Agile Planning in 3 SImple Questions

Should We Do It

Can We Do It

Will We Do It

Answer these three questions before you start on any large initiative

Asking Should we do it starts a conversation around whether this is strategically aligned with our goals and objectives.

Asking Can we do it then moves the conversation to whether or not it’s technically feasible, what types of architectural enablers might we have to invest to deliver on this idea?

Once we have answered the Can we do it then we need to move onto the important aspect that will drive the final decision do it — Cost.

Just because we CAN do something doesn’t mean we SHOULD. At one organization the business came to us with an awesome idea (no really it was) but when we told them that could take more than 20 sprints to accomplish (almost a year) the business said that it would be valuable to them if it was 4–6 sprints but not more than 20. This caused them to go back to the drawing board to refine their objective goals.

Once we evaluate the strategic alignment, technical feasibility, and the potential cost of initiatives, only then are we ready to pull the trigger to invest in this idea.

Asking the Will we do it, provides everyone an ability to confirm that this is the right decision and then make that investment decision transparent to the organization.

It may sound non-Agile in approach (it’s not Discovery is an important component) but before we invest our teams in large Initiatives we should take some time to assess whether that is a good idea to do it in the first place. Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should.

Lean/Agile - The Art of Doing Less

Our traditional ways of managing software development projects center around generating ideas that are deemed valuable and then attempting to estimate at a detailed level the effort involved by having a team of people work to document ‘all’ of the requirements up front before the project even begins. These projects often will take many months to complete before anything of value can be delivered to the business.

Agile focuses on delivering value as quickly as possible, often within 2 weeks to 2 months. Lean focuses on maximizing work not done, which combined with Agile speaks to doing less as a part of our delivery process.

But what do we mean by less when looking at taking on a large feature/product development effort? 

There are couple of ways that this comes into play:

1.   Software is often littered with features that someone thought would be important to the customer, yet fails to deliver the value (need) to the customer. Worse still this code becomes part of our legacy application, stuff we have to code around and test against regardless if the feature is being used or not.

2.     Often the perceived value of something changes once the project begins, causing the business to pull the plug on work before it is complete and anything of value can be derived by your software development team. This is costly both in terms if financing and employee happiness.

In both cases the business has expended money to have software developed with the end result being the business received reduced or no value.

When looking at Agile Product/Project Management we are asking the business to act not just as the agent of funding but as the consumer of the work as well. Too often the business is a distant or non-existent participant with respect to how their product is unfolding. Instead they rely on project plan updates that speak solely to progress against the agreed upon scope of the project at its inception over viewing what has actually been developed and delivered to date.

In an Agile setting business needs to review the work at regular touch points, often the Sprint review and actually see what is being developed. There is often a great difference between what the business ‘thinks’ they want and what they actually need. Seeing working software lets them see their idea in action, often with enlightening results. What they envisioned may not in fact be what they are seeing and more importantly not what they need (the value). They funded a Ferrari but maybe only needed a good old family sedan.

Business is typically missing in this very powerful process in Agile, a process which allows them to make course corrections and even stop working on features as soon as they reach their maximum value. 

At one large entertainment organization I worked for several years ago, the business had us working on a large rewrite of a heavily used widget that resided on hundreds of thousands of pages. After performing a Discovery and Story mapping session we determined that the work should be done in three releases. At the end of the first release the business reviewed what we had completed and decided that this was actually good enough and then pivoted us to working on an even more valuable redesign of a key customer facing web app.

In the waterfall days the work that we did for that first release would have been put on the shelf, the money invested would have delivered no value to the business. With Agile we were able to complete the work and deploy to production, providing the business real value for their investment. They made the decision to stop this work and move on to more valuable work.

The Art of Doing less is about developing more mature approaches to how your organization funds and manages work. Instead of funding projects fund your teams, allowing for work to flow to them over having them focus on managing project scope to the bitter end of the project.

Move away from believing you have to have fixed scope to one that understands that Agile is about powerful flexibility and maximizing the value of the work that we do, while minimizing the amount of legacy code we leave behind. 

A legacy system that is littered with large amounts of un-needed or under-utilized capabilities is code that is harder to scale, develop in and test against. When your teams talk to you about Tech Debt, this is what they are referring to and as a business you are both a direct owner and contributor to this reality.

The Art of Doing less brings with it a greater ability to maximize an organizations investment in its software and product development.

