Ken Furlong

I’ve been thinking a lot about retrospectives lately both because our team has been struggling with them being ineffective/wasteful and because retrospectives were the subject of conversation at the last DC/NOVA Scrum Users Group meetup.

Our team has been tweaking and experimenting with various modifications to our process but one thing that we’ve left untouched for a year now is our retrospectives.  Every sprint, we ask “What went well?” “What went badly?” and “What can we improve?”  Rarely, though, do we follow through on those items under “What can we improve?”  We’ve tried forcing ourselves to make these items concrete, posting them near our board, bringing them up in the standup meeting, etc. but to no avail.

We’re now experimenting with changing the meeting itself to better foster improvement.  First: we’re going into the meeting with an agenda rather than having it be a free form discussion.  Generally, when we treat it as free form, memories are dull and it is difficult to start a conversation.  We’re hoping that a prepared agenda (to which anyone can contribute) will help grease the skids,so to speak.

Secondly, the “What can we improve?” section will now be more explicitly a “What experiments should we run?” discussion – things like “should we be using Selenium instead of our current solution?” or “what if we only tasked out half of the stories at the beginning of the sprint and left the second half until the middle of the sprint?”

The “What went well?” and “What went badly?” topics, then, can focus not only on unexpected things that came up but also on the results of these process, tooling, and workflow experiments that we’re running.

Hopefully, this will prove to be a true PDCA loop and really drive improvement.  After all, that what retrospectives are supposed to do.

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A number of recent problems has caused our team to tweak our weekly Backlog Review meeting.  Specifically, we’ve added two items to the agenda: 1) a review of the stories tentatively scheduled for the next sprint (and possibly the next one after that) and 2) providing our PO with an estimate of our story point capacity for the next sprint.  If you’re thinking “why weren’t you reviewing upcoming stories already and why don’t you just use your velocity?” read on.

The first problem we experienced dealt with a specific story – a new database report that was needed.  The report was originally conceived and designed a few months ago but the project was postponed for several (valid) reasons.  The story, though, had been estimated months ago and then not touched again.  When business priorities were such that the report was again a priority, we simply dropped it into a sprint.  That’s when things got ugly.

In the intervening months, the estimate had become stale.  We had learned several rather critical lessons about this particular type of database report (we had developed similar ones in the meantime) but never incorporated that learning into this story or its estimate.  What we originally thought was an 8 point story instantly became 6 different 5 point stories.

That’s all fine and good – estimates are estimates and it is expected that the team will gain new knowledge and refine estimates as time goes on.  That’s not what happened, though.  Instead, we only realized the problem during our sprint planning meeting.  Since our velocity was hovering in the low 30′s, the revised set of stories ate an entire sprint.  Product Management was not expecting that at all.  Though they were prepared for estimates to shift and priorities to have to be moved around, they were not prepared for a sprint that they thought (and were basically told) would hold 4 or 5 different stories being eaten up by one story.

The lesson we learned was that we simply couldn’t allow stories and their estimates to become stale – there was too much risk that the story itself no longer made sense or that the estimate was now widely off.  Ideally, stories would never get stale because the backlog would be a pull system and stories would be planned and estimated very close to when development would begin.  Unfortunately, a huge piece of prioritization is weighing costs and Product Management can’t gauge the cost/benefit of each story relative to others without estimates.  Thus, it sometimes happens that stories are estimated and then shelved for a while.

To deal with this, both the team and Product Management now know to be on the look out for any stale stories or estimates that might be making their way to the top of the backlog.  Additionally, we’ve now broken our backlog review into two parts: estimated new stories and reviewing the one or two sprint’s worth of stories at the top of the backlog in case anything needs to be tweaked.  This uncovers problems a lot earlier than the sprint planning meeting and gives Product Management a chance to move around other priorities and reset customer expectations.

Secondly, our team’s capacity over the last several sprints has been somewhat erratic due to overlapping vacations, conference attendance, and other circumstances.  As a result, Product Management has been subjected to a few rude surprises on the first day of a new sprint when we tell them that our capacity for this sprint is half of what it was last time.  The fix for this (at least until our schedules settle down and we can really rely on our velocity again) is to take 2-3 minutes in the backlog review and estimate (in story points) our capacity for the next sprint.  This again gives Product Management so early warning and time to shift things around as necessary.

I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has had similar problems and what their solutions were.

