Archive for December, 2007

ART OF SCRUM: Pay Your Debts Promptly

Posted: December 26, 2007 in Art of Scrum
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Once upon a time, there was a project that was supposed to be done at the end of the month. There was a full Product Backlog, some of which was well defined into twelve Stories, and an enthusiastic Team ready to tackle the four week-long Sprints it was expected to take to finish the project. Confidence was high, and the predicted due date seemed to be no problem. Flip the hourglass with the sands of time; enter: Reality.

Once upon another time, a college student was given a credit card. Charge all you want and pay it off at the end of the month and it was like getting an instant, interest-free loan. Payday is the 30th (read: end of the month), so let’s get some shoes.Again, enter Reality.

Both of these scenarios, when adding the cosmic constant called Reality, are the beginning of accruing debt. In Scrum terms, technological debt is that work that is NOT done when trying to hit a predicted due date once reality enters the picture and starts to pump chaos into the well-sculpted predictions made at the beginning of the project. Another way to look at technological debt is to think of it as credit card interest. If the Team can hit the predicted deadline dead on (pun intended), no debt accrues. But any deviation beyond the due date creates a situation where, when normal business pressures come to bear, compound interest starts to make things interesting.

Let’s expand my first example. Sprint week one: an Impediment arises that chews up four hours of productive time during the Sprint, causing the third of three Stories to not be completed properly. Planning Scrum for week two: this issue bubbles up to the surface and is taken into account by using the second week Sprint to finish the work not completed on the first week’s third story. This causes the Team to lose Velocity and only complete two stories in the second week. The Team now completes the second Sprint, and has a total of five Stories complete in a quality manner — code is solid, all testing is done, and the work is up to par. Now, halfway through the project, this is noted, but optimism is still high, and somewhere in the next two Sprints, this extra Story needs to get done on top of the remaining six . This is not yet technological debt, but it should be cause for concern for the Product Owner, the ScrumMaster, and the Team. Interest is looming.

As the two final Sprints are planned and executed, somebody comes up with a fabulous idea of a shortcut to keep the project on track to be delivered on the predicted date. These ideas are usually along the lines of not completing due diligence on testing, outputting hacked code, skipping code reviews or full QA, or otherwise not doing high quality work. Project is delivered, client and Product Owner look like heroes, and everyone is happy, right? Wrong.

Technological debt — or interest — exists in the product itself. The entire Team — Product Owner, ScrumMaster, and Team Members, all know that within the delivery lurks something that was not up to par, and may come back to haunt them later. Extrapolating my second example — including the introduction of reality — at the end of the month, it is more important to pay all of your rent and only part of the credit card bill, so your $300 pair of shoes only gets $250 dumped on the bill. Waiting until the end of the next month to pay for your new clogs will actually cost you $75 more, not the $50 that it would have taken had you paid the whole thing promptly before the interest rate started getting that rear-naked choke hooked in. Technological debt works the same way. Your shoes just cost you $325. Next month, as the compounding really gets rolling, they will be a $350 pair of shoes, all the while losing value while you are wearing them to your Scrums every day.

Back to example one: client is so happy with the delivered product, they want it installed on all three of their websites, and expects that it should be an easy chore. We delivered them a quality, scalable, perfectly-factored product, right? Unless the technological debt is addressed immediately in the new estimates — probably a whole week’s worth of Sprint on top of this new client request — the problem is not just going to sit there and be a static problem value; it is going to gain interest. As the product is scaled, built upon, sold as-is to other clients, this debt is accruing interest. As long as this debt is ignored, it will continue to compound and cause problems in the future, especially in terms of codebase. Technological debt really gets good when the programmer who put the hack into code in the first place either is no longer with the Team or doesn’t remember what was done to create the problem in the first place. Time is the factor that is compounding — in this case, to find the problem and fix it. The sharpest pain in the process of catching up on technological debt is that there is nothing that can be sold to the client as an upgrade or a new feature; this was supposed to be done in the name of Quality last month…or six months ago,,,or whoever the dude was that built this code in the first place.