The focus for business should be on what is needed not what is wanted. Project funding models encourage asking for more than is needed so one of the first things you need to do is to move to a team based funding model. Develop a framework to assess value and risk so you can appropriately prioritize work as it flows through your teams.

Understand that each of your Scrum teams has a fixed cost (~40k per sprint), this should guide you further in questioning what you want your teams to work on.  At some point in time in most projects there comes a point where there is a diminishing value relative to the investment.  

Lean and the Art of Doing less requires changing your organizational mindset to understand there is also value in work NOT done.

Management and Agile - To Succeed or Not to Succeed

As more and more larger organizations look to Agile as a means of delivering software to their customers the one thing that keeps coming back to me is that for any of this to work there has to be transparency and acceptance that a move to Agile will change your organization, not understanding this will court almost inevitable failure. Agile in itself is an aspirational desire to change the way that we deliver software, one that does away with the project processes that evolved over the years from Waterfall.  I know that waterfall feels sound and safe with all of its up front business analysis, project planning, Steering Committees and that all important Change Management process, but in reality it really is more of a facade than foundation.

Having managed work and projects in both worlds I have seen how it all works.  Recently I was told (in an Agile organization) that Project Managers are responsible for delivery and it was at that point that my thoughts crystallized around my own journey, Project Managers don't deliver, Teams do.

At it's heart Agile is about everyone doing their part to make our product delivery better, whatever that looks like for your organization in that moment in time.  Agile by itself is not prescriptive, the Scrum/Lean techniques and processes that have evolved from our Agile journey may be a bit more prescriptive and become more so when we add things like Scrum certifications to people's palmares.  We need remember that one of the key reasons that the manifesto came into being was an intense desire to find better ways to deliver software, which means the journey has no end and certifications and such are merely ways for us to have a shared language.  Let me repeat, once you commence on your Agile 'journey' it doesn't have an end, you will always be evaluating what you can do better.

So back to the question at hand, to succeed or not to succeed in Agile, what needs to happen?

