Archive for the ‘Scrum’ Category
Have you read the manifesto?
I sometimes wonder whether people have actually even read the Agile manifesto. It is made of four core values and 12 principles, I won’t paste them all here, you can find them at the above link. Maybe the principles are hard to find, but you can read them here.
That’s all there is to it. Agile isn’t a “framework” or a “methodology”, if anything, it’s common sense. Common sense described in four values and 12 principles.
Agile is not a synonym for scrum, or kanban, or anything else. The term “Agile” shouldn’t be used as a description of an all encompassing set of practices that it doesn’t describe. For example, what does “Agile adoption” even mean in this context? Does it mean you’ve finally decided to use common sense? No, it means a company is adopting a framework or methodology that is inspired by the Agile manifestos values and principles, such as Scrum.
Agile is a mindset, a way of being. So please, stop posting things about how “Agile has failed”, or “Agile does damage” unless you actually mean that common sense has failed, or common sense has caused damage. Which is unlikely.
Remember, you don’t DO agile, you ARE agile, it’s a way of being, not something you do.
Estimating stories quickly and efficiently with ‘The Rules’
ticktickticktickBING - An Old Timer by hiro008 on Flickr
Estimating a backlog should be easy, especially if your Product Owner has looked after it, knows how to write good stories that mean something to the developers and the business and is able to prioritize based on business value (or, customer delight!). However, estimation meetings, poker planning, planning two or whatever you call it, can often be painful events that descend into chaos, anarchy and heated debate. While these things are all fun, estimation should be fast and simple, afterall applying arbitrary numbers, whose only measure is relatively sized, to amorphous items of work can’t be rocket science, so why would you want to spend much time on it?
Trouble is, developers and engineers are paid to solve problems, that’s what they love to do, so they begin the moment the problem is presented! This is to be applauded, but doesn’t really nail what should be fast conversations about stories!
We’ve recently been coarse estimating the next releases’ worth of stories for each if our products, the backlogs for these products contain between eight and 38 stories, depending on the goal. When we started estimating these, it was clear that it was going to be painful, so I created ‘The Rules’ (to be clear, they’re guidelines, remember the Shu Ha Ri!):
- Reset the countdown timer to five minutes.
- Product Owner reads story and acceptance criteria.
- Team ask questions to clarify their understanding of the feature. No technical discussion.
- When no more questions, the team estimates.
- If estimates converge or there is consensus, GOTO 1 and start a new story.
- If no consensus, start more discussion. Technical discussion is OK here.
- When the conversation dries up, or the time ends, whichever is first, the team estimates again.
- If estimates converge or there is consensus, GOTO 1 and start a new story.
- If a consensus isn’t reached, reset the time for another five minutes.
- When the conversation dries up, or the time ends, whichever is first, the team estimates again.
- If a consensus still hasn’t been reached after 10 minutes, put a question mark next to the story and GOTO 1 and start a new story.
- Optionally: create a spike story to discover more information in order to estimate the difficult story.
The Definition of Ready
Well, I’ve only gone and got myself published on the Agile Journal! Here is what I had to say:—–
Are you ready? Image by Kevin Dooley on Flickr
Development teams use the idea of a definition of done (DoD) to decide when they think a user story is ready to be shown to the stakeholder for review. The DoD is like a bouncer or doorman, ticking technical criteria off on a list before the story is allowed in to party. The DoD is a powerful tool, and while its explicit value is obvious in ensuring the quality of a user story before review, its implicit value is equally, if not more, important. The DoD forms a contract between the development team and the product owner (PO). This contract not only ensures that stories meet a baseline of quality but it also creates a bond of trust. The PO knows that, with a DoD, he can trust the team to deliver a quality technical solution, and in agile software development, trust is key to your success. The acceptance criteria form a similar bond between the PO and the stakeholder or business. The criteria are designed to help a PO decide if a story meets the stakeholder’s requirements. It’s this list—defined in conjunction with the stakeholder—that creates trust on the stakeholder’s side. They know that their PO will deliver what they need, because it says so on the story. The DoD and the acceptance criteria combine to make a powerful ally for your team’s success. But both of these things require that the user story itself is sensibly written and defined and that the acceptance criteria aren’t some magical pie-in-the-sky, moon-on-a-stick list of ridiculous demands that would give a hostage negotiator nightmares! The PO can make use of a similar DoD called the definition of ready (DoR). This can be used for all the same reasons the DoD is used for the team. It’s useful if the Scrum team helps the PO come up with a DoR, help her define things about stories that make them easy to understand:
- small enough to be manageable in a sprint
- contain enough detail to estimate accurately and
- create acceptance criteria that really help define “done.”