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On Monday of last week, our network and desktop support team (what we call our “IT Team” as distinct from our software development teams) began experimenting with Kanban as our project management framework.  Heretofore, we’d simply been handling our project management and priorities in a sort of ad-hoc fashion.  We knew we wanted to racket it down, but didn’t want to use Scrum since the IT team is more of a support organization that would not operate well using time boxes.  We decided to experiment with Kanban for multiple reasons, including its suitability for support organizations and its focus on lean principles.

Our first week of experimenting with Kanban went quite well.  The major benefit we saw was the visualization of our work and workflow.  On Monday, we held our first retrospective and identified the first major process issue we want to address: widening the ownership of the backlog to the entire team.  Up until now, I had generally been the one ultimately responsible for what we worked on and in what order.  Obviously, there was input from the rest of the team and other stakeholders but there was a sense that I was the gatekeeper for priorities.

Kanban has highlighted the inefficiencies in that arrangement and we’re now trying to actively discuss the backlog and new issues at least once a day in our daily meeting – if not more often throughout the day.  This is definitely going to be an ongoing improvement effort so I expect we’ll keep this as an action item for at least several weeks until we get to a point where we think the entire team has full ownership of the backlog.

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Today was the opening of AgileCoachCamp 2010 (#ACCNC) here in Durham.  So far, we’ve had a few rounds of lightning talks which were limited to 3 minutes and no slides as well as a lot of networking and generally good conversation.

In my lightning talk, I mentioned that I like to refer to our previous methodology (what we were doing prior to moving to Scrum) as “Waterhocking.”  I think it accurately captures the nature of our previous process.  It was definitely ad-hoc in so far as we weren’t following any particular project management framework and just handling things as they came up on a case-by-case basis.  It was similar to heavyweight “waterfall” methods in that we had extensive requirements gathering and documentation phases (BDUF), lengthy periods where the team would keep heads down and just try to build exactly what was documented, and too little user and acceptance testing too late.  Lastly, our releases often felt like we were hocking the product up since we were often under a fixed deadline and killing ourselves to get a product out the door only to find that the customer wasn’t happy with what was delivered.

Apparently, this label struck a chord with my fellow participants – it has a few mentions on twitter.  I’m definitely looking forward to tomorrow’s sessions; my only regret is that I can’t be in six or seven places at once.  There are so many really experienced, really insightful people here it is impossible not to miss great talks.

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Our company has been in the habit of doing periodic EPPs (Employee Performance Plans).  We’ve evolved from doing them once a quarter to once every four months to twice a year.  We’ve gradually lengthened the amount of time an EPP covers because of the overhead involved in putting them together and reviewing them.

When the Engineering department moved to Scrum, we obviously had to change the way we conceived of an EPP.  As usual, the problems we encountered weren’t caused by Scrum – just highlighted by it.

The main problem we encountered was “how can we say we’re planning on doing anything since we don’t set our own priorities?”  In the past, this didn’t seem like a problem because we just subtracted the amount of time needed to complete our EPP objectives from the amount of available time for “PM-sponsored” projects – or we built in the fact that we wouldn’t be working 100% of the time on those projects.  Either route is a problem because it reduces visibility into what the team’s priorities and capacity are.

Another problem was “how can we claim to be agile while putting together six month long personal plans?”

The latest problem we’ve encountered had to do with personal/career/team development, e.g., writing more unit tests, peer reviewing code, experimenting with peer programming, networking with peers outside the company, etc.

I feel like we’ve addressed all three problems fairly well.  Here’s how:

Regarding EPP projects, we realized that engineers making themselves personally responsible for entire projects was simply the wrong approach.  Granted, we wanted to get these projects (mostly technical debt reduction projects) done and granted they are important, but cutting out the rest of the team and the Product Owner is simply not the best way to accomplish them.

We realized that we should not be focusing on the whole project but simply that piece which is under our control.  Thus, we are now adopting EPP goals such as “Advocate for refactoring product X” – with objectives such as “educate Product Management about the costs and potential benefits” and “submit requested user stories and Definitions of Done to our Product Owner”.  In this way, we’re doing everything we can to see that these projects get done without sacrificing the prerogative of the PO to set priorities.  We’re also doing what only we can do: identify, explain, and plan to reduce technical debt or capitalize on new technologies.

Regarding the fact that we’re using six month EPPs, we are very explicit that EPPs – like all plans – should not be written in stone.  Thus, we’ve taken the approach of having quick, monthly reviews of our EPPs to see if there is anything we want to add, remove, or change given our evolving situation and knowledge.  These reviews sometimes only last five minutes; sometimes they last 30.  The point is that they don’t introduce much overhead and they allow us to course correct fairly frequently.

