Category Archives: Software Quality

A Magical 1997-era Web Form & the Illusion of Progress

This morning, while I was checking my email, the power went out.

There was no storm, the neighbors still had power… did I forget to pay the bill? Surely not… I get an email every month & immediately click through to process the payment. But I decided to check anyway.

I went to our local electric company’s web site to check on the status of my account. It’s not a big town, and their development budget has got to be tiny… it looks like they haven’t updated their web site in more than a decade. And the “Pay Your Bill” form is even more extreme… that form is straight outta 1997, complete with a little moving text, like ants marching across the bottom of your screen. It looks like Peoplesoft used to look like, at the dawn of the millennium.

Not my power company’s web form. But close. You get the idea.

Turns out, I did make a mistake last month. I was traveling when bill time came around, and instead of clicking the button to pay all accounts, I accidentally only paid one and not the one that corresponds to the house where I live, where I work, where I absolutely positively need internet all the time.

There was a text box at the top of my screen with a phone number, and a message saying that power could usually be restored by 8pm. I started mentally arranging my work day… how much connectivity I’d be able to get by tethering to my phone… how much battery life I had left in my laptop… how much crow I’d have to eat, as the impacts impacted other people and other meetings.

I quickly filled out all the little boxes to let the electric company know that I really wanted them to take my money and turn my power back on as soon as they could. Like usual, their clunky looking web form was smooth to actually fill in.

But then magic happened.

I clicked the “Pay Now” button with the stylus on my phone. TAP! Before my fingers returned to the position they were in when they started the downward trip to click the button (literally milliseconds later) I heard whirring all around me. The printer was going through its startup sequence. The TV started to flicker on.

That 1997-era web form was like a lightswitch. When I flipped it, my power went back on. For whatever the power company didn’t invest in making their web site look slick and exciting, they sure did invest in what means the most to me: automatically, instantaneously, magically getting my power back in the blink of an eye.

Why don’t all companies invest, like this, in delivering meaningful value over delivering the appearance of value?

I’m thinking of a company I know, right now, that’s invested several million dollars over the past year trying to get a web app in place to perform a basic revenue-driving function of their business. They even “built an MVP”! But they’re still falling short of their goal. I wonder if they, like so many others, are falling into the most nefarious trap that exists:

The Illusion of Progress… showing that you’re moving forward without showing that you know what really matters, and then surgically focusing on that.

Are you making progress on what really matters? Or what looks like it matters?

There’s your challenge for this week (and life).

Agile Should Not Make You Feel Bad

Agility can be great (even though for many neurodivergent people, it’s the opposite of great). But when teams go through the motions to be “Agile” they often end up overcomplicating the work, adding stress to interactions, and achieving less agility.

If your agile processes are “working”, then over the next iteration (typically 1-4 weeks):

⬜ You have a clear understanding, as a team, of the value you’re working to demonstrate. (Note that this is not a promise or a commitment, but a shared purpose, direction and intention.)

⬜ You have a clear understanding, as individuals, of the actions that will generate that value. You know what to work on (and think about) when you’re not in meetings or with clients.

⬜ You don’t feel alone – you have teammates to communicate with and collaborate with, and resources you can use, as you move forward to advance project objectives.

⬜ You are working at a comfortable, sustainable pace.

⬜ Your team is improving every week – you continually do things a little differently to help improve quality, productivity, collaboration, or other outcomes.

None of these things require meetings (or “ceremonies”) – just communication and inclusion. We should always be asking ourselves and our team members: what’s the easiest, smoothest, least intrusive way of building this shared understanding and maintaining it every day?

When teams work with agility:

⬜ Everyone understands the overall goal and the next increment of value to demonstrate.

⬜ Everyone has clear things to do to contribute to that value.

⬜ Each person (and the team as a whole) works at a sustainable pace.

⬜ Nobody feels alone. There’s a group of collaborators to share the work with.

⬜ The client or project champion has visibility into the work and is happy with progress.

⬜ There’s an opportunity to rest, reflect, and adjust every week or two.

It’s not ridiculously hard to adjust to changes in scope, tools, or personnel. 