POs don’t just pluck an idea out of the air, write a user story, and drop it onto the backlog (we hope). Stories go through a process just like the software they drive does. The PO has a responsibility to the team to create user stories for them to estimate and, at some stage, work on, that aren’t badly defined or not thought through. Team members don’t want to have to do a bunch of the PO’s work in order for them do their own work and deliver value. To this end, a PO and the Scrum team might find the DoR useful. This is a contract that the PO has with the team in order to say “Before I put a story in front of you, I will have done everything I can do make it not suck.” Some examples of criteria on a DoR are:
- Story contains actors, problem, and value
- Story should fit in a sprint
- Story should be appropriately documented (does it require wireframes? User-journeys?)
- Value should be obvious, if not, it should be explicitly stated
- Story should have reasonable conditions of satisfaction
- Story should focus on problems, not solutions
Using the above example, we could ensure that the user story: Show users other products that they can buy before they checkout which begins life as a throwaway request from a stakeholder at an audio-visual online storecan be rewritten using the DoR as: As a customer, I would like to see products that I might like to buy at the same time as my television, hi-fi, or other product, so that I can be certain I have everything I need. Acceptance Criteria:
- Show users products that other customers, purchasing the same products as this user has chosen, have bought also
- Based on what the user has added to his basket, show him products that could potentially be used with it, e.g., if he has chosen a TV, then show him cables, TV stands, and Blu-Ray players
- Show ratings and percentage of customers who ended up adding the additional products to their basket.
This shows the actor, problem, and value for the customer. The value for the business is implicit in that it will increase uplift. The story is appropriately documented with reasonable acceptance criteria, however it doesn’t tell the developers how it should be done technically. I’m a big fan of release planning meetings. These meetings include going over the team’s DoD to see if there are any changes team members want to make in conjunction with the PO or stakeholders before they start sprinting. This is an ideal time to create your DoR as well. In addition to the explicit value you get from having a contract between the Scrum team and the PO, the DoR also goes a long way to fostering trust (as long as the PO follows through) in the same way that the DoD and the acceptance criteria do. If you have a bad sprint, during the retrospective, you can review your DoD and your DoR. Did the story require more work before it went into the sprint backlog? The DoR provides a similar yardstick to that of the DoD when looking for root causes of failure. Try adding a DoR to your process, especially if you’re having trouble with your stories being difficult to estimate or work on. You’ll reap benefits immediately, building trust and creating stories that have real value.
Lower the pain threshold and you’re not waiting, you’re impeded.
Jenny by jamesfischer on Flickr
Women, it is said, have a higher pain threshold than men. I saw evidence of this as I watched my wife give birth … twice. She went through something that I can’t even imagine having to endure. I’d have screamed ‘epidural!’ the moment the first contraction hit, but then I am known to be a bit of a wuss. My wife however, gritted her teeth and got on with it, I’ve never been more proud.
I’ve witnessed a similar thing with scrum teams. Some of the teams I coach have an extremely high pain threshold when it comes to dealing with impediments. It’s often been one or two days later that I’ve even heard about the impediment, let alone had a chance to deal with it. I suspect this might happen in other teams too and it’s worrisome; it may mean that the team doesn’t believe their SM will be able to remove the impediment (which would illustrate a trust issue and is the subject of another post), it might be a show of machismo to tough out the impediment themselves and resolve it without bothering anyone. This is an honourable motive, but chaps, this isn’t 12th century Japan, if you need help, you can, and should, ask for it. Understanding when you’re impeded and recognising the need to seek help is a more macho thing than flexing your muscles and baring your teeth, it also makes the ladies swoon*.
However, the most likely reason that people don’t raise the issue, is the team simply don’t see it as an impediment in the first place. In standups, or in just day-to-day team chat, the term “I’m waiting for…” crops up quite frequently, usually in reference to the design or operations team. This term is poisonous, it’s a pseudonym for “I’m impeded by…” and teams don’t recognise this is the case.
If you’re waiting for something to occur before you can do something else, you’re impeded by it and your best course of action, if you’re unable to un-impede it yourself, is to raise it to your SM (or your coach. 
) and have them try and remove the block for you. Next time you catching yourself saying “I’m waiting for…” remember, you’re impeded.
Don’t tough it out, leave the high pain threshold stuff to the mothers of the world, they’re much better at it.
*Probably, I have no data for this, I made it up.
Should I start with scrum, or kanban?
or, Should I transition from scrum to kanban?