One of the central concepts of Scrum is honesty. Honesty within the Team is crucial, and in the case of this example of technological debt should have been clear communication to the Product Owner that due to the Impediment, the project needed another week to be delivered with the quality that the client deserved. If the client could not wait one more week for a quality product, then the Team has to get a Business Owner involved — usually to OK overtime, working lunches, and otherwise reducing other responsibilities in order to retrieve the additional time to do it once and do it right. In the case of the shoes, you would have saved your money and purchased them the 15th of the next month when you could drop $300 in cash and not absorbed any debt in the first place.

For a good graph-and-chart-laced article on the issue of tech debt, check out Technical Debt and Design Death by Kane Mar.

ART OF SCRUM: Transparency Leads to Agility

Posted: December 18, 2007 in Art of Scrum
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There are three terms to describe the way light shines on an object: Transparent, Translucent, and Opaque. Transparent means that you can see right through it; translucent means that light shines through it, and opaqueness is the quality of blocking all light. Although you may think that vocabulary lessons are not on topic for this forum, I am a fan of the Definitions section of this collective knowledge repository, and point out this fact:

Without a common language it is difficult to communicate.

Transparency is an Agile quality. Although there are several definitions that might apply from the link above, transparency is a communication art. One of the foundations of Scrum is honesty, and honesty leads to transparency for both internal team members and external clients. Being transparent means that all of the work done on a Sprint is visible to those participating in the process. This means document — lightly — as you go, identify problems — impediments — as they arise, ask for clarification — from your Team, your Product Owner, your ScrumMaster — as the Sprint happens.

Opacity occurs when Team members feel like they cannot lift their eyes from the screen and their hands from the keys. If the ScrumMaster or Product Owner only has a foggy idea of what the Team is doing, this is translucency. Transparency is honest communication all the way out to the Stakeholders — that means the client. Even if it is bad news, it is Agile bad news, which means that it is coming now rather than weeks or months down the road. Whenever you can save weeks and months, you know you are getting more Agile.

Mark Levison writes a great blog-style site out at Notes from a Tool User. Aside from being a proponent of Team Programming, Mark simply states that “Transparency builds Trust”. I think that this is a good sound byte to remember. Transparency = Honesty = Trust.

ART OF SCRUM: Why Product Owners Want to Tell You Stories

Posted: December 12, 2007 in Art of Scrum
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Originally published: Tuesday, 12/11/2007

Really good Product Owners always start Planning Scrums with something along the lines of “Once upon a time…” The reason behind this is that one of the least understood but most powerful concepts in Scrum methodology (along with the Squeaky Toy) is the Story. A Story, essentially, is a short description of the usefulness of a feature or product, including vital information such as who is going to use it, why they want it, and what it is supposed to do.

From this trite-sounding invention, you can deduce what is important to who in the Scrum process, the business value, the importance in the grand scheme of the entire project, potential use / test cases, and a whole host of other information within the bounds of a properly-formatted sticky note. Product Owners are the conduit to the customer, or Stakeholders, and as such, they are responsible for translating important pieces of the Product Backlog into Stories. Stories are a bite-sized translation of a feature or client request into terms that the Team can understand, cut up into Tasks, and agree to deliver at the end of the Sprint.

According to Mike Cohn, a properly formatted story is thus:

"As a <some role> I want <something> so that <some value / justification>"

This deceptively simple formula drives Product Owners crazy, because it forces them to get rid of all of the ballyhoo and explain the basic purpose of this feature to the Team. In response, the Team is able to meet the Product Owner halfway and start from the bottom to build a feature or product that the client really wants by describing a series of Tasks that will reach this goal — demonstrable and working — by the end of the Sprint.