1. Trust - First and foremost we need to begin to build trust between Sr. Management and our Product Delivery teams.  If we have a history of delivering late, with fewer features and cost overruns it is really hard for that same management team to flip the switch once you say you are Agile and trust the very teams who haven't delivered in the past.  Trust is a two-way street and the great thing about Agile is that once you begin to master the techniques and methods that successful teams utilize trust is almost a by-product of that.
   1. Commitments - In Waterfall we are making a 'commitment' to deliver a set of value/features in a specified period of time based upon a business requirements document as guidance for what the business/customer is asking for.  When we make a commitment farther out into the future we become less and less accurate with our plans, it is the nature of the unknown unknowns in life.  Things change, they always do, so to expect that our business and software development teams, in today's ever-changing world, can predict 9-12 months in the future exactly what they are going to deliver is simply living in delusion.  Manage reality or it will manage you.  Commitments in Agile are much shorter in time, basically every 2 weeks.  These commitments however are based upon the Vision that YOU management need to provide.  You say you can't plan for the future every two weeks I would argue you can't plan much further out.  By planning and committing in shorter delivery increments, management get an opportunity to change direction without causing massive pain from already planned out work.  We need to be able to change direction or refocus efforts on the things that are most valuable to our business, not what we made big plans for last year that we thought we needed.  Locking in feature development that doesn't meet customer needs, simply wastes money and loses market share.  When teams make and keep their commitments to you, they gain confidence and you gain trust.
      1.  Context - In most waterfall projects we end up asking for absolutely everything we think we might need, when in reality sometimes 70% of what we asked for (or even less) is more than enough to meet the needs we were trying to address.  Focus on the most Valuable things your customer wants and move on to the next highest value work, not diminishing returns on things customers may not value as much as we might.  Teams want to work on what brings the most value to the organization, development teams when provided the transparency of why we need to do something can do amazing things.
   2. Self Organizing Teams - This one really causes I think the most concern for management.  You in essence are saying that the teams that you currently manage are better able to make decisions about how to delivery our products.  Guess what, they are.  These are people who work in the trenches every single day, know every single issue, impediment, risk, etc... associated with your current product delivery processes.  And every one of them has probably said something to the effect of, 'If I was in charge I'd to do X to fix this'.  I've been a Sr. Manager for many years and have built several high performing teams and one of the best things I can do for them is to provide guidance and vision for what I'm looking for and letting them solve the issues that deliver the solution.  I'm a smart guy but I don't have all of the answers and if you are the type of manager who believes that in order to be 'respected' you have to be the one to manage how Agile will change your product delivery processes you will fail personally and the organization will suffer as a whole.  Teams of people can solve major problems much more easily than one person can, so let them have the ability to self organize and empower them with making the necessary changes to improve your product delivery.
      1. Context - With great power comes great responsibility.  By ceding some level of daily control to your teams you are also doing so with the expectation that they deliver on what they commit to..  If they don't then they must provide a game plan based upon the Retrospective on how they will solve their inability to hit their commitments.
2. Investment - Agile won't come without an investment cost associated with it.  If like many large organizations you have a mess of legacy code mixed with attempts at migrating to newer technology stacks, business requirements and rules imbedded in code with tribal knowledge scattered through the organization.  Agile requires speed in your product development processes which translates into several investment areas:
   1. Automation - When we say automate we mean across the entire spectrum of the organization, if it can be automated you should probably evaluate whether it can/should be.  More specifically we want to automate:
      1. Unit Tests - Developers should be writing unit tests for everything they build, preferably using XP techniques such as TDD (Test Driven Development).  These are not really hard processes but if you are starting from scratch there is both discipline and framework that needs to be built-in order to get to a mature state for test automation.  Unit tests need to be executed with every build, because with that comes fast feedback if something broke, fix it early and you increase speed and profitability.
      2. Integration Tests - Probably one of the harder areas to get high levels of automation in, primarily because the organization hasn't invested in the appropriate product like test environments.  Be prepared in your Agile journey to spend heavily on getting the right environments in place and highly available.  Testing the performance of your system right before you deliver is a recipe for disaster and delays (remember time is money).
      3. Functional Tests - These are the tests management is probably most familiar with and may even have reviewed at one point or another.  These are typically the manual tests that QA will execute at the end of your waterfall project, where we are not baking in Quality but testing out defects.  Building high levels of automated testing at the functional level gets to what I call, Progressive Regression.  Instead of running a final full regression at the end of a 6-9 month project, why not do it every single night?  You will need to again invest in physical environments but also in people training as many in the QA world are not equipped to handle the new role of a Software Engineer in Test.
         1. Word of Caution - Don't rely only on Test Automation in your functional testing efforts, you still need real people with hands on testing capabilities because at the end of the day automated testing cannot always tell you when something is bad from an experience or product flow perspective.
      4. Deployments - One of the hardest things that teams fail at is planning for deployments to their environments.  Making your deployment process as frictionless as possible is a high value target for your organization.  Many organizations don't have a fully functional DevOps org and many in this field are still struggling to figure out how to operate in an Agile world.  Let them figure it out and provide them with the tools that will support automation of critical deployment processes and hold them accountable to doing it.  To many times we purchase tools and then never make the time to actually use them, invest and utilize, that is the key to your ROI.
      5. None of the above work comes without an investment in both hardware and people.  Current requirements processes will change substantially as you move to an Agile cadence.  People will struggle to find their way, some level of productivity reduction is expected in the beginning of an Agile transformation. You as a Leader need to set a clear vision of why the organization needs to change, make it clear that the teams have accountability to deliver the work that they commit to and that you as a leader have accountability to provide them with space to learn, fail and finally improve.  Successful Agile includes failure because without it we aren't really learning from our mistakes, rather hiding the truth.  Agile done right makes everything visible, especially who is accountable for what.
3. Patience - Nothing great was ever built-in a day or a week.  Odds are good that this will take more time than you thought it would, but also make it clear to the organization that an Agile death march is not something that you are taking on either.  Agile is about accountability and commitment, use these values to your benefit and identify those that simply can't or won't work in an Agile environment.

From a management perspective you need to understand your role in the success of any Agile transformation, it must also change the way you look at and manage your business.

Baking In Quality with Agile

One of the things that I love about Agile and especially the related techniques of BDD and Test Automation is that if done correctly your teams are essentially baking Quality into your products AS they develop, not after. Traditional SDLC (read waterfall) took a very linear approach to project delivery which in turn translated into a similar approach to how we developed and delivered our software products.

