Edge of Chaos | Agile Development Blog

Many interesting posts and discussions about Scrum and Kanban published last weeks. Someone even called this a war I don’t think it is a war, but some posts indeed may drive such feeling.

• Ken Schwaber bashed Kanban. “I was told that Kanban is frequently used when an organization cannot readily adopt Scrum. Many of Scrum most difficult aspects are then sidestepped. Managers are still in charge of telling people what to do. People can be interrupted at any time. People are still work in functional silos, preserving the jobs of functional managers. People are not allowed to work in containers, sharing skills and knowledge to bring complexity into solutions – instead they are worked on a pull (more sophisticated than push) production line.”
• Karl Scotland discusses Scrum and Kanban difference as Intentional vs. Implementational approaches. Interesting perspective in fact. Karl thinks that Kanban can be used with Scrum to reveal even more problems in development process.
• David J. Anderson posted the most rational article about Scrum and Kanban difference. I like it a lot. Some phrases are true gems: “Kanban is not a project management or software development lifecycle method. It is an approach to change management - a framework for catalyzing change in an organization.” and “Kanban uses a WIP limit as a change agent and Scrum uses commitments. This is a fundamental difference in approach.” David also posted some reflections later with interesting thoughts about anarchy and science.
• A year ago Tobias Mayer didn’t believe that it is possible to use Kanban at all. “I fundamentally disbelieve that there is any such thing as a “value stream” when you are working in a complex environment, in a creative process, building new products or generating new ideas.”

I think Ken is wrong. His arguments against Lean and Kanban quite ridiculous. Sure there is no intention to treat software development as a factory and apply lean manufacturing principles blindly. Of course there are people who will try (or already tried) that and fail. But vast majority of lean community in software development do understand the difference and working on concrete practices. Lean philosophy is great, but tools and practices can’t be taken from manufacturing directly.

Pull system is more complex than Push? C’mon!

David has wise arguments and perfect position. I think Kanban will be more popular than Scrum in long-term perspective, but it will take time. Visualization is a key thing to manage complexity, and software development is a complex system.

When reading this Kill Your To-Do List blog post, I thought that managing personal to-do list can be similar to product backlog management. Not in the part that you should totally kill your product backlog, but in the “one thing at a time” part. This is by no means a new thought.  E.g.  Mary Poppendieck was heard saying that product backlog should be eliminated.

So, as in to-do lists, there’s no point in nurturing and moving product backlog items back and forth.  In this case, a lot depends on what is your definition and understanding of product backlog. I’d say backlog is an environment in which a product grows and exists but not a set of components that should be implemented for sure.  Looking further into, what kind of environment is it? Backlog might be a repository of all the slightest shades of ideas that have a very vague chance to be implemented. A chaotic heap. This heap can hardly be called a “backlog” but rather a by-product of brainstorming. OR a product backlog might represent a careful selection of user stories that will be implemented for sure.

Both of these options, as often is the case, have the optimal state somewhere in between. In our production workflow, we’re now using several buffers - the first layer is raw Requests and Ideas (coming from our HelpDesk, or from the PO, or from the team). The second layer is Product Backlog with User Stories (Requests and Ideas are now groomed and converted to User Stories by  Product Owner who decides that some time these will be implemented for sure - based on how many people requested this feature, based on current product development strategy etc.). The third layer is Planned state for User Stories in Kanban board.

Here’s a quick graphical representation of this product backlog upward funnel:

That’s how User Stories lifecycle looks on  Kanban board, from Planned state on:

Backlog is not seen on Kanban board.  When done with their current user stories, developers  pull new user stories from Planned state.

Previously, when we worked with iterations before switching to Kanban, there was no buffer between inception and implementation - so time-boxed releases and iterations have been planned directly from the backlog. With Kanban, the buffering  is done by moving stories to Planned state and prioritizing them.