Regarding personal/career/team development goals, the problems we were running into regarded how to measure success.  If we had an EPP goal to “ensure unit tests are written,” what defines success?  What do we say at the end of six months if we didn’t write as many unit tests as we could have for the first month or two, then were pretty good for the rest of the period until the last week when we again may have missed some opportunities for tests?

We realized that we were not focusing on the real issue.  At the end of the period, we didn’t so much want a code coverage percentage as we wanted to be able to say that we had adopted or internalized certain practices.  That is, that we had developed certain habits.  Thus, at the end of the period, the question we ask ourselves is not “what is our code coverage like?” but rather “have we developed the habit of always writing unit tests?”  While this is more subjective, we feel it is still more valuable and it more accurately reflects what we actually want to do.

Summary

• Plan to do those things where you add unique value – bearing in mind that no one person can tackle an entire project alone and, therefore, should not be solely responsible for that project.
• Review the plan often, making changes as necessary.  The plan is not written in stone.
• Don’t be seduced by “vanity metrics” like “how many units tests have I written per story?”  Rather, focus on those habits or practices that you want to develop or internalize and then judge yourself against how well you have become the engineer you want to be.

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I’ll be attending Agile Coach Camp 2010 – a bar camp for agile practitioners being held in Durham, NC, March 19-21.  I and a colleague will be able to be there for the entire weekend and hopefully meet up with another co-worker who is based in NC whom we haven’t seen in a while.

I’ll also be attending the Lean Software and Systems Conference in Atlanta from April 21st through the 23rd.

I’m really looking forward to these conferences and meeting anyone else who might be attending these.  If you’re planning on attending, drop me a line and perhaps we can arrange to meet up.

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One of the biggest problems (if not the biggest problem) we have on our team is technical debt that has accumulated over the last 4-5 years. Fortunately, the team and our Product Owners understand the problem of technical debt in general and recognize it in our case.
We’ve started taking small steps to reduce our amount of debt. I’d love feedback and suggestions about what we’re doing and anything that anyone else has found helpful.

The first thing we’ve done is resolved to not take on any additional debt intentionally. Of course, almost anything we implement will eventually become technical debt if it is allowed to collect dust long enough or if circumstances change – but the key point is that it wasn’t debt when we implemented it. Our hope is that the rate at which technical assets become technical debt will be such that we will be able to keep up with regular refactoring.

The second thing is that our POs have made it clear that they are willing to give us the time to pay off technical debt – but the burden is on the team to identify, flag up, and explain the technical debt to the PO so that it can be properly prioritized in our backlog.

The third thing is the team now has a weekly 30 minute meeting to discuss technical debt. We don’t have a firm agenda, but the discussion usually centers around a few points:

• Are there any pieces of technical debt that we would like to discuss (presumably because we haven’t discussed them in this forum before)?
• How costly would it be to pay down this piece of debt? (We estimate this using the XS, S, M, L XL scale.)
• How costly in the interest on this debt? That is, how much pain is it causing? (We estimate this using a yellow, orange, red scale. I’ll explain why in a minute).
• How should we begin the process of paying down this debt? Is this something we can “just fix” with a little effort on the side? Is this something that we should write up a user story and request our PO add to the backlog? Should we keep it in our back pocket for a hack-a-thon project?
• Who is on point for this piece of debt? That is, who is going to “just fix it” or write the user story or keep it on their own hack-a-thon to-do list?

The fourth thing is that we’re now maintaining a technical debt board on a wall near our sprint backlog. We wanted a visual representation and reminder of our team’s biggest problem. It will hopefully help us stay focused on it, not let us forget about any given piece of technical debt, and help us track and encourage progress (a very important facet, in my opinion).

This is why we estimated cost using size but impact using color – we can visually represent each piece of technical debt using a piece of paper, not card, post-it note, etc. of the appropriate color and have a board where someone can assess all of the critical information at a glance (example). If we had just used Fibonacci numbers for each scale and written them in the corners of cards or something, it would be much harder to get a sense for the whole situation.

So far, we’ve identified two pieces of technical debt that we can “just fix” in our spare time and the fixes are in progress. We’ve also begun working on writing the stories necessary to eliminate another debt. Hopefully, we’ll be able to keep up this momentum, increasing our velocity and quality along the way.

Any tips from those who have gone before would be greatly appreciated!

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Since converting to Scrum, my team has been in the practice of planning our capacity for a sprint in terms of ideal hours.  We had a fairly simple spreadsheet where we’d enter the number of vacation days each team member was planning and taking and their estimated “overhead” percentage (all of the time spent in meetings, handling random things that come up, etc.).   During our Sprint Planning meetings, we would then estimate all of the tasks for the stories in terms of ideal hours – how long we expected that task to take assuming zero distractions and interruptions.  We then took on as many stories as we had enough ideal hours for.