Adventure lies EVERYWHERE! Image by Daniel Voyager
We’ve been doing scrum at Affiliate Window for a couple of years now. We go through the inspect and adapt cycle regularly and we’ve made few, if any, changes to our process, only our engineering practices. Recently, however, we’ve been working on a couple of projects which have required some groundwork and lots of backend work. This kind of work doesn’t really lend itself to the ideal of having something to show the stakeholders at the end of every iteration. We still have the review, describe what we’ve done and then take a look at the backlog with the stakeholders to decide what the priorities are for the next iteration.
This has raised a question from one of the teams about moving over to kanban and it got me thinking about what organisations can do to start on an agile journey, should they start with scrum, or kanban? What about established teams? Can they transition from scrum to kanban, or vice versa? Why should they? Should they even do it?
Now, there’s no reason why you can’t continue doing scrum (which is what we’ve decided to do), even with backend heavy work. Afterall, it’s simply a framework designed to offer constraints in order to create fast feedback (amongst other benefits), but kanban is attractive in that it allows you to decide when you demo/review and so gives you the benefit of time in order to actually have something tangible to show the stakeholders. Kanban is also attractive for those coming to agile afresh. It allows you to start integrating some agile practices and get a view of your issues (in order to solve them) without changing your heirarchy or existing process.
For Kanban to really work, you need to make sure you’re setting up a pull system that describes your entire process, from inception to delivery – not just a column based todo board (which, unfortunately, you see a lot described as ‘kanban’). To be able to do kanban well and retain the holistic view of your work required by the product team to make educated guesses on delivery and suchlike, the team needs to be mature enough to do kanban well. This means; mapping out the different states in your system, working out WIP limits and, importantly, deriving cycle time (how long it takes an item on the board to get from left to right) in order to estimate delivery/scope/cost etc. Herein lies the rub (I’ve always wanted to put that in a blogpost!).
If you’re not able to use scrum to help you deliver backend-heavy, large work items, then it’s unlikely that kanban can help either. The constraints of scrum help you stay on target and be accountable for what you have or haven’t done and make tweaks and adjustments to perform better in the coming iterations. Once you’ve nailed scrum and you have a product backlog with well defined stories, which are easily estimatable, then you’re ready to mature to a really valuable, efficient and data-driven kanban implementation. Eventually, when you’re able to size your stories all the same, you can do away with estimating as your cycle time will remain constant. Allowing you to set regular reviews and inspect/adapt cycles. You’re one step closer to programmer anarchy!
So, should you start with scrum, or kanban? Kanban allows you to start your agile journey without upsetting the status quo; you don’t change any names, or add/remove roles. You simply illustrate your process on a big visible board and become accountable, as a team and a company for the work you do. You can implement any agile practise you like (standups, backlogs, user stories, etc) and see how they work for you without rocking the boat. Scrum, on the other hand, requires a reboot and an installation of a new process, one with constraints *built in*, but the benefits are numerous and valuable right off the bat.
Should you start with scrum, or kanban? The answer, I think, is ‘it depends’. If your organisation, including those at the top are comfortable with scrapping your current process and starting something new, even with it’s inevitable lead time, then go for it. Use scrum and the constraints will help you become agile. If your organisation is reticent to start, or you have buy-in from teams, but not the business, then start with kanban. It’s lightweight and non-intrusive and will still allow you to raise your impediments and issues (but solving them often requires bold and honest action, beware!).
Should teams transation from scrum to kanban? Probably, but make sure it is for the right reasons and that your team is mature enough to make the most of it, if you’re not sure, then try transitioning via scrum-ban, it’ll help you see the benefits and enable you to get better at the things which make kaban most useful, without changing more than you are comfortable with.
I’d be interested to know how others started their agile journey, or whether many transition from scrum to kanban (or the other way). Drop me a mail, tweet or leave a note in the comments!
Failing sprints? Decompose your stories to the nth degree
Is he about to fail his sprint? Image by Sebastian Mary
Recently I had a retrospective with one of my teams after two failed sprints. They cited unplanned tasks as one of their issues and suggested that perhaps the scrum framework wasn’t right for the kind of project they’re currently doing.
To give some context, this is a long running team on a long running project with no kind of release windows. One mistake that we did make was that there wasn’t a ‘Sprint Zero’; a chance to look at the project as a whole and do some time-boxed up front planning for a sprint. However, we’ve entered two sprints without some knowledge of how we plan to do things and it’s caused bad sprints.