I’d say that planning with iterations provides less flexibility than planning with Kanban. As you drop user stories to time-boxed iterations, you  commit to implementing all of them within a given period of time. Kanban is way more flexible since user stories can be pulled one-by-one from Planned state and implemented with no time restrictions. I can’t resist citing an analogy here: it’s the same as moving with the smallest possible steps to posture yourself before hitting the ball in tennis. With large steps, you do not have flexibility. With small steps - you’re very agile and flexible to position yourself for the perfect shot.

So, the buffered Planned state in Kanban is like this breaking down into small steps, instead of taking one giant leap and committing to the whole pack of user stories in iteration.

That’s the way it goes for us. You’re better off moving by small steps, taking it one-by-one (this brings us back to the inspiration blog post reference in the beginning than with giant leaps.

If we think about conferences in general, the traditional understanding is: people come together to share their knowledge, to learn, to discuss, to network etc.  Some people expect that if they attend a conference they for sure must learn something totally new, something that will change the way they work or even their lives.  Some people come to see who’s out there, to network and to have some fun. In a nutshell, as many people as many reasons to attend conferences

I tend to think that with all the  information we’re consuming, it’s very hard to come up with something totally new to a thinking and knowledgeable audience. If you’re engaged in agile community, and if you’re a thinking person, you thrive in the blogosphere and you practice agile  - it’s hardly that something will be totally new to you (”totally” is the keyword).

Recently we attended Agile Central Europe conference in Krakow. I’d say that my #1 enjoyment about this event was live cross-twittering. Broadcasting Agile CE to the Twittersphere has really been fun. I liked tweets by Andy Brandt, Marc Loeffler (aka scrumphony), Pawel Brodzinski and Robert Dempsey (for the two latter, it’s not only tweets, but their presentations that I enjoyed) .  As opposed to most attendees,  I didn’t very much like the closing show by Gwyn Morfey and Laurie Young. The guys have done a great show, but it was more about dramatic presentation of what’s going on in any dynamic agile team I’ve seen a bit of those “paper sword fights”

After attending Agile 2009 in Chicago, I’ve really got a little bit skeptical on the conferences overall because what I’ve seen was people talking about simple truths but with such an air as if they were uttering epiphanies. So, when going to Agile CE I wasn’t expecting epiphanies. It was more about going out there with our team, watching people and taking every opportunity to enjoy everything that comes up on the way  (including live jazz night in Krakow).

This approach worked better than huge expectations. Strangely, this small cosy conference has become an unexpected source of inspiration.  In a sense,  that it’s not always you have to come up with an excellent new topic or idea no one else knows about. The main thing about conferences is confidence and freedom to express yourself, share your personal experience and absorb experience of others. Somehow someone will find it useful. There’s no need to be afraid to appear too simple. People will listen and admire  even if this is your first experience as a speaker.

And.. it’s great that there’re many more agile conferences to come

Yesterday Google alerted me about a review of TargetProcess  by Boris Gloger. I started reading this review and I couldn’t believe my eyes. How could Boris Gloger, such a respected Scrum trainer, overlook some important features of an agile tool he’s reviewing?

Writing reviews  is a very responsible task. It only seems that web can tolerate all. There’s no censorship, no security checks on whether the info in a review can be trusted or not. Reviews are about knowing all the facts. Only when you make sure that you know all of the subject matter, then you can write a review.  I’d never stand up as a guru and claim - my people, I’m your guru, I know all about this tool -  and then - ooops.. - I’ve got some essential flaws in my knowledge of this tool.

Now, let’s see what Boris Gloger overlooked. Comments on Boris’ page do not work(!!!), unfortunately.

Target Process is a tool created by Target Process Inc. to manage agile process. They can support Scrum, Extreme Programming, Lean and others. The tool have a good set of features and some nice ideas to speed up the addition of data for your project. They also provide a Eclipse and Visual Studio add-in so each developer can see their to-do list right on the IDE. If you like to try it for yourself there’s a 30 day free trial available.

Ehm.  TargetProcess comes for free not only as a 30 days trial. It’s free for small agile teams up to 5 people. It’s our humble donation to the growing agile community. Boris, it’s a fully functional free copy with free updates and subscriptions for agile teams of 5.

