a couple of articles recently about quality:

Quality is Not Negotiable in which I talk about how to handle defects - by always treating them as top priority work items.

and

Technical Debt in which I expand on this common analogy between lack of testing and debt to show that technical debt is even worse than financial debt.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 06:48 PM | |

May 15, 2005

Truck Factor

Truck Factor (definition): "The number of people on your team who have to be hit with a truck before the project is in serious trouble"

Clearly "hit by a truck" is an extreme thought however you could easily substitute "take vacation at the same time" to get the same idea. If any part of your project has a truck factor of one then you are in a particularly fragile situation. If that one person leaves or is unable to work on the project, you will suffer the consequences.

Over time, anyone can be replaced. Truck factor is an indication of how expensive it will be to replace specific people.

In an ideal situation, everyone on the team will know all parts of the system so that the loss of any one person would have minimal impact. In reality, many projects rely on one or more "heros" who are the only one who understand certain critical parts of the system. When these heros leave (and you should assume they will), you must be prepared to recover.

If you have a hero on your team, the best thing you can do is reassign that person to a different part of the system. This will allow the replacement to ramp up while the hero is still available for support. If you wait until the hero has left then the ramp-up will be significantly more expensive.

An added benefit to reassigning the hero is that this person will now have the opportunity to work on something different. Since the hero's tend to be the most technically competent members of the team, this will usually mean that the new area will improve once the hero has worked on it for a while.

Truck factor is a quick metric that will highlight potential problems in your project. Having hero's on your team can be very beneficial but only if you don't become dependant on them. Truck factor is one metric that will highlight your dependencies.

Cross posted from Mike Bowler's Weblog

Posted by Michael Bowler at 06:42 PM | |

May 04, 2005

Can dying plan-based projects be recussitated?

We've all seen this. A one-year project in its 13th month, and the Project Manager has been reporting 80% of the tasks at 90% and has been doing so for the last 120 days. There's no end in sight, and the customer is leaking cash every day the product fails to go into production. What can be done? Agile project management principles can help this all-too-frequent scenario.

First, let's look at how this situation comes about. In a typical task-oriented project plan, one is required to decompose the tasks down to a fairly reasonable degree of specificity. The tasks are organized around a dependency graph, estimated, resources are assigned, and the schedule is calculated and/or nudged. (Well, usually the initial estimates don't match the customer's expectation and deadlines, so there's a revision step here where estimates are shortened) But how does change get reflected? If a PM is doing an excellent (if frustrating) job, they are constantly updating the schedule, the plan, and re-conceiving the tasks as new information comes to him.

More often than not, however, this gets so messy and unwieldly that the PM holds fast, and starts to estimate completion based not on a proper decomposition and a completion of each of these tasks, but based on his guess, or his workers' guesses. Complexity of the tasks is hidden, and becomes often quite invisible. Tasks at 80% which suddenly need to be re-decomposed and re-conceived do not, in the main, get moved back down to 40% after certain roadblocks are discovered.

The result? The customer is increasingly afraid, trust between delivery staff and client (and management) are eroded, pressure is increased, mistakes under pressure become more frequent, less sleep is had by all, and 90% complete becomes an asymtote, rather than a milestone.

Now what is to be done with such a project? How can Agile project management approaches help this situation? We can examine this by playing out such a scenario...

We can start by identifying a few key practices of Agile project management, and examine their benefits to the business client.

Timeboxing and Iteration

The first thing we can talk about to the fearful client is timeboxing. Timeboxing caps his investment into small chunks. We look at it and say, OK, you're in deep trouble, but you don't know how deep your trouble is. By timeboxing into a very short timeframe, and making a large project into many little short projects, we can get more visibility into the process - we can see things as they are, rather than how they're reported on a project plan. Speaking of visibility...

Daily Meetings and Iteration Review

Part of the value of iteration and timeboxing is increased visibility, so we really need to have a mechanism for visibility. Already distrustful of project plans, we can tell the client, "Don't believe the paperwork, let's look at what's actually built. At the end of each iteration, we'll review the current situation, and demonstrate existing functionality." His eyes perk up. "Wah?" he asks incredulously? What do you mean? So we say, "we don't want you to guess at how ready this thing is. We'll show you. That way, you can decide if it's ready enough. ...Or your product marketing people, if you prefer. It's up to you, but you get to see it, touch it, and sense for yourself how ready it is, and you won't have development managers and developers waving their hands pretending it's further than it is."