Over time, I became less and less satisfied with this way of planning capacity.  In general, it didn’t seem to add much value to the process and increased the length of the planning meeting.  Additionally, because we track the progress of a sprint using the number of hours of work remaining, the team had to continuously update both our task board and our online tool (whether Rally, ScrumWorks, etc.) or others wouldn’t have a good sense of how the sprint was going.

At best, this represented time (albeit, not a ton, but still enough that it hurt) not spent doing actual work.  At worst, it was a complete waste since there were usually caveats associated with the hours as they are presented on the board or in the tool, e.g., “well we’re way over in terms of hours we spent on this task, but we realized that all the work we did will save us time on the next 5 tasks so it’s basically a wash” or “we’re going to leave this task at 6, but we might lower it to 1 shortly depending on how something turns out”.

One could respond that those types of things can and should be tracked in a tool and the problem is not that we were using ideal hours, it was that we were being lax in updating the tool and, by extension, the rest of the team and stakeholders.  While this was initially my thought, I came to disagree for the following reasons:

1. It seemed odd that we were estimating work in terms of a fictional unit – the ideal hour.  Since there is very rarely an extended period of time during which someone really doesn’t have any distractions and is free to focus on a single task, I don’t understand why we ask them to imagine how long a task would take under those conditions.  Granted, it makes the math easier, but that doesn’t make the estimate any better and might actually make it worse.
2. We limited the granularity of ideal hours to whole hours.  Even if ideal hours were a real unit, limiting their granularity means limiting their accuracy and usefulness.  Granted, estimating in whole hour blocks is faster and easier, but the very mechanism that makes it such also severely limits its usefulness – especially when there is disagreement within the team about how long something is going to take and we just settle with the average.
3. In my experience, estimating in ideal hours didn’t help us.  There were times when we had to go to the Product Owner and say that we couldn’t get all of the stories that were tentatively put on the sprint backlog done in time (because the number of ideal hours needed was higher than our capacity) – but those were identically the times when the number of story points on the sprint backlog exceeded our velocity and/or where we had huge 8 point stories which we all later agreed should have been multiple stories whose points would have added up to more than 8.

For a while, I didn’t have a good suggestion as to how to do away with ideal hours.  Then I saw this presentation on the ScrumAlliance website.  I’m going to take the liberty of paraphrasing the author: if we’re really doing our story point estimates well, and we’re always trying to break things into smaller stories so that story sizes are as uniform as possible, and we’ve got some historical data to tell us what our velocity is, why don’t we just use that to figure out how much to put into a sprint and save ourselves the trouble of estimating tasks?

Under such a scheme, we would still task things out so that we could uncover any gotchas and get a general consensus in the team as to what needs to be done.  We just wouldn’t estimate hours for tasks and then track progress in terms of hours remaining.  Granted, it might turn out that we sign up for an amount of work that causes us to either end early, have to work a little extra, or miss a story, but we run that risk with ideal hours too – we just spend more time doing it.

In terms of tracking the progress of a sprint, the author suggests having a burndown of tasks rather than hours – which is obviously less quantifiable but perhaps no less valuable.  Our current burndown uses hours, but it really just gives the illusion that we know exactly how many hours are remaining.  Not having an ideal hour burndown just means we don’t have that illusion anymore.  As the author points out, precision doesn’t equal accuracy and accuracy is what we’re really after.

Lastly, there was the issue of how to adjust the amount of work we pull into a sprint when we know that someone will be on vacation.  Ideal hours gives us a nice way to do this because we just subtract the appropriate number of hours from our capacity.  That really isn’t that accurate, though, because any given day in a two week period might be very different than any other day in terms of how much someone is able to focus on direct work.  Treating all days as identical in terms of capacity is again mathematically easier but perhaps no more accurate.  We could probably do just as well by “manually” adjusting the velocity down a few story points based on gut feelings.  Again, precision doesn’t equal accuracy.

When I presented these ideas to the team, we all decided that it was worth trying – after all, even if we crash and burn, we’ve only lost two weeks.  That was 2 sprints ago and we all seem pretty happy not using ideal hours.  Our task board is just the same except we don’t put hours on our tasks.  Our online tool is the same – we just assign every task 1 estimated hour.  Our burndown chart thus shows the burndown of tasks.  During planning, we are extra conscious of task breakdowns and try to make all tasks as uniform a size as reasonably possible.