The “Features” works like an Epic or Theme for your stories and if don’t care for that it can be totally skipped. If you’d like to use it’s possible to determine an estimation and priority for the features but it really doesn’t make much sense to me.

The Features DO work like Epic or Theme and you can rename Features to Epics or Themes or any other name of your choice. The names are completely customizable and it’s up to you which name to choose.

I’d prefer to see something simpler like tags for the stories.

What??? We’ve got tags for user stories and for all the other entities! We’ve got bundles of tags. Tags board. Tags are powerful tools for categorization and filtering, so if I were a certified Scrum Trainer I would have quadruple checked before making such a blunt statement about no tags in any agile tool.

We talk about estimating feature so, of course we can estimate stories also. That’s the first problem i think the tool have, it’s only possible to estimate using time units, ideal or not. That’s no mentions to story points at all, this miss, pushes Target Process to field of time tracking tools, which is not a good thing.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. You missed the point with story points. They’re there, and you can choose between ideal time units and story points. This bold statement of no user story points in TargetProcess pushes you, Boris, to field of shallow reviewers that do not take enough time to study the agile tool they’re reviewing, and then spread this distorted knowledge to their students on Scrum trainings.

Target Process is supposed to work with different agile models, so they use the term iteration instead of sprint.

Foul and a miss. As I already mentioned, one can customize terms and rename the term “iteration” to “sprint” or whatever. TargetProcess is supposed to work with different agile models, so we’ve made our terms and processes completely customizable.

On the Taskboard there’s an awkward choice, there’s only two columns available Open and Done, where’s the WIP ? It’s on another tab Kanban Board, I really don’t understand why they went that way, but it’s no good at all.

Ugh. I really don’t understand how Boris could have overlooked such essential part of TargetProcess as customizable states and processes flow.  Two columns Open and Done on the task board are available for dummies. For advanced reviewers, all the states they want are available. Users can introduce as many states as they need to their development process, and they can give any names to those states. Kanban Board states are customizable as well. It’s no good at all that our honorable reviewer missed this..!

It’s hard to say what I think about Target Process, they had good ideas, like the shortcut flows, but really bad ones like the Kanban Board. Overall the tool is ok but not very intuitive, could be more polished on the user experience, and of course the common problem of too much focus on time tracking hurts a lot.

Boris, I promise you will not be that hurt as you take a closer look at TargetProcess. You seem to have some special inkling with too much focus on time tracking, that’s why you see it where there’s no special focus on it. Time tracking in TargetProcess is just in the right amount, no less, no more. IMHO, it’s rather less of it, than more.  As for user experience - draw the curtain… look in here

There’s so much room for observations and analogies in the evolution of production trends. Analogies are not merely a candy for the brain. They bring along a deeper understanding of phenomena and ultimately are one of the greatest aides to align (or misalign) with mainstream.

If we look back, to the 18-19th century - mass production was a dream. The philosophy was: produce more.  Lavish architecture designs, garments, gardens - everything created by people was about going more massive and taking much space. Standards of innovation have been changing over the centuries  - what’s been innovative and massive, has been becoming obsolete. Minimalism is the new innovative. Is it because humans subconsciously feel they’ve taken too much terrain and sky on this planet for industrial experiments and now are trying to compensate for that by being minimalistic in everything? Or simply finding ways to fit in?

Hardware/software as well as visual designs and interfaces are meekly following the same trend. This just shows how subtly the “new innovative” standards are taking over. We remember huge PCs. Now we’ve got all kinds of minimalistic devices the names of which start with “i“. We remember waterfall. CMMI standards  with their tons of rigid rules, regulations, documented processes. Now we’re  going “lean” and “agile” - the same minimalistic tendency.

People have managed to stuff the overproduced artifacts not only all over the planet but all over themselves. Fatness is the problem. Again, what a shift in standards -  as late as in the beginning or even middle of the 20th century it was considered trendy to be fat. Well, not obese, but hearty fat. Now, we’re all about lean. Off with plump beauties. Straighten up now, lean is the philosophy of minimalism in production.