In our traditional delivery methods, quality was not 'baked' in but tested out and we never ever got to the point where we are able to test out all of the 'defects' that are found, instead we create a bug database where 'bugs' go to die.  Every organization typically has some form of a bug database with bugs that were 'found' sometimes years ago and were never fixed (of course begging the question were they ever bugs in the first place?)  In Agile we really don't want to see a bug database because we should be instilling a zero defect policy for each sprint, meaning that we should never be introducing new tech debt into our product.

As I progressed on my Agile journey I came to realize that there are actually two types of 'bugs' that we encounter when we develop software:

1. Bugs as Missed or Undefined Requirements
2. Bugs as True Bugs

-- Bugs as Missed or Undefined Requirements - I will argue (and in a book that I am starting to write about this topic) that a majority of the bugs that we find and document aren't really bugs at all, but rather functionality that has been misinterpreted based upon the requirements definition that comes out of segregated development processes, ie Write Requirements, Develop Software, Test Software and Deploy Software.

Language is such an imprecise way of communicating that it almost virtually guarantees that if you have more than 1 person developing the software for your product you will get different interpretations of how to implement the requirement functionally.

Remember the old 'The System Shall' statement? that is commonly used in writing Business Requirements documents?  I always thought that this missed the scope of the requirement, what about what the System Shall Not Do?.  We focus so much on happy path for our functional development that we miss large segments of functionality based upon what an application shouldn't be allowed to do.

Let's take an example of an English word to convey what I'm meaning:

What do you think of when you see the word - BASS

Do you think of this:

OR this?

These have the same spelling in the English language yet they have two entirely different meanings. Our life experiences become a prism for how we interpret what we read and how we react to it. (PS, I'm a musician so I think of the instrument before the fish)

Teams that rely on written requirements documents that are reviewed and worked on independently, meaning developers develop the code/functionality and then pass it on to testers will inherently have issues/bugs related to how something was interpreted and then developed.  In the above example the developers may have thought they were delivering a bass guitar, but the testers were expecting a bass fish (yeah extreme I know) but I believe this is the root of many of our issues when trying to deliver what the business expected in the first place.

-- Bugs as True Bugs - I believe that true bugs are more technical than functional (or should be).  Bugs related to how integration happens are very common because although we can describe the behavior of our feature we can't always anticipate issues related to how independent systems will work together.  Many 'true' bugs in Agile are caught in the moment and fixed before they ever make their way to production.  For the Finance people out there this is a tremendous cost saving that has been proven time and again.  ROI is greatly enhanced when you deal with tech debt up front rather over time.  And please don't ever think really that it is more important to get 'something' to production over making sure that the product is operationally sound.

So what to do?

To address the  inherent limitations with our  communication, we need to abstract our thinking into more concrete descriptions of behavior over broad-based statements such as the System Shall.

User Stories and the corresponding BDD acceptance criteria are a great way to do this as a BDD example table clearly defines the behavior of our product functionality via outcome based upon inputs.  The 'language' of BDD is unique so that everyone can begin to have a shared understanding of what the story and behavior of the product(aka system) will do.  BDD abstracts our communication and removes individual interpretation.

In Agile we start by ensuring that the teams understand that they OWN the quality of their delivery. One of the things that I absolutely love about high performing Agile team is that there is no finger-pointing, if a Sprint fails to deliver what the team committed to then everyone shares the blame, not just an individual or functional group.

How we bake quality into our products is by understanding how to write User Stories that provide context without the ability to misinterpret the meaning of the requirements.

To do this we must first ensure that we have a well written user story, what does that look like?

A good user story needs to identify the What and then the Value statement.  Many teams that I have worked with start to write stories that only identify the actor and What but leave out the value statement, which is really the proof that what we are working on is of sufficient value to devote our resources to.  A good user story should never have any Creative or Technical design conveyed, I know that many people like to show their technical knowledge by writing stories that convey what they think the design or system will need to utilize, but all that does is start the team down a path before exploring all options.

Behavior over language interpretation is what you are striving for when writing contextually rich user stories.

BDD with its accompanied Example statements takes an otherwise basic user story and brings it to life.  Much like we do when we take basic ingredients for cookies and then bring them together in the right amounts to deliver awesomeness every time.

Software quality is much like baking, you need:

• The right ingredients - Good individual team members, honest communication, commitment to quality
• The right process - Write good user stories, add quality BDD acceptance criteria, code and test in parallel and then deliver, involve the entire team in writing BDD, involve the entire team in the estimation process.

