Edge of Chaos | Agile Development Blog

There are various ways to support agile team retrospectives. We’ve used all of them, so let me share our experience.

Cadence (usual retrospectives)

If you have iterative development like Scrum or XP, it is very convenient to run usual retrospectives meetings. For example, with 2-week iterations you have such meetings every other week, discuss issues, what worked, what not, brainstorm solutions and new things. We’ve tried mood boards, various formats for issues gathering and for action items tracking. We’ve tried a whole lot of things in 2 years. In general, it worked. But then we switched to Kanban and somehow retrospective meetings faded out…

Is there a better way to improve development process?

Stop-the-Line

We tried to apply stop-the-line practice. It states that as a mistake or malpractice is discovered all responsible people should immediately hold a meeting to resolve/prevent this specific problem. There were several stop-the-line events, but this practice did not survive. Why? There are two main reasons.

1. It is very disruptive. People are working on various unrelated tasks and are in the flow. Suddenly they should switch to a problem resolution brainstorming. Many people don’t like to do that.
2. It may take too long. Sometimes the problem is very hard and it takes much time to find a good solution. People impatiently drink coffee and want to get back to work.

So we dropped stop-the-line practice and replaced it with a pure pull system.

Pull / Issues Board

Issue Board is a very simple concept with 3 basic rules:

1. Every person in a development team can write a problem or a new idea he wants to discuss on a whiteboard (Issues Board).
2. There is a limit of 3 problems on the board.
3. When there are 3 problems on the board, we have a retrospective meeting right after a daily meeting.

We have been using this approach over the last several months and I like it most. It leaves off some problems both of the stop-the-line approach and the cadence approach. First, if there are no issues or ideas, there’s no need to have a meeting :) Second, no interruptions, since daily meeting is interruptive by itself, so it is just natural to have a retrospective meeting right away.

If you have other approaches to retrospectives, go ahead and share them!

Cumulative Flow diagram is a very good starting point for stop-the-line or retrospective meeting. Here is a real example from TargetProcess development.

You can see in the chart that we had a bottleneck in the beginning of December. It was caused by a quite complex user story. In theory a single user story should not affect cycle time significantly and should not create bottlenecks, but if you violate some rules it might be the case.

The user story was about replacing jQuery javascript framework with ExtJS framework. It took 1 month to implement by 1 developer. During this month we’ve made several releases and all went smooth. Then this user story was verified by testers and all existing acceptance tests were passed. So we’ve made a decision to merge this story to the main code line.

Unfortunately, after the merge quite many bugs were found in the build during smoke testing. These bugs took more than a week to fix, and during this time we were unable to release anything, since the merge was already done and the rollback was quite complex as well.

The lesson learned is to put more effort into testing of user stories that are more complex in nature. This particular story affected many places in the application and usual smoke testing was not enough. So we are going to introduce a new class of service (let’s call it  “technically complex story” so far :) which would mean more in-depth testing and verification before the merge.

In general, Cumulative Flow chart is a valuable tool to analyze historical data, but for emergency bottleneck identification Kanban Board is even better. If you have limits on Kanban Board, you see problems immediately.

January 13/14 is the Old New Year holiday. Seems like today is the latest appropriate time to look back  and recall the most interesting blog posts by TargetProcess in 2009 :)

Based on visitors count, the posts are ranked as follows (descending order):

1. Lean and Kanban Software Development Digest: In May 2009, this digest came along right on time as Kanban adoption started to grow. We’ve been sifting through the Lean/Kanban buzz and considering if Kanban might be a good tool for our development process, so this post has the most valuable findings we’ve made and shared with agile community.

2. Refactoring vs Rewrite: This post is a real train of thought of a Product Owner trying  to make a decision on how to proceed with product development — rewrite or refactor. Can well be used in textbooks for software product management :)

3. Mind Maps: Scrum, Extreme Programming, Lean: Another by-product of our research on agile development processes. The specific value of mind maps is that they help grasp complex things with visual representations.

4. Tale: Deadline and Technical Debt: Once upon a time…  Who could ever expect that the fundamental principles of product management can be outlined in a fairy tale ? :) There we go:  smart Arthur, the cunning king, quest for princess — the metaphorical expression of the danger of technical debt in software development.