P.S. I truly believe that all the fat folks are hiding the “lean” insignia deeply inside them. It just takes some effort to peel off the layers

Kai Gilb started a series of posts that challenge Agile Software Development. Part 2 is about creativity and “how well” focus in software development. While I agree with the problem, I strongly disagree with the solution. Kai recommends to write requirements (the format he uses doesn’t allow me to call it “user stories”) in a form that does not contain solution:

Developers Are Not Product Owners

Then developers should creatively find the ways to implement this requirement, to invent the solution and to solve the “how well” puzzle. We’ve got a huge problem here indeed. Most developers can’t invent solutions at this high level. They can create beautiful architecture and build the quality in. They can write tests upfront and use powerful tools to speed up development. They can do many things, but often they can’t invent a “how well” solution that will make customers happy. Why?

1. Most developers know nothing about User Experience (and don’t care).
2. Most developers can’t create usable design.
3. Many developers barely know a problem domain and in any case don’t want to dig into much details here.

In short, most developers are engineers (so far?), so what Kai proposes will not help. It is just a theoretical solution to “how well” problem. It’s the same like trying to grow 4 hands and 2 heads to double your productivity (well, sacrificing beauty maybe…)

In Scrum Product Owner is responsible for writing User Stories. It means he should invent solutions and care about “how well” thing.  I don’t see a significant problem here. Of course, it’s great if developers are interested in requirements handling and solutions investigation process, but if they are not, Product Owner can do that alone or with special people who care. Who they can be?

Those people are UX specialists. They know how to solve “how well” problems effectively. They know many things about design patterns and all new trends in interfaces. They like to explore problem domain and talk to customers. If you have such people among developers — you are SO lucky! But often this is not the case.

We, at TargetProcess, try to instill UX culture into development process. We started in August, now it’s February and I can’t say we’ve had much success. Sure there are significant improvements, but to be honest most developers are not so interested in UX staff, they like BDD, DDD, C# and SOA more. I expect it will be a long process that will take years. And our company is quite small. I can’t even imagine an effort for such a radical shift in a huge company.

Broad Requirements Are Not Testable

I wonder how you can write BDD scenarios for broad requirements as Kai suggests. How the hell can you test anything, if you don’t have any clue on how it should work? So broad requirements can’t replace user stories obviously. They can live in backlog, but developers should deal with concrete requirements that are testable right away.

I can agree that you can split backlog in 2 parts. The first small part contains detailed stories that can be put to development asap. The second large part contains broad requirements without solutions. That might be a good idea. But we should clearly separate UX phase and Development phase. During UX phase we should solve “how well/how cool” problems, and during development phase we should solve technical problems only (with some corrections in “how well” for sure if required).

P.S. Kai, I hate gray text on gray background in your blog. It is not user friendly.

I read Agile development grows UP article written by Mark Lines. It has quite a strange taste… Is it an attempt to advertise new methodology? I hope it is, otherwise Mark is completely missing the point and agile development trends.

I want to review the article. Just can’t resist, sorry.

Many of us don’t have the benefit of co-location, where the entire team works in close proximity (ideally in the same room), with the user representative present at all times to answer questions

Sure we all know that a co-located team is better. It is not a surprise that consultants advise to co-locate team members. If you need to win the race, it is better to drive BMW M3 than Ford Focus. There are so many discussions around distributed agile this year. There are so many ideas and experience reports on how to implement agile remotely. Agile works in remote teams.

Pair programming i.e. 2 programmers sharing 1 keyboard is an expenditure most management will not endorse

It’s a very strange argument. Many managers will not support continuous integration, iterative development and BDD. It does not mean that these practices are bad. Context is everything. In some companies and on some projects pair programming will increase productivity. While on other projects there will be no benefits or even degradation. How many agile coaches insist on pair programming and say “You are not agile without PP”? Not many. It is wrong to spread this argument to the whole agile community.