When we began to plan the current sprint. There were some ‘technical’ stories in the backlog, for large chunks of backend work which had other stories dependent on them. They were all estimated quite high, without acceptance criteria or the ‘As a …, I need …, so that … .’ stanza to support them. This is fine, the stanza is only important when it provides value and usually not for technical stories. One of the problems was not having acceptance criteria, so the first thing we did was to define those.
After that and to get to the crux of the post though, I asked :
Describe this story in high-level steps.
To which the team discussed what would be done to do each story, we defined the tasks at a high level (much like you would do when planning proper), but after each task was defined, I asked the team to estimate the tasks in story points. It was an eye-opener!
The tasks were all coming in with estimates of 2′s and 3′s. Which meant that, when the broken down, estimated tasks were added up, they were more than the original story. This usually happens, but it was an ‘Ahha!’ moment for the team. It allowed them to think more abstractly about the work. It’s not the plans that are valuable, but the planning!
To compound the issue, we’ve been getting hung up on the idea of each story delivering functionality which we can demo. While this is a noble goal, I’m sure it’s not always possible. This was causing huge estimates on stories and, as we know, bigger estimates mean lower accuracy on that estimate. With this constraint removed, the team breathed a sigh of relief and began writing stories which were meaningful and well sized. What actually came out of it is that, once we’d broken them down, we could see that for some of them, there actually were things we could demo; speed improvements on database queries and data integrity which DO provide value and so can be demoed.
Finally, when choosing the stories to add to the sprint, the team committed to work which they used their gut feel (and their velocity, but only as a guide) on what they could fit in. I went through each story asking, ‘Can we do this and all the previous stories?’ They committed to less than they would have had they just added the original stories. Meaning that, the non-decomposed stories were causing them to overcommit without recognising it.
So, if you’re failing sprints due to unplanned work cropping up and causing you to have over-committed, then ask for high level tasks on how to complete the story and estimate each of these tasks as if it were a story, you can go too far by decomposing each task to a story level, but if you’re finding this is the case, then your failed sprints probably aren’t caused by your stories.
Speaking at the London Global Scrum Gathering!
I’ve held off mentioning this until I got back from holiday, but I received this email while away:
Your submission, ”The Anatomical Dissection of a Sprint Backlog”, has been accepted into the programme for the London Global ScrumGathering on the 11th-13th of October 2011.
I’m so excited about this, you have no idea! So, if anyone has any great charts, graphs, hints, tips or ideas on how to use your sprint backlog, then let me know!
Agile core values: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Actual is not Normal
The four core value of the agile manifesto are values which I strive to live by, both at home and in my personal life (where it fits, my wife doesn’t care how I write a birthday card, just that I do (although, I suppose that fits too!)). It’s the very core of my job as an agile coach, so I though it was a bit time I wrote a few articles exploring them and what they mean.
I really should have posted this sooner, but, for some reason I haven’t. I think, mostly, because I realised that I needed to get a better understanding of what the values (and principles, but they’ll come later) really mean. While I recognise that being agile is not a destination, but a journey (cheesey, right? But true). I think my understanding of them is now deep enough to write about them, so, without further ado, I present the first in a set of four articles…
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
I struggle to believe that, in any organisation, there are people that think there is anything that is more valuable than it’s people. If you’re in one of those organisations, then, it’s probably time to look for a new job.
People are the one most important asset in any organisation and the key word here is ‘individuals’, no one wants clones working for them and the more diverse the people you work with are, the more satisfying and fruitful your work life should be. Having an interesting and diverse set of colleagues makes it that much easier to get up and go to work in the morning!
One of the mistakes that I often see made (and, unfortunately, perpetrated by a lot of online and digital scrum tools) is forcing yourself into using a process. It’s interesting to note that the two most popular agile methodologies don’t prescribe any particular process to follow with software development, but people believe that they do. Kanban, for example, is not just a board with a ‘todo’, ‘in progress’ and ‘done’ columns. Each column marks a step in your process. The process you already have. Scrum also doesn’t tell you how to build your sprint backlog, instead, it just says you should have one and is quiet on what you should put on it (with the exception of the sprint burndown, but that isn’t a process, just a tool).
Most companies will already have a process for the way they write software before they begin their journey toward being agile. Sometimes it might be as simple as describe, develop, deploy. Other times it will involve review, QA, regression, analysis etc etc. When you start your agile journey stick with the process you have, don’t make things harder for yourself by changing too much. Introduce the framework of choice and use it to help you see where your problems lie. Then, slowly, organically and by small, incremental changes begin to adapt the process you have into one that allows you to align with the agile principles and create great software (or any other product for that matter).