But I regularly see “agile” teams flailing… unhappy… in constant panic mode, with stress that just won’t end. They are very busy and always seem to be scrambling to show their client or project champion some kind of value… with the feeling that they have to defend their existence. They have a nagging sense of confusion and impostor syndrome may be creeping in. They can tell you exactly what tasks are on their JIRA boards, but they can’t tell you why those tickets exist or how their task is contributing to overall project value. They have lost sight of the forest (value) because they have planted so many trees (tickets).

For these teams, the Scrum process and Agile ceremonies may be adding layers of stress and bureaucracy rather than helping the team work sustainably to consistently drive value. They are “doing Agile ” but have actually made themselves less agile… less able to flow and adapt and respond to changes in scope, tools, or participants.

Agile methods first emerged in response to the slow, painful, unsatisfying, unhappy practice of software development. It was really depressing to spend months building software, only to have customers and users complain how bad it was when they got it (especially when you developed exactly what they specified). It felt isolating to have to figure out how to deliver a piece of the software without any input from other engineers, and it was distressing when others were blocking your work and you had to convince them to listen to you. The whole endeavor was inefficient, and people were often tense and stressed. 

The realizations in red (in the 90s) led to the Agile Manifesto items (2001) in blue

We’re applying processes and tools without really examining why we need them

So let’s prioritize…

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

  • Why this is part of the Agile Manifesto: Since the beginning of time, development teams tend to get hung up on the details of using tools (e.g. MS Project, JIRA, kanban boards) rather than why the tools are there in the first place: to make sure people are getting the information and context they need – on a regular, routine basis – to make continuous progress on the team’s overall deliverables.
  • What we should do in 2022: Focus on information sharing, context building, and working arrangements that help people get work done. This applies to interactions within the team as well as interactions with the client.

We’re doing a lot of work that doesn’t actually contribute to our goal

So let’s prioritize…

Working software [ie. tangible stuff that’s valuable] over comprehensive documentation

  • Why this is part of the Agile Manifesto: Software development in the 1990s was documentation-heavy. I even remember, in 2018, throwing away a few hundred pounds of paper (in about 20 4” binders) containing requirements and design documents for a really big software project that we did between 2002 and 2004. Often, development teams wouldn’t even produce software that matched the documentation because we’d learn about what was feasible and what was not as we were doing it. Everyone tended to deliver software that the business needed a year or two ago. We didn’t learn together and co-create the software. 
  • What we should do in 2022: We provide value in the form of information, shared understanding, and working software (which may be in the form of quality controls) – that’s it. Anything we produce that doesn’t directly contribute to making these things happen shouldn’t be done. 

We’re unable to deliver something we don’t know how to define or describe yet

So let’s prioritize…

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

  • Why this is part of the Agile Manifesto: Because deciding what you’re on the hook to deliver at the beginning of a project – and exactly what the deliverables are going to look like – is dangerous. You and the customer rarely have enough understanding of the problem (or of each other) to get it right. 
  • What we should do in 2022: Establish shared accountability. (Note: this is rare. How many times has a customer been on your team and just as accountable to the project champion for the end result as you are?) A workaround is to set expectations with the client that we are discovering the shared understanding together, and we will get as close to the desired deliverables as we can, given the fact that we are embarking on a process of learning together.

We’re unable to commit to a plan when we might learn that our plan isn’t feasible

So let’s prioritize…

Responding to change over following a plan

  • Why this is part of the Agile Manifesto: As you learn about what’s possible, what’s not possible, and what the client actually values… plans will change. Instead of establishing a timeline that won’t end up working out (and that will cause you a lot of stress when you start deviating from), just start with the understanding that your Gantt Chart and your intermediary milestones will probably not be achieved when you think they will – or maybe even at all.
  • What we should do in 2022: Always keep the final goal in mind, but revisit and adjust the plan as you learn more every week. Iterate! 

Cogramming (Or: Pair Programming for People Who “Don’t Like It”)

Picture Unrelated. Image Source: Doug Buckley @ Hyperactive (Braintree, MA)

I saw a bunch of threads this morning on Twitter about pair programming, one of the core practices of XP and agile cornerstone. The arguments were diametrically opposed, either: it’s great, and the overhead is necessary and leads to long-term value; versus it’s terrible, because I need to get in the zone and that requires alone time.

(I don’t really like pair programming either… to be honest, I don’t have the attention span for it. I can get into my own groove, but it’s painful to follow along with someone else for more than a few minutes.)