Delivering a system without moderately detailed requirements (beyond User Stories) is not acceptable for testing, writing training materials, and production support purposes.

C’mon! User stories can be VERY detailed. For example, you may use BDD-style user stories format and write many cases that will describe functionality in some format, that can be directly converted to unit tests! It is an incredible thing, to be honest.

Fixing architecture as you go (i.e. refactoring) without some initial architectural design is not appropriate for large-scale enterprise systems

Most people in agile community believe that it is required to spend some time on architecture. Again, it is so context dependent. If you create a simple application, one day may be enough to nail down all important decisions. If you create a complex system, it may take several months. Common sense is a critical factor here. There is always a danger to over-architect things and working software is the best proof of concept.

Also something called “emergent architecture” is being developed. I like the idea and maybe it is a right direction.

Most projects are not completely independent and cannot be built in isolation. Dependencies and integrations with other systems are required and require some co-ordination.

Agile adoption is spreading rapidly and indeed there are no common/standard approaches to solve this problem. But I believe it will be resolved during agile enterprise adoption (and we already stepping into this phase).

Organizations usually have some governance practices in place (such as PMOs, ISO, CMMI) that necessitate a level of bureaucracy and documentation

Does it all mean that PMO, ISO and CMMI are good and we should give up and follow the rules? Agile community tries to fight bureaucracy and I personally love that. Documented process means NOTHING for success of software development project. In 90% of cases it holds you in the spider’s net and blocks creativity. There is NO software development without creativity. Wake up, Mark.

We live with these standards, but we should fight them.

Deploying software to users every 1 or 2 weeks is usually not practical in most organizations. Just migrating software through development, test, system test, user acceptance, production environments is a major undertaking. Having many projects trying to do this in parallel on a weekly basis simply isn’t feasible.

This argument is so common… and “not practical in most organizations” is a truly masterpiece. Any statistic data? Did Mark try to deploy anything outside the enterprise-scale Java mastodon applications world? Many SaaS services do painless weekly updates. Some services do painless updates on a Daily basis! It is unbelievable, but I like that. Customers like that!

Mark promotes OpenUP methodology (based on Unified Process). Only advantages in the post, no disadvantages or context at all. Folks, I think it is a so long-awaited silver bullet! Finally it is there! Let’s bury Scrum. Let’s bury XP. Let’s burn Kanban and all the other processes that spark agile movement. God bless the OpenUP silver bullet. Amen.

I’m digging into Lean Manufacturing and it’s so interesting to learn manufacturing history and its trends. There are so many parallels between manufacturing and software development. Of course they are not direct, but a curious mind can draw them quite easily. Let’s take Cellular Manufacturing as an example.

Cellular Manufacturing is a workspace organization technique. The main principle is to organize production of a single product in a small dedicated unit (cell) that consists of several people and several workstations. The benefits are surprisingly huge:

“The result is very fast throughput. Communication is easy since every operator is close to the others. This improves quality and coordination. Proximity and a common mission enhance teamwork.”

It is a significant improvement over the functional space configuration, when you have large queues and long transition time.

Now, if we think about software development, it is becoming clear why distributed teams have problems and why functional departments will not survive in the near future.

Cellular manufacturing applied to software development directly leads to cross-functional teams that work on a single project. Cell is a single team that has its own inventory and cross-trained people. Expanding it further, it means that developers should be able to do testers’ job, and vice versa.

From lean perspective, managers job is to setup cells configuration efficiently. It is not required to track individual work, but to track cell work instead. It brings process optimization to a higher level and powers system thinking.

It is really amazing how much we can extract from lean manufacturing and adopt this knowledge to software development…

I got this insight on lean and agile techniques in military context when reading  “Ideas Made to Stick” book.  The workflow of the military was described there as an example of how important it is to make messages as concise as possible to accomplish tasks.