"Oh wierd," says he. "So what are these daily meetings?"

We tell him that the daily meetings have several purposes. Only project members get to speak, and they report on what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today, and what, if anything, is blocking their path. No one else gets to speak, but others who are not on the team itself can listen in. This way, the whole project team is clearly aware of how they're working, what's left to do, and what each other are doing.

"Why do they need this? They have the plan." "True," we reply, "but how often do you have two people who need something, and both do it because they don't know that someone else already did it. With your current project delays, do you want any duplication of effort? Just by way of example?"

Feature Lists, not Task Lists

We also talk to him about working from feature lists, not task lists. The team will be implementing features, and fulfilling requirements. How they do it is up to them. "Why should I care," he'll ask. "You don't," we reply, except to assure him that if people are working against features, then they can choose to re-order their tasks in such a way as to most quickly get to the goal. No wasted effort, we tell him. Sounds good to him.

Customer-Prioritized Features

What's more, we assure him, we will be first working on the highest-priority features. What "needs" to get to market. Everything else slides down the list. Even if the wonderful plan we all love had it earlier. High-value features (as prioritized by the client) and their necessary dependencies. That's it.

"So no features that I didn't ask for?" He looks hopeful.

"That's right," we reassure him, "and you can change your mind."

He faints.

Smelling salts are brought.

"What do you mean, 'I can change my mind?'" he asks.

"If, when we get to the iteration review, and you test drive the thing, Acme corporation has come up with the killer feature that you absolutely must have or the whole thing is useless, you put it at the top priority on the list we use to drive the next iteration."

"And no one will complain that it's out of scope?" he marvels?

"If you put it at the top of the list, it is the scope for the next iteration. We are at your service," we comfort him.

"So when will this be finished?" he asks us desperately.

"When you say it's ready," we reply. He boggles. What does that mean, he thinks.

"What does that mean," he asks.

"It means that we will tie it off, when you think it has enough juice to go to market. If, after you re-prioritize what's left, you find that it's 'ready enough', then we'll roll with it, take a couple of weeks to steady it and ship it, and then we can pick up your next-highest priority things, or anything new you want in it." He looks near fainting again. "And we stop when you feel that spending money on it is no longer bringing you enough value, ideally because we've done all the high-value stuff already, and we're working on less valueable stuff."

"So I have discretion to pull the plug whenever I want to?"

"Yep."

"Please help me..."

Conclusion

This little scenario is fictitous, but in the end, it's consistent with the experiences of many Agile practitioners (particularly Scrum) that I have spoken with. We've only covered a small sampling of Agile practices that may help a project in crisis. Others may help quality, may improve developer productivity - but the above can help a key client or stakeholder begin to see a light at the end of the tunnel. While many people cannot get their heads around it, they may be willing to try new things when they're in enough pain with the existing process.

And it can turn a project failure into an ever-increasing success, because success is defined monthly, re-defined at the desires of the business client, and executed in bite-sized chunks that are digestible and estimable.

Just don't forget that people have the strangest reactions to things that break their expectations... so make sure to bring the smelling salts...

Posted by Christian Gruber at 09:08 PM | | | TrackBack

April 24, 2005

Agile HR - Sort Of

An article called Are You Ready for the Agile Future presents a brief discussion about the role of HR in an agile organization. There are several very good ideas. The basic idea is that the HR function must adapt to the nature of agility. This in turn means, for example, hiring people that are agile, nimble, adaptable etc.

There are however some mis-steps in the article.

One is an ommission: the HR organization must itself become agile. In one organization that I worked, it took at a minimum 4 weeks and typically 12 weeks to get a contractor onto a project. Three months lead time!!! Now admittedly, it is not easy to bring an individual on-board quickly. However, it is possible. Some organizations I have worked at have lead times for getting new people into the organization that are on the order of 2 weeks including search, selection, administration and orientation. In these organizations, the HR organization maintains an attitude to their own work as service to the larger organzation... and the faster the service (without sacrificing quality), the better.

The article also misses the mark on employee performance. Employees should be measured on their sphere of influence, not their sphere of responsibility. In other words, if a person is a member of a team, their own performance should be judged by the performance of the team as a whole. This mitigates people's competitive habits and positively reinforces collaboration. People should not be measured against their role discription.