Let me offer up an alternative: cogramming.

Cogramming is like pair programming, but you’re just programming next to someone on a module or a task that’s related to what they’re doing. (In today’s WFH climate, that might mean opening up a Zoom or a Google Meet, turning your cameras off, muting, and working independently until you encounter an issue that you’d ordinarily deal with inside your own head.) When you reach a checkpoint, or when it’s time to sign off, you can do “mini code reviews” to make sure someone else’s eyeballs have been on your work… and caught any big things that you might not have been able to see.

Does it work? From experience, yes. And there’s a basis for it in the research too, through the literature on collaborative play and group dynamics in kids. (Here’s an article that describes some of that.)

Cogramming can help you realize the benefits of pair programming without the pain of actually pair programming. Plus, managers will love hearing that they’re not losing any apparent productivity by two people working on the same code at the same time. If you’re anti-pair, try this approach before you give up entirely.

“Documentation” is a Dirty Word

I just skimmed through another 20 page planning document, written in old-school “requirements specification”-ese with a hefty dose of ambiguity. You know, things like “the Project Manager shall…” and “the technical team will respond to bugs.”

There’s a lot of good content in there. It’s not easy to get at, though… for each page I want to understand, I can expect to spend between ten minutes and an hour deciphering what’s going on. (That’s half a week of work, and I have a lot of other work to do this week. Is it even worth it?)

Also, this document is boring… and there’s a lot of filler (like “package X is useful, flexible, and open source” – OK, that’s great, and factually correct, but not very informative).

The whole document could have been condensed into 4 or 5 slides of diagrams plus annotations. If that had happened, I’d be looking at a 10 to 30 minute commitment overall to get my brain into this particular company’s context… and then I’d be able to make some useful contributions. (As it stands, I’m weighing whether it’s worth my time to go spelunking in that 20-pager at all. Probably not.)

Unfortunately:

  • The bulk of technical documentation that I read is unintelligible or lacks sufficient meaning. I have three decades of exposure to this stuff, so if I can’t understand it, I feel super sorry for the early career people (who might think they can’t understand it because they don’t know enough).
  • Nearly all of the technical documents I see are uninteresting. And tech is interesting.

99 times out of 100, technical documentation is dull and dysfunctional. While it’s supposed to help people and teams establish a shared understanding of a system or a process or a concept, it just ends up looking really impressive and convincing you that the authors know a lot more about this than you do. It doesn’t help you much, if at all.

And as a CTO, CIO, or VP of Engineering, I don’t want to pay for crappy documentation. This particular document probably cost me between $32K-50K, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg… because it doesn’t account for the incremental costs of the people who will attempt to decipher it – which could be 10-100x more over the lifetime of that document. Although the person or team that wrote the 20-pager probably knows what’s going on (at least a little bit), the artifact itself is going to cost other people time and take them away from more value-adding tasks.

The sheer volume of information we’re required to wade through to gain understanding – without the assurance that it will lead us in the right direction, or even in any direction at all – is probably what’s led to the disease of devaluing documentation

A lot of managers think documentation isn’t value-adding, and shouldn’t be done, because… in most cases, people do it so badly that it wasn’t worth the investment in the first place.

Dear tech workers: can we fix this, please? I know it will take a whole generation to effect meaningful change, but… I’m ready to roll up my sleeves.

Scrum and the Illusion of Progress

Agile is everywhere. Sprints are everywhere. Freshly trained Scrum practitioners and established devotees in the guise of Scrum Masters beat the drum of backlog grooming sessions and planning poker and demos and retros. 

They are very busy, and provide the blissful illusion of progress.

(Full disclosure: I am a Sprint Grinch, and my heart will not grow three sizes, or even one… on any day.)

Despite the mirage of progress, the people on the front lines doing the engineering work feel little relief from the ill logic and misplaced pressure of the pointy haired bosses. The managers aren’t getting the deliverables faster (like they convinced themselves they would). There are tons of charts and graphs that tell us how we’re doing (like burndowns) but now the CFO is using them to whip our horses just a little bit harder, trying to get them to go faster. They’re not going fast enough. (Spoiler: They will never go fast enough.)

And isn’t that what Agile is supposed to do… speed things up? NO!