The point of this is that, really, the process doesn’t matter so much as the people using and creating the process. The tools they use don’t matter as much as the indiviuals working together to create the process and create, or use tools which support their endeavours. Having a process is important, but not as important as the people in your organisation using your process and adapting it to suit their needs in order to attain the principles of being agile. Having tools is important, if they’re the right tools, but not as important as how you use them and what you use them for.
If you’re somebody looking to implement agile in your organisation, or someone trying to make your organisation adhere closer to the agile ideals, then empower your people to improve themselves and their process and then leave them to it.
Hire good people, then get out of their way.
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So, that’s the first core value. Next time, working software over comprehensive documentation.
Adding a timeline to your sprint backlog
I like retrospectives, actually, I love retrospectives. Especially retrospectives that really get to the root of any problems the team are having and then get a great solution or at least something to try. The trouble is, retrospectives can often be stale, how many times have you been in a retrospective and had this:
So, um, yeah, good sprint, I think everything went well, didn’t it? I had a problem with some testing, but I fixed it. What was it? I can’t remember. Something to do with fixtures, but it got done.
The problem with memories is that they’re fallible. Who can remember what you did two days ago, let alone a week ago. Certainly me and, it appears, neither can the teams I coach. There are things, you can do to make retrospectives better, but this wasn’t so much a problem with the retrospective as a problem with memory. So, what did the teams do? Added a timeline to their sprint backlog. It’s quite simple really. Create a grid on the bottom and, in every standup, discuss whether anything happened yesterday that could be added to the board. The idea is to get key things on there, so, stuff that went wrong, stuff you noticed or learnt, good stuff; use it as a way to remember the timeline of the sprint. When you get to the retrospective, you’ll then have an entirely different conversation than the one above.
Timelines FTW
Some of the teams have gone a step further and added an arrow to remind them which day of the sprint it is and even added holidays/absences. What do your teams do to remember their iteration?
In response to: Refactoring The Scrum Lexicon
This is a comment I posted on Jordan Bortz’s blog in response to Refactoring The Scrum Lexicon (read this first). Apparently, it was too long as a comment. Jordan says:
Your reply is way too long To approve and aside from that, you just trot out the standard stuff….. If you have a shorter comment that is somehow relevant, that is fine, but all you are saying really is that we should just do it the way scrum wants and there is nothing unique or value added there
Still, here it is anyway:
Hi, I’ve subscribed to your blog as there’s some great posts here, but some of this one seems a little … contrary.
I totally agree with your chicken and pig comments, but I think that, if you understand the context, it’s not that insulting. You’ve worked with engineers right? They call each other much, MUCH worse.
The daily scrum is a name I have no opinion for. You could call it the daily ballet and I wouldn’t care, it’s the content that counts. Most teams I’ve coached call it a standup.
I don’t mind scrum master, but team leader or team advocate is the WRONG title. I don’t lead the teams I’ve been SM for. I’m merely a facilitator and a tool to be used for removing impediments/buying donuts.
Continuing your marathon analogy, you could run a marathon with a series of sprints. Then stop, have a bottle of sports juice and see how well you did. Then repeat. If you’re fit enough to run a marathon, you’re fit enough to sprint it in stages and that’s the point. After each sprint, you have evidence on how well you did which will indicate how well you *could* do. I prefer iteration over sprint however, because I don’t have to explain iteration to people.
Sonja hit the nail on the head, the backlog is a prioritised list of user stories with acceptance criteria and estimates. That cannot be said of a todo list or feature list although, it doesn’t preclude those from being the same.
Finally, I totally disagree with your last point. A commitment is not a guarantee that the work will be done, just a commitment that the team will focus on getting that work done during the iteration, if they don’t, they don’t, but they’ve committed to getting it done and that’s what is important. There are real psychological reasons for doing this. Best efforts sounds like an excuse and projection sounds like a feature of a gantt chart. Commitments are one of the foundations of doing scrum correctly, removing that term will make it less clear what is going on.
I’m not entirely sure on your reason for suggesting these changes. Scrum and the framework should be judged on delivered working software. Not on whether the management agrees with or understands the nomenclature. By making it more professional, or more like traditional management will make it that more difficult to adopt. Scrum is often a radical change and requires decisive action to implement, it cannot be a gradual change from one methodology to another, it will ‘surface organisational dysfunction’ and for that, it needs to stand alone in order to be understood as not just a slight modification to what we’re doing, but a completely different way of doing things, regardless of whether that is true, that is what people will see when it starts shining a light in the cracks of dysfunction.