By taking the time to build contextually rich user stories and define the story with BDD acceptance you move towards a shared understanding of the 'behavior of your product' over one that is driven by functional requirements.  Requirements tend to convey to little of behavior and focus more on the big win that is being conveyed to Sr. Management regarding what is being delivered.

Agile is a very disciplined delivery process and in order to bake the quality into your product you need to develop efficient processes that keep the User Story/BDD train running smoothly.  If you are entering a sprint and then writing your BDD then you are already behind, you need to develop a process by which teams are working on current sprint development AND building context for the next one.  It can be done and when it is you get what I call progressive regression with the automation that comes out of your BDD work.

Agile is very disciplined and to think that going Agile will make your current life easier, well guess again.  What Agile will do is highlight EVERY current weakness you have in your current product delivery process and then focus your attention on finding ways of improving on them.

For those of you looking for workshops regarding User Story/BDD techniques, please reach out to me at soundagile@gmail.com.

Agile Planning - I have a need a need for speed

Working at Disney a number of years ago was in so many ways transformative for me (not sure why I left) because it provided me with an opportunity to work with an organization that needed to get better at delivering software for our partners and we ended up choosing Agile as our path. Disney was the place where I had the opportunity to help build an Agile process from Requirements to Delivery and what we discovered was that we needed to develop an effective planning process that allowed us to build a solid backlog of work before we just started coding.  I here that so often in organizations that are just starting to adopt Agile.  I think a statement I heard recently is descriptive of organizations that just start coding - Shoot and Point.

Disney is a largely creative driven organization (Not surprising) and because of this we typically had a disconnect between our creative (UX) groups and the Product Delivery teams.  The UX team primarily worked independently of the PD teams and as was the case when I arrived, UX would deliver a creative design that didn't align to our technical capabilities.  This is a common issue in today's web development environment.

Our first 'Release' Planing went very poorly and after a round of retrospectives we came up with a format that at first pass you would say wasn't Agile (trust me we used that phrase a lot in the early days of our becoming Agile).  But in the end this first step of Discovery ended up being what I believe is the most critical element of being able to go fast in Agile.

The basic process that we ended up with was as follows:

• Pre-Discovery - Sr level PD, PO, UX, Marketing and other Stakeholders would review a specific new feature that was being considered. The group would utilize several tools such as Mind Mapping to understand the scope, parameters and potential dependencies at a high level.  If the feature work was approved then we went to the next phase.
• Discovery - Depending uponthe the size of the potential project Scrum teams and extended stakeholders would meet to go through a low-level review for that feature development.  For many of our larger efforts it was not uncommon for us to sequester the teams into a room to work through the entire effort, UX to QA to Delivery.
  • Process
    • Kick off - Have your PM or PO along with the key stakeholder(s) of the effort describe WHY this feature is so important.  We learned in our process development that it helped our PD teams to have an understanding as to why this feature was important to the organization.  It helped them feel connected to the value that was being delivered and not simply code jockeys running a race.
    • Competitive Review - Another great exercise was to have the entire team go out and find competitive features that we either did or didn't like and describe why.  This helped the next phase of our Discovery process as we worked to define what our feature sets would ultimately look like
    • UX and Story Development - This was the primary scope of our Agile workshops.  Typically led by the UX lead for the project we would begin developing low-fi wireframes and discuss the issues, constraints and code complexity that the low-fi would entail.  We discovered in this process that we could work through the types of issues that come much later in a typical product delivery effort.
      • Outcomes -
        • UX ended up with designs that they could utilize to develop prototypes that would be used in User testing prior to any significant development work being completed.  This allowed changes to UX to be found at the very beginning of the PD process rather than at the end when refactoring consumes a much larger amount of time and leads to lower quality of code.
        • PD ended up with a solid design at the beginning of the PD process which led to high quality code and higher levels test automation.
        • QA ended upon with an ability to write higher quality acceptance criteria which lead to high quality in the delivery and higher levels of test automation (sensing a theme here?)
        • User Story development was done during the Discovery phase and with it I was able to have a fairly accurate model to predict the number of stories at the beginning of the Discovery phase (typically between 100-120 higher level Epics, we strove for stories to be between 21-34 points in this phase as PD would start fairly quickly after the discovery phase 2-3 weeks) and how many that would translate into for a full project (typically 350 - 400).  This provided me with input as to how many BDD acceptance criteria would come out of this as we used a marker to determine when a story should be broken down - More than 7 variables in the BDD would be an indication that it's time to think about breaking down the story and more than 14 tests in a single test scenario would also trigger the conversation of whether to add a scenario to a story or create a new story.
          • Benefit - Keeping your BDD test automation in small increments makes it much easier to understand what broke, who probably broke it and what is needed to fix it.