Once upon a time, we used to build software like we built skyscrapers: plan every single task, put in on a Gantt chart, and make sure there are approval gates between every phase of work: elicit requirements, design the systems, write code, test it, deploy it, maintain it.

But a couple of big, bad things tended to happen over and over: 

  • By the time we got to “test and deploy” we’d discover that the thing we built was not what the users and stakeholders actually needed. (“But it’s exactly what you asked for in the requirements,” we’d say, “and you approved it at multiple decision points.” “Sure,” they would say, “but we learned a lot in the meantime, and things are different now. You just built us what we thought we needed six months ago.”)
  • The software developers would build something that the operations team, responsible for standing it up and maintaining it, wouldn’t be able to support at the intended service levels. (“You can’t expect us to maintain this,” they’d say. “It’s fragile.”)

Agile practices emerged more than two decades ago when engineers said… hold it, there’s got to be a better way. If we work collaboratively with our users and stakeholders, learning together, figuring out how to realize value together… then we’ll produce something that real people are able to get value from much faster. We need control over our process, and we need you to be actively engaged, business people. We can eliminate all these handoffs, and replace them with shared accountability.

The two solutions were: 

  • Agile: We said “let’s take a more collaborative approach to development, and get the users and stakeholders together with the engineers, so they can all learn and co-create together until they’ve produced the next nugget of value.” 
  • DevOps: Instead of two groups siloed from each other, let’s automate the handoff and make it seamless, and give the developers tools that will alert them when they’ve got to fix more stuff. If tests automatically run before the code is merged into production, we’ll always know that we’re deploying stuff that runs. (I’m pretty sure everyone agreed this was a good idea.)

Agile is a great aspiration. But how often have you ever seen the users and stakeholders sharing space, sharing accountability, sharing the process of creating value? Not often. They still coordinate through user stories, and tickets, and handoffs, and PRs. 

Agile speeds up value delivery, but not necessarily software delivery. Having daily stand-ups and burndown charts and JIRA tickets won’t make people code faster. But it will make managers think they should be coding faster, and that’s where the poison will settle in and grow.

Bottom line, my position statement is:

  1. Any (minimalist) process is better than no process.
  2. Agility is an essential goal, but Scrum and certified Agile practitioners are less likely to get you there.
  3. Go back to first principles: plan an iteration, co-create value, see where it got you and reassess your ability to reach your goal, then adjust. Keep experimenting.

Would I ever use Scrum? Sure, under specific conditions:

  • There’s something we have to build, and we’ve never built it before.
  • The road ahead is unknown.
  • We have access to collaborators who can help us see what’s needed.
  • We agree to intentional checkpoints where we can see how far we got, and whether we can still get to the place we’d originally intended.
  • We iterate, and iterate, until we agree we’ve incrementally added enough total value nuggets to move to the next project.
  • There are no well-meaning-but-not-helpful engineering managers or business managers hovering over the development team with bated breath, waiting to beat us with burndowns. The dev team can manage itself.

Agility is a laudable – and essential – goal. But only in rare cases do I believe Agile and Scrum will get you there.

Why Software Estimation is (Often) Useless

For 12 years, I blogged and wrote a whole bunch. For the past year and a half, I’ve let myself be pulled away from so many of the things that make me me… including writing. Today I heard one of the best anecdotes ever, and it’s the spark that will be pulling me back in. (Thanks, John.)

So here it is! It has to do with software estimation. Not only is it difficult to accurately estimate how long it’s going to take someone to do a programming (or similarly technical) task, the act of estimating often does not add any value at all. Estimation is a bad thing, especially if you’re trying to be Agile.

(And if you’re in a client/contractor relationship, you’ll have discovered that estimates are the lifeblood of the relationship, even as they drain all the life and all the blood out of the relationship, slowly and deliberately.)

Sometimes I get caught asking engineers for estimates even when the task we’re embarking on is new, unknown, uncertain, and requiring lots of learning and exploration and discovery. I should know better. But I cave, because the concept of the software estimate is so enticing: with a good estimate, I’ll know exactly how much time someone will need to spend working on a task that’s still kind of nebulous and mostly unknown. (That was a joke.)