One of the recommendations in the article is to "Create selection, testing and hiring criteria that identify diverse, resilient, nimble people." Unfortunately, there is no guidance on how to do this. Here are some ideas: look for people who have moved between projects, roles, employers and even locations frequently, look for people whose resumes contain lots of work that doesn't fit their job titles, look for people who have hobbies and interests that are outside their field of specialization, look for people who have diverse volunteer experience, look for people who ask lots of questions.

(Thanks to Deb Hartmann for the link.)

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 09:48 PM | |

April 18, 2005

Book Review: "Good to Great" by Jim Collins

Summary: In this well-written, engaging book, author Jim Collins describes six critical factors that he and his research team found common in companies that transformed themselves from a long period of mediocre or bad results to a long period of great financial results. Although focused on publicly-traded companies in the United States, the results of this research can easily be extended to apply to other types of organizations.

Good to Great describes the following six concepts:

1. Level 5 Leadership: personal humilty and professional discipline in an organization's leader are the starting point for the transformation.
2. First Who... Then What: don't worry about what to do until the right people are in the right positions in an organization.
3. Confront the Brutal Facts (Yet Never Lose Faith): careful and honest examination of an organization's current situation is the foundation for finding a path forward.
4. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): discover a simple business concept that people can be passionate about, that works with a single key economic driver and that the organization can be the best in the world.
5. A Culture of Discipline: disciplined people removes the need for heirarchy, disciplined thought removes the need for bureaucracy and disciplined action removes the need for excessive controls.
6. Technology Accelerators: pioneer the application of carefully selected technologies without relying on technology for transformation.

Some of these concepts are very close to the underlying prinicples of agile work. For example, in the Scrum methodology, the first five principles are all represented. The Scrum Master embodies some of the attributes of level 5 leadership. A self-organizing team gets the right people in the right position. The daily scrum and the sprint planning meetings are designed to help the team confront the brutal facts. The sprint goal embodies at a local level the simplicity of the hedgehog concept. And the practices in general are a manifestation of a culture of discipline.

Who Should Read this Book? Anyone interested in creating a lasting positive transformation in an organization should read this book. In particular, individuals who are coaching teams or organizations should read this book since the concepts also appear to apply at a sub-organizational level.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 07:29 PM | |

April 12, 2005

Agile Household Management

Four weeks ago my wife, Melanie, reviewed a paper I was writing about Agile Work. When I talked to her about it, she asked me why we aren't using these practices for managing our household.

So, we decided to try it. First we developed a starting Work Queue. It includes stuff like "eye appointment for Mishkin" and "build boxes for vegetable garden" and "set up expenditures spreadsheet". It covers any activity that is non-repeating, non-business. Things we need to do with the kids, renovations, travel plans, personal finances, community work, social events.

Once we developed our Work Queue, we agreed that Melanie would be the Queue Master, responsible for managing the work and prioritizing it. So, with a small amount of coaching, she prioritized our rather long list of Work Queue items.

We then jointly decided how much to accomplish over the next week. Our iteration length is one week because we already have a natural rhythm of that length due to my travel schedule for work. We took on about 15 items from the queue, and committed to getting them done.

We have now been doing this for a little more than three weeks. Having this process in place has been helpful in a number of ways. First of all, because it is in priority order, our level of stress about what we need to do is decreasing rapidly. Secondly, we are starting to develop a sense of how much work we can accomplish in a one-week period. By being focused, I am finding that we can get more done than I would otherwise expect. Thirdly, by working in weekly iterations, we can quickly adjust to things that come up. Finally, we have a clear set of expectations about what we will accomplish and this reduces feelings of tension around household work.

There are some things that I would like to add to our approach. We have three young children and I would like them to become involved with the process. The eldest is nearly seven, reads at least three years ahead of his age, and is certainly capable of understanding the text-based format of our planning. I would also like to see how we can incorporate acceptance test-driven work into the mix. Because we are such a small team this may be overkill, but at this point we are not explicitly checking our work at all or setting any sort of acceptance criteria. I can see that jumping up to bite us in the future.

I would be interested in hearing from anyone else who has tried applying agile techniques and practices in their own households.

Posted by Mishkin Berteig at 05:15 PM | |