I know this doesn't 'Sound' Agile (like the name of my company), but in my experience doing this small amount of work up front does provide teams the base to go really fast once the PD process begins.

I have used this process now for many years and when we do it right it's like writing a symphony, all of the moving pieces make beautiful music.  When it isn't done right, then all you get is noise.

This process probably does work for larger and more complex organizations over small organizations, but really would you start building a house with no blueprints and no idea of what you wanted?  If you had builders just show up and you told them I need a house to live in and I need it fast you will get that, but I doubt it will be anything that you want. And in reality it wouldn't be done fast as they probably wouldn't have the right materials scheduled to arrive at the right time.  I have my roofing supplies but the foundation company can't some for a month, see what I am getting at?

Slow down a bit, understand what you want, how to get it and then go fast to get it.

Agile Planning and Delivery

Agile is often viewed as the way that small organizations and teams can build product quickly and in fact I believe that to be true. Being quick and nimble allows smaller/growing organizations the ability to get into a market quickly and deliver features that larger organizations haven't delivered yet or haven't thought of.

This very ability to deliver new features to a market that desires them is the very reason that larger organizations need to change the way that they deliver their product.  As an organization becomes larger, the entropy that comes from that growth causes the organization to stop being a market leader and start being a market follower.

In the technological world we live in, you can go from market leader to out of business in just a few short years.  I read an article recently that suggests that Walmart is starting to show signs that its dominance in retail may be coming to an end.  I wouldn't be surprised, as I think they have lost sight of the fact that low prices don't always solve the things we as consumers value.  Walmart isn't a market leader anymore, they may just not have come to that realization.

It's this lag in reality when big companies start falling behind  Somewhere along the way almost every organization will lose its way, lose site of the very thing that caused them to be great in the first place.

When you look around in the Agile learning space you see many of the original creators of Agile and Scrum trying to figure out how to help large organizations get past their own entropy.  I don't think that Agile can help, it can highlight where your planning and delivery processes are inefficient but it doesn't provide the language that senior management needs to hear in order to effect real change.

If we want to help organizations transform and be 'agile' then we need to speak in the langauge of management, which is money.  I've yet to have a cogent conversation with management regarding how their lack of focus costs them money and more importantly fails to deliver the speed to market that they need in order to stay market leaders.

If you think that Agile provides you with a means to quickly change product direction in order to play defense or catchup when new features that you have been planning on are released by a competitor, then you are missing the point.  Agile does accept that change will happen, but we expect that the change will take the form of measured change in how we can make the product more valuable, not wholesale changes in direction.

Changing direction within a Sprint is something I've seen several times and it's almost always driven by management.  Whether you have too many idea's/opportunities or are just trying to stay relevant give you team time to work on one thing at a time.  Context switching reduces productivity and that you can translate into money.

The example I've been using recently is this:

If you managed your Sprints the way you manage your money you would go broke.  Take this example for consideration (note this is what good Agile teams should be forcing into the planning conversation).

Consider a team that has planned 20 points for the current sprint and someone (Product Owner, Sr. Management) has decided that something else is more important, like completing a feature for a key client.  The appropriate response from your Agile team is 'Great, let the team review the request and provide an estimate'.  Right there you have probably lost 2-3 points in analysis and estimation by the team.  Once they have completed their estimation, they come back to you and tell you that it's a 5 point effort.

You think to yourself great we can do that in this sprint,  let's do it.  A good Agile team will tell you yes we can do it but you need to remove 2-3 points for the estimation effort AND 5 points for the new work that you want us to take on in the current sprint.  So you have LOST 7-8 points of productivity, aka value) to get 5 points of value.

If you invested 8 dollars into a business and only were able to get 5 dollars back you would quickly realize that you can't sustain that monetarily, right?

Put this to your executives next time you have a priority conversation.  I didn't even bring in the  technical debt we typically take on to hack something together and the lack of testing that will happen because we weren't ready to take on the work (read no automation).