My friend John shared the best anecdote ever today about why software estimation is so frustrating (liberally embellished):

Imagine that you’re standing on a hill looking down at a labyrinth, or a corn maze. It’s reasonably small… you can see that the corn maze is definitely doable, you can see a couple paths in and out, and the entire maze is a similar size to other mazes you’ve successfully found your way out of. So you’re pretty sure once you get to the entrance, you’ll find your way out.

But there’s no way you can say exactly how long it will take you to escape. Maybe you’ll run right through from start to finish, and it will be smooth. Maybe you’ll get stuck in the beginning, and spend a long time before winding your way out. Maybe you’ll run right close to the end, but have no idea you’re a few feet away from the exit, and you’ll get stuck there for a while.

And maybe you’ll make it halfway through, get lost, go in circles, and eventually just die in the maze.

Problem is, I can tell you how long it’s taken me to get across comparable mazes, but I have no way of knowing how long it will take me to escape from this maze, and just having another engineer in the maze to pair with me and see things I’m maybe not seeing is no guarantee at all that either of us will get us. Statistically, we’ll probably make it out, but the estimate I give you is just a guess.

Unfortunately, it’s a guess that’s going to make a lot of people unhappy, no matter what. Because even if I make it out of the maze fast this time, then they’ll expect that I’ll zoom through the next maze.

– John

Top 10 Business Books You Should Read in 2020


I read well over a hundred books a year, and review many for Quality Management Journal and Software Quality Professional. Today, I’d like to bring you my TOP 10 PICKS out of all the books I read in 2019. First, let me affirm that I loved all of these books — it was really difficult to rank them. The criteria I used were:

  1. Is the topic related to quality or improvement? The book had to focus on making people, process, or technology better in some way. (So even though Greg Satell’s Cascades provided an amazing treatment of how to start movements, which is helpful for innovation, it wasn’t as closely related to the themes of quality and improvement I was targeting.)
  2. Did the book have an impact on me? In particular, did it transform my thinking in some way?
  3. Finally, how big is the audience that would be interested in this book? (Although some of my picks are amazing for niche audiences, they will be less amazing for people who are not part of that group; they were ranked lower.)
  4. Did I read it in 2019? (Unfortunately, several amazing books I read at the end of 2018 like Siva Vaidhyanathan’s Antisocial Media.)

#10 – Understanding Agile Values & Principles (Duncan)

Duncan, Scott. (2019). Understanding Agile Values & Principles. An Examination of the Agile Manifesto. InfoQ, 106 pp. Available from https://www.infoq.com/minibooks/agile-values-principles

The biggest obstacle in agile transformation is getting teams to internalize the core values, and apply them as a matter of habit. This is why you see so many organizations do “fake agile” — do things like introduce daily stand-ups, declare themselves agile, and wonder why the success isn’t pouring in. Scott goes back to the first principles of the Agile Manifesto from 2001 to help leaders and teams become genuinely agile.

#9 – Risk-Based Thinking (Muschara)

Muschara, T. (2018). Risk-Based Thinking: Managing the Uncertainty of Human Error in Operations. Routledge/Taylor & Francis: Oxon and New York. 287 pages.

Risk-based thinking is one of the key tenets of ISO 9001:2015, which became the authoritative version in September 2018. Although clause 8.5.3 from ISO 9001:2008 indirectly mentioned risk, it was not a driver for identifying and executing preventive actions. The new emphasis on risk depends upon the organizational context (clause 4.1) and the needs and expectations of “interested parties” or stakeholders (clause 4.2).

Unfortunately, the ISO 9001 revision does not provide guidance for how to incorporate risk-based thinking into operations, which is where Muschara’s new book fills the gap. It’s detailed and complex, but practical (and includes immediately actionable elements) throughout. For anyone struggling with the new focus of ISO 9001:2015, this book will help you bring theory into practice.

#8 – The Successful Software Manager (Fung)

Fung, H. (2019). The Successful Software Manager. Packt Publishing, Birmingham UK, 433 pp.

There lots of books on the market that provide technical guidance to software engineers and quality assurance specialists, but little information to help them figure out how (and whether) to make the transition from developer to manager. Herman Fung’s new release fills this gap in a complete, methodical, and inspiring way. This book will benefit any developer or technical specialist who wants to know what software management entails and how they can adapt to this role effectively. It’s the book I wish I had 20 years ago.