Once the Story is told, the Product Owner, the ScrumMaster, and the Team complete the Story by negotiating an Agreement. The Story is usually the top half of the sticky note; the Agreement is the bottom half. In order for the Team to be successful, it must meet the requirements set forth in the Agreement. Agreements are usually a series of bullet points that describe what should be demonstrable to the client by the end of the Sprint.

To put this into perspective, here is a Story with an Agreement from Achieve’s history. Note that Achieve has exercised the First Rule of Scrum: if the rules don’t work for you, throw them out.

STORY:
“This Story allows [the site administrator] to deploy quiz question creation to site users while guiding them to provide these questions in the right format.”

AGREEMENT:
* Exactly four answer boxes, all required
* No title field for users
* No feedback per question
* Auto-generate title field based on taxonomy, question field, and an incremental random number (to prevent repeats in any possible case)
* administrative controls to enable / disable functionality
* show mockups for the way this feature would look to a user

With a Story defined with an Agreement, as long as the Sprint is a reasonable length of time for the Team to perform this work without impediments, there will be a happy ending!

ART OF SCRUM: Wallpaper with Whiteboards

Posted: December 4, 2007 in Art of Scrum
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Going through two years of graduate work (and still paying for it) for a MS in Educational Technology was an eye-opening experience. It seems that no matter how old you are, kindergarten tactics for teaching still works wonders. I still marvel at my hard-earned teacher salary going towards instruction content such as “Effective Use of a White Board”, “Zen and the Art of the Overhead Projector”, and the much-feared “Copyright Law and Properly Setting Your VCR to Record a Show”. All of this post-graduate work can be summed up in two sentences:

  1. Write legibly, and do not obscure your own writing; i.e., write on the board / projector and then get out of the way
  2. Read the instructions and practice at home

Back in 1997, these were high-tech gadgets to use in the classroom. 10 years later, and this stuff seems Stone Age. But I still love the whiteboard because it allows people to add a visual component to an oral discussion. Instruction theory describes a theory of mental retention of content by how many senses are involved with learning it:

  • Hear it: 10% — audio
  • Hear it and see it: 25% — audio, visual
  • Hear it, see it, and write it down: 45% — audio, visual, kinetic
  • Hear it, see it, repeat it verbally, and write it down: 65% — audio, visual, kinetic, and more kinetic

In this case, more interaction leads to better retention of the data. Essentially, more involvement allows the brain to interact with the subject matter on a variety of levels, firing multiple synapses in different areas of the neocortex to facilitate full comprehension. I probably need to draw a diagram and make you repeat after me to get that concept to stick…

Anyhow, I was pleased to see that the new AI East whiteboard is being used frequently. I know that the Wall ‘O Board at AI West is used quite a bit as well. The greatest trick to effectively using whiteboards, however, involves a step that is not normally taken — extracting the needed information off of the board at the end of the session so that the surface is not marred by either ghosting or by questioning if you can erase what is currently on the board. Someone has to be responsible enough to write down what is needed to be saved and insure that this is filed in the appropriate manner — hopefully, not paper in a filing cabinet.

Fret not; the act of copying down what is on the whiteboard is a productive activity. This is an opportunity to grab only the real fruit of the labor, organize it again in a more readable or understandable fashion, all the while being polite enough to allow for the next whiteboard user to have a clear surface. This was one of the complaints about using the Conference Room for the Scrum Task Board; nobody else dared to touch it in fear of disturbing the controlled chaos of different colored sticky notes progressing across the snowy landscape of the tileboard, so the expanse of writable surface was effectively lost for other uses.

Joel on Software is a big fan of Hallway Usability Testing; I believe that whiteboards facilitate this sort of information transfer. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a handy whiteboard is a low-tech interactive space for gnoshing out problems and quickly suggesting alternate approaches because you can point to established agreed-upon concepts, draw arrows, gesticulate at thaumaturgic symbols, spit out theoretical code samples, and otherwise use more than one sense to get a sense of what you are talking about.