As a Finance guy I would say that this is a bad investment.  Yes I want to satisfy my customer but if they are a good customer you should be able to have an ability to manage their expectations so that the team can take on the work in the next Sprint.  Depending on when the request came in they may only have to wait 2 weeks.

Effective teams I've worked with use this process as a first line of defense against changing priorities within a Sprint.

BDD - Breaking down stories

One of the areas that many teams struggle with is getting user stories to the right level of context.  For me context IS everything in user stories.

 Yes a story is a placeholder for a conversation, but with large complex systems and organizations, the need to build out (and document) context has many benefits for teams and the organization.

Over the years I've seen some consistent elements fall out of BDD that can provide teams with an understanding of when a User Story may need to be broken down.

As you begin to build your test scenarios for your user story ensure that the story has no more than 3-4 scenarios.  If the number of scenarios is large, getting a clear contextual understanding of the story becomes much harder.  Additionally if automation is part of the equation then you end up with a larger code base for a single story and it can make trouble shooting failures harder.  Smaller stories mean less complicated acceptance criteria and more manageable and scalable automation code.

Once you have identified your test scenarios and begin writing the supporting BDD acceptance criteria look for some of these elements as queues to potentially break down your stories:

1. Large set of parameters- If you see that you have more than 7-8 parameters in an individual test scenario consider breaking the test into additional scenario(s) or another story.  As I've taught my teams, if you see your example table stretching off the page you probably need to break it down.
2. Large set of examples - If you see your test has more than 12-15 examples in an individual example table, you should consider breaking it down into additional scenario(s) or another story.

Keeping your stories and test examples small ensures that the team can more accurately estimate, deliver and demo their work consistently.

Teams should strive to break stories down so that they are small enough to be completed (Dev and Test) within 2-3 days.  This level of granularity provides clear visibility during Standups if the team is on track to deliver on their commitment.

Many teams suffer from what I call 'pushing a river down a creek' syndrome.  Meaning that they don't perform sufficient planning and story breakdown which leads them to continue to push their work out into future Sprints.  This leads to a lack of visibility as to when 'it will be done/delivered'

Breaking down stories effectively also leads teams to have stable velocities which leads to predictable delivery.  All of this feeds improved Program and Project management across the organization.

Organizations that need to scale Agile need to understand that this level of discipline isn't easy, but we shouldn't shy away from something just because it's hard.

BDD story breakdown leads to vastly improved feature definition, scalable automation suites and a strong automated regression.

Product Discovery - Uncover your backlog in Agile

Much of the writing and learning that you gain about Agile focuses on the day to day nuts and bolts part of execution, however I think that teams are missing a much greater opportunity to improve the quality of both execution and delivery if they spent more time developing their backlog. My teams consistently hear me talk about getting contextually rich user stories  as part being able to delivery quickly and with high quality.

In order to get to the point that we have contextually rich user stories teams need to spend some dedicated time building out their product backlog.

Whether you are developing an entirely new product or simply adding features to your existing product, taking the time to fully investigate and build out your User Story backlog is important.

Much is said about doing just enough documentation to get the job done, but what I've seen over the years is that teams that fail to build out user stories that have a specific set of information in them will spend more time trying to figure out what they are doing IN the sprint which negatively impacts quality and the teams velocity.

There is nothing wrong with spending time before a set of sprints building a strong understanding of what the team is going to do.

You wouldn't try to build a house without a certain level of planning ahead of time.  Agile teams often arrive at the start of their Sprints with nothing more than a set of ideas.  If builders showed up at a job site to start building your home with only a rough idea of what you wanted, they couldn't go very quickly nor would they build something of quality that met your needs and expectations.  You might get what you want, but probably not.

Agile teams need to take this approach a bit more, spending time with their Product Managers to not just flush out the features that are wanted, but more importantly the lower level details needed to provide the team an ability to plan more effectively and deliver high quality products.

If a builder shows  up and wanted to pour a basement, they need to know more than that.  They need to know the size of the basement (ie how much concrete do I need) , if the site has been prepared, has drainage been considered, etc.... Building anything of quality requires planning before you can deliver.

Agile I think too often believes that you can go lite on the planning and still delivery quality.  If you think that refactoring is the golden ticket for lack of planning, it's not.  Rarely do teams have time to do the amount of refactoring they require to keep their applications clean and scalable.  This leads to applications that grow in complexity requiring even more time to add features, all the while thinking that we can go lite on planning.