All in all, I’m very happy we’ve moved away from ideal hours and are relying more on our velocity and “gut checks” to know how much work to pull into a sprint.  I highly recommend trying it.

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My company has gone to lengths to ensure that employees can work from anywhere in the world (provided they have an internet connection).  Since I live 70 miles (80 – 150 minutes, depending on traffic) from my home office, I have taken to working remotely.  For a couple years, I probably went into the office an average of once every two months.

In many ways, this is fantastic: I save between 160 and 300 minutes per day (!), no frustrations with traffic jams, fewer distractions, being home to help out with the kids if necessary, etc.

I’ve become quite the advocate for telecommuting and for the idea that distributed workforces can be every bit as productive as co-located ones.

Recently, however, I’ve started realizing that some of the criticism of telecommuting is quite justified, particularly the idea that distributed teams don’t share ideas often enough.  In my experience, we actually do share ideas quite frequently – but only with those with whom we work the most – our direct peers, reports, and superiors.  Usually, that means people who basically do the same thing you do.  In other words, even though as a company we try to have a fairly flat org structure and no silos, we create invisible silos outside of which we rarely, if ever, venture – not because there’s an actual organizational barrier there, but because we literally just don’t see other people.   While you can easily bump into a guy from another team at the water cooler, you rarely “bump” into some one over IM.

In one way, this is good: fewer distractions from your immediate work – more productivity.  In another way it sucks: less innovation, less cross-pollination between teams.  I am beginning to think that telecommuting tends to increase immediate productivity and decrease innovation.  By “innovation,” I mean those new processes, tools, products, resolved pain points, or ways of thinking that materialize when someone from your sales group (who happens to sit next to someone from your database group) says “I’ve been thinking, what if we knew which feature our customers care more about: feature x or feature y” and your database guy says “you know, I could tell you which customers use each and how often in about five minutes.”  That is exactly the kind of conversation and quick opportunity that rarely happen when teams are distributed.

Many people would blame this on several things: a) the sales guy would have to realize that someone else in the company might be able to provide this info (how you could make everyone in your company aware of every piece of information that someone else in the might be able to generate is beyond me), b) inertia: the sales guy has to think “yeah, this is worth disturbing someone with an IM or a phone call” or “yeah, this is worth writing out in long hand in an email and hoping for a response,” etc.

When the team is co-located, these issues tend to disappear – the sales guy doesn’t need to realize that the problem is solvable to mention it to the person sitting next to him.  Regarding inertia, people who are physically sitting next to each other tend to just volunteer issues like that for the sake of conversation – it’s practically encouraged to break the silence.

There are lots of companies trying to solve these issues with various social tools for the enterprise, such as Yammer.  These tools, in my opinion, are good, but nothing beats physical co-location.

To try to combat this, I’ve been making an effort to go into the office at least once a week.  In addition, since a lot of my colleagues telecommute quite a bit, I’ve been trying to organize work-ins where once or twice a month, everyone from the office tries to be in the office on the same day.  A shocking idea, I know, but you have to understand that we’ve all realized the benefits of working remotely and do so quite regularly – we’ve got it down.

In essence, we’re coworking with ourselves, which ends up being quite interesting.  We have noticed the usual benefits associated with coworking – a lot of cross pollination of ideas, more “soft” understanding of what’s going on in other departments and teams, quick opportunities seized just because two people were sitting next to each other, etc.

So why don’t we just all work in the office all the time?  Because I don’t there would be much marginal benefit.  So far, it seems that the benefits we accrue in one day would be the same as those accrued over an entire week – except with the added cost of going into the office every day.  There’s just something about being in the office being novel that keeps us from falling into the rut where we all sit at our desks and focus (read, “ignore all inputs not directly associated with the task at hand”).  By setting aside a day every week or two, we force ourselves to really focus on spontaneous collaboration while we are together – something we would be able to do if we were always together.

I am eager to see how this experiment plays out.  Comments are very welcome if anyone especially if anyone has had similar experiences or is conducting similar experiments.

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Jack Milunsky has a brief post up over at AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com wherein he discusses the issue of switching stories mid sprint.  One of his points that I’d like to draw attention to is his response to the criticism that a team can be the slave of the process, i.e, too rigid in following Scrum mechanics and not willing to change a sprint mid stride because something urgent comes up.  As he says “Well you’re either a slave to the process or the team is a slave to any chicken in the company who shouts the loudest.”

That is a fantastic point, in my opinion.  It is much like the oft repeated response when something goes wrong while you’re doing scrum: “would this have been any different if we were doing waterfall?”

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