The evolution of the military strategy with dates and sources is not a subject of this blog
With no extra details, here’s the core of the point I’m trying to make:

First the Army’s approach was to make sure that every single action is planned down to smallest details. But, as they found out, “enemy bears no plans”. An unexpected move could destroy the whole set-up so  “all king’s horses and all king’s men” could not make the Army function again. Effectively, I mean.

So, they reverted to something very similar to agile technique of creating user stories - Commander’s Intent. Commander’s Intent is “the commander’s stated vision which defines the purpose of an operation, the end state with respect to the relationship among the force, the enemy and the terrain; it must enable subordinates to quickly grasp the successful end state and their part in achieving it”.

Do you see the resemblance? It’s a replica of lean production principles, only in military, not in civic, context. And it’s exactly like the agile principle of engaging people and encouraging their creativity to achieve one common goal.

I will not go into quoting sources on the web on Commanders’ Intent and military doctrines to find more analogies and similarities in military setup and lean/agile methodology.  I just outlined the idea.

There’s a misconception related to this topic: Some people think that agile works all OK for lazy folks. It’s all about freedom, about looseness, no obligations. Not at all. Agile is less conventional, it does not care about being in the office at 9 am sharp, or about wearing a tight business suit. But agile projects do have their Commanders’ Intent and they require genuine responsibility and engagement from the team - the soldiers.

Now, as  the Army follows agile principles, would you need any better proof on the effectiveness of agile and lean methodology?

Bringing together agile philosophy and software development outsourcing has been one of the hottest topics over the last decade.  Lots of blog posts, discussions in social networks — people try to figure out for themselves if it’s at all possible to align agile methodology with the existing reality of outsourced projects.

How can vendors who practice agile gain new customers? How can customers as newly-converted adepts paste their vision of agile thinking on their existing outsourcing partners?

First of all, let’s look back into when and why actually did it all start with IT outsourcing. Manufacturing outsourcing existed since long ago, but IT offshoring only started at the end of 80’s - beginning of 90’s. Companies jumped at the opportunity to save bucks and use cheap labor not only for producing goods, but for producing software. So, the main point is that from the very beginning outsourcing has all been about saving money. No other notable motivation - just saving money and using cheaper labor.

Next, along comes agile manifesto. People start seeing that the waterfall approach  they’ve been using with their outsourcing vendors is not that good after all.  Fixed price contracts do not guarantee real value (Scott Ambler writes very well on that in this article). Next, the more labor is outsourced to some country, the higher are the costs, so the main point for outsourcing which is cost savings makes no sense any more.

There’re other even deeper-lying consequences. On the one hand, the country which outsources - or businesses in this country not the country itself - they save bucks but lose in the long run as they do not grow their own engineering minds, let alone all the problems that you have working with remote teams - yes, we have all this telecom in place, but nothing ever will replace face-to-face communication. If you often go on business trips to the outsourced destination to talk to your team - again, it’s more costs.  On the other hand, outsourcing makes a dangerous long-term impact on the recipient economies as well.

But the point is not about how bad or good outsourcing is.  Vendors have written an array of blog posts on how to align agile and outsourcing - and that’s natural - they want to keep going, so they do everything to back up their point of view proving that agile goes well with outsourcing. This might work true in some cases.

The companies that outsource on the other hand - they have legacy outsourcing teams. They need to get going with them as well, to stand up to all the funds already invested in their outsourcing center/provider.

So with all this outsourcing in our hands - what do we do?

As an agile outsourcing vendor, you should be ready to invest lots of time and effort to educating your new customers on the value of agile and to building a solid relationship. This might be a very difficult task since some people just don’t want to get educated and prefer to stick to good old fixed price bids, logging and billing for gazillion of change requests, lack of communication and other “joys” of classical outsourced development.

As a company with established outsourcing facility, you’re better off. But perhaps you could be even better off if you started this relationship not with an overseas company, but with a guy next door at least.

Anyway,  you are where you are - so you would need to work with your outsourcing partner to practice the agile approach, since at the end of it all work with agile methodology brings real value, as opposed to counting short-term waterfall pennies and losing long-term gain.