As you consider Agile as a development process, don't forget that Product Discovery is an important element of delivering high quality product quickly.

Hurdling through Product Delivery part 2

Product delivery is a discipline that requires the involvement of all segments of an organization:

1. Customers and Stakeholders
2. Product Owner
3. Scrum Master
4. Delivery Team - UX/Dev/QA
5. Operations
6. Services and other specialized teams that touch the product in anyway as it moves from concept to delivery to production.

As I mentioned in my previous entry, maximizing the smoothness of product delivery is like running the hurdles.  How so?

What happens when you first start running the hurdles with no experience?  You stand at the starting line and then you start to run.  As you approach the first hurdle you try to determine how you are going to make that first jump.

Is that first approach smooth?  Probably not.  You probably came up to that first hurdle and maybe stutter-stepped before trying to jump or even had to stop before you actually tried to get over the hurdle.   Why?  Because you didn't know what to expect, you didn't know what you didn't know as you ran toward that first hurdle.  Maybe you made it over all of the hurdles but it probably wasn't pretty, perhaps you fell a few times in the process.

So with skinned knees and wounded pride you make your way back to the starting line and you try again and again and again.

In this process you are setting your baseline performance.  Are you getting better with each attempt?  Hopefully....because we really want to be a successful sprinter.

As you continue training, perhaps even getting a coach, you start to break down your individual steps as as you go from hurdle to hurdle.  Over time and through practice and experimentation you make small changes in order to maximize your speed and efficiency in getting to, over and past each hurdle.  Not paying atttention to how you land after a hurdle means you may not approch thet next hurdle most efficiently.  As you continue this practice and feedback loop (Retrospective) you can begin to reach ever higher levels of speed and success.

Eventually you don't see the hurdles, they are just part of the process of completing the race.  They aren't obstacles anymore.

This approach is how athletes get to world class levels.

How is Product Delivery like running the hurdles?  With each step from ideation to delivery there are hurdles that we face that keep the entire delivery process from being efficienct and effective.

And more importantly, whereas a sprinter has the luxury of knowing that their hurdles are 30ft apart and either 39"-42" tall, Agile Product Delivery teams don't always know where their hurdles are at, but through effective use of Scrum, teams can begin to identify where the hurdles are and start the process of learning how to approach and exit each of those hurdles, using Retrospectives.

We too can get to a point where our hurdles are just part of the process and if you aren't running the hurdles anymore what are you running?  A sprint.....

What are some of the common hurdles that we face in Agile Product Delivery?

• UX Design not clear
• Lack of Product Vision
• Poorly formed product backlog/user stories
• Lack of technical excellence - Continuous Integration, Automation, code reviews.

Successful Agile delivery is all about identifying your hurdles, getting them lined up appropriately and working to maximize the efficiency of the steps we need to take to get to the end.

As with world class athletes we need to continue to evaluate our approach and drive world class product delivery for our customers.

Delivering Software Fast is Like Running the Hurdles

I had the opportunity to attend a couple of Dan North's Deliberate Discovery sessions at the Better Software East conference this month and as he talked about how we want to deliver software faster I started to envision that delivery of software is much more about running the 100 meter hurdles than it is about running the 100 meter sprint. With the 100 meter sprint the runner knows that from start to finish there are no obstacles and that they can maximize their speed through focus on the finish line.

Organizations aren't like that, we pose so many different hurdles that even if you believe that you are running a sprint, in reality you are probably running the hurdles.

With hurdles a sprinter must continue to work on the way that they will approach the first hurdle and then the next and so on and so forth.  Along the way anything might 'trip' them up.  When they clip the top of the hurdle they have to make adjustments almost in mid air to try to recover.  The ability for great hurdlers to continue to work on their approach to each hurdle ensure that they can run fast competitive races.

Software development is very much like the hurdles.  Even if your Engineering team is able to deliver features quickly, if your Product Development or QA groups aren't aligned with that speed then no matter how fast you run between one hurdle you will be struggling to make the next one because you haven't optimized the steps in front and behind the hurdle that you do well.

In order to deliver software fast organizations need to look at each of their Product and Software Development cycles so that each one maximizes the delivery of the previous steps. More to come on this......