#7 – New Power (Heimans & Timms)

Heiman, J. & Timms, H. (2018). New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World – and How to Make it Work For You. Doubleday, New York, 325 pp.

As we change technology, the technology changes us. This book is an engaging treatise on how to navigate the power dynamics of our social media-infused world. It provides insight on how to use, and think in terms of, “platform culture”.

#6 – A Practical Guide to the Safety Profession (Maldonado)

Maldonado, J. (2019). A Practical Guide to the Safety Profession: The Relentless Pursuit (CRC Focus). CRC Press: Taylor & Francis, Boca Raton FL, 154 pp.

One of the best ways to learn about a role or responsibility is to hear stories from people who have previously served in those roles. With that in mind, if you’re looking for a way to help make safety management “real” — or to help new safety managers in your organization quickly and easily focus on the most important elements of the job — this book should be your go-to reference. In contrast with other books that focus on the interrelated concepts in quality, safety, and environmental management, this book gets the reader engaged by presenting one key story per chapter. Each story takes an honest, revealing look at safety. This book is short, sweet, and high-impact for those who need a quick introduction to the life of an occupational health and safety manager.

# 5 – Data Quality (Mahanti)

Mahanti, R. (2018). Data Quality: Dimensions, Measurement, Strategy, Management and Governance. ASQ Quality Press, Milwaukee WI, 526 pp.

I can now confidently say — if you need a book on data quality, you only need ONE book on data quality. Mahanti, who is one of the Associate Editors of Software Quality Professional, has done a masterful job compiling, organizing, and explaining all aspects of data quality. She takes a cross-industry perspective, producing a handbook that is applicable for solving quality challenges associated with any kind of data.

Throughout the book, examples and stories are emphasized. Explanations supplement most concepts and topics in a way that it is easy to relate your own challenges to the lessons within the book. In short, this is the best data quality book on the market, and will provide immediately actionable guidance for software engineers, development managers, senior leaders, and executives who want to improve their capabilities through data quality.

#4 – The Innovator’s Book (McKeown)

McKeown, M. (2020). The Innovator’s Book: Rules for Rebels, Mavericks and Innovators (Concise Advice). LID Publishing, 128 pp.

Want to inspire your teams to keep innovation at the front of their brains? If so, you need a coffee table book, and preferably one where the insights come from actual research. That’s what you’ve got with Max’s new book. (And yes, it’s “not published yet” — I got an early copy. Still meets my criteria for 2019 recommendations.)

#3 – The Seventh Level (Slavin)

Slavin, A. (2019). The Seventh Level: Transform Your Business Through Meaningful Engagement with Customer and Employees. Lioncrest Publishing, New York, 250 pp.

For starters, Amanda is a powerhouse who’s had some amazing marketing and branding successes early in her career. It makes sense, then, that she’s been able to encapsulate the lessons learned into this book that will help you achieve better customer engagement. How? By thinking about engagement in terms of different levels, from Disengagement to Literate Thinking. By helping your customers take smaller steps along this seven step path, you can make engagement a reality.

#2 – Principle Based Organizational Structure (Meyer)

Meyer, D. (2019). Principle-Based Organizational Structure: A Handbook to Help You Engineer Entrepreneurial Thinking and Teamwork into Organizations of Any Size. NDMA, 420 pp.

This is my odds-on impact favorite of the year. It takes all the best practices I’ve learned over the past two decades about designing an organization for laser focus on strategy execution — and packages them up into a step-by-step method for assessing and improving organizational design. This book can help you fix broken organizations… and most organizations are broken in some way.

#1 Story 10x (Margolis)

Margolis, M. (2019). Story 10x: Turn the Impossible Into the Inevitable. Storied, 208 pp.

You have great ideas, but nobody else can see what you see. Right?? Michael’s book will help you cut through the fog — build a story that connects with the right people at the right time. It’s not like those other “build a narrative” books — it’s like a concentrated power pellet, immediately actionable and compelling. This is my utility favorite of the year… and it changed the way I think about how I present my own ideas.


Hope you found this list enjoyable! And although it’s not on my Top 10 for obvious reasons, check out my Introductory Statistics and Data Science with R as well — I released the 3rd edition in 2019.

« Older Entries