5. 5 Wrong Reasons to Apply Kanban. For some reason (no pun intended), 5 wrong reasons ranked higher than 5 right reasons. Maybe it’s just human psychology — to go from “what’s wrong”  instead of  ”what’s right” …

6. How We Use Kanban Board. The Real Example:  Once we figured that Kanban process is just the right thing for us and put it in action, we shared this  experience with our blog readers.

7. 5 Right Reasons to Apply Kanban: There they are :)

8. Zero Defects? Are You Kidding Me? : Can this juicy frog be sure that it swallowed the very last bug? This post is a warning against the so-called “zero defects mentality” in software product management.

9. Simple Rules, Complex Systems and Software Development: Complex systems function at their best when guided by simple rules. Look at ants, birds, space rockets and … software development.

10. BDD and User Story Specification: Examples — This post includes some real user story specs in BDD for TargetProcess product. Enjoy and use.

These are the TOP 10 posts  in 2009 from TargetProcess agile blog (click here for more)

Happy OLD NEW YEAR! :)

Kanban is becoming a popular agile tool. Indeed it is very good for software projects of certain types. However, there is a danger of false reasons behind Kanban adoption.

#1. User Stories Diversity

“Our stories vary in size a lot from 1 point to 40 points. Large stories just do not fit into an iteration”

It is very easy to say you can’t split user stories, thus iterations should be abandoned. An easy solution is not the best one. There is something important behind the fact you can’t split stories. Most likely you don’t know how to split stories right. It is quite hard from the beginning and demands creativity.

Moreover, according to Queueing Theory, it is better to have small stories with roughly equal size. Small batches with equal size improve flow (and you have a better and more predictive cycle time). So in Kanban you still have to split stories to smaller stories and try to make them equal size.

#2. Failed Iterations

“We can’t complete most stories in a single iteration”

There may be many, many reasons behind. Mini-waterfall approach, velocity greed, large stories, manual testing, poor stories description, etc. You may even have a wrong iteration length. For example, in large projects 1 week iteration may be an overhead with a huge transaction cost. So 1 month iteration may be much better in this case.

You need to analyze true reasons, the roots of the problem.

#3. Failed Retrospective Meetings

“Retrospective meetings are waste, they do not help in process improvement and we want to remove them”

You just don’t do these meetings right. One popular failure is no Action Items after the meeting. Without action items a Retrospective Meeting is just a kind of informal chat that you may have over a glass of beer. You meet, chat about your problems, and get back on the same track next day. Rule #1 is to collect and write the list of Action Items that you will try to accomplish during the next Sprint [or any other time box].

One more  common pitfall is to skip action items execution. You may collect them, but not really try. You may even try them, but abandon too quickly. Almost all new rules or practices put you off the comfort zone. It takes time to learn them, use them and like them (or dislike), but it should be an expert opinion, not just a gut feeling.

If you expect that you will replace failed retrospective meetings with a nice and simple “stop the line” rule, you’ll fail, since it is even harder than scheduled regular retrospectives and demands even higher level of self-discipline.

#4. Shared People / Functional Departments

“We have a single pool of developers and share them between projects. We can’t form stable project teams”

Do you really think that Kanban will solve your social and organizational problems? C’mon! It helps to visualize flow and find bottlenecks, but if you don’t have a cross-functional team — you have hard times. It is proven in so many sources and researches that cross-functional teams perform better, produce better results and better software.

If you are experiencing difficulties planning sprints with shared pool of developers, try to fix the root of the problem first – switch to cross-functional teams and eliminate multi-tasking.

#5. Simplicity

“Kanban is so simple! No plans, no estimations, no iterations, no overhead”

Indeed Kanban looks simple. But it provides nothing interesting by itself. To ensure a successful Kanban adoption, you need to apply Lean principles first. This new buzzword may sound like a silver bullet, but obviously it  is not. Hard work, discipline, target on perfection and constant improvements – all that is required to apply any agile methodology.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that Kanban is bad. We use it within TargetProcess and I personally believe it works way better than iterative development (for us).  I just want to make a point that you’d hardly resolve all your underlying problems as you switch to Kanban.

P.S. I usually don’t read posts like “10 reasons to …” Can’t believe I wrote such post myself! :)
P.P.S. Read next post 5 right reasons to apply Kanban.