Tag Archives: scrum

Agile Should Not Make You Feel Bad

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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”)

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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.

Scrum and the Illusion of Progress

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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.

Agile vs. Lean: Explained by Cats

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Over the past few years, Agile has gained popularity. This methodology emerged as a solution to manage projects with a number of unknown elements and to counter the typical waterfall method. Quality practitioners have observed the numerous similarities between this new framework and Lean. Some have speculated that Agile is simply the next generation’s version of Lean. These observations have posed the question: Is Agile the new Lean?  

ASQ Influential Voices Roundtable for December 2019

The short answer to this question is: NO.

The longer answer is one I’m going to have to hold back some emotions to answer. Why? I have two reasons.

Reason #1: There is No Magic Bullet

First, many managers are on a quest for the silver bullet — a methodology or a tool that they can implement on Monday, and reap benefits no later than Friday. Neither lean nor agile can make this happen. But it’s not uncommon to see organizations try this approach. A workgroup will set up a Kanban board or start doing daily stand-up meetings, and then talk about how they’re “doing agile.” Now that agile is in place, these teams have no reason to go any further.

Reason #2: There is Nothing New Under the Sun

Neither approach is “new” and neither is going away. Lean principles have been around since Toyota pioneered its production system in the 1960s and 1970s. The methods prioritized value and flow, with attention to reducing all types of waste everywhere in the organization. Agile emerged in the 1990s for software development, as a response to waterfall methods that couldn’t respond effectively to changes in customer requirements.

Agile modeling uses some lean principles: for example, why spend hours documenting flow charts in Visio, when you can just write one on a whiteboard, take a photo, and paste it into your documentation? Agile doesn’t have to be perfectly lean, though. It’s acceptable to introduce elements that might seem like waste into processes, as long as you maintain your ability to quickly respond to new information and changes required by customers. (For example, maybe you need to touch base with your customers several times a week. This extra time and effort is OK in agile if it helps you achieve your customer-facing goals.)

Both lean and agile are practices. They require discipline, time, and monitoring. Teams must continually hone their practice, and learn about each other as they learn together. There are no magic bullets.

Information plays a key role. Effective flow of information from strategy to action is important for lean because confusion (or incomplete communication) are forms of waste. Agile also emphasizes high-value information flows, but for slightly different purposes — that include promoting:

  • Rapid understanding
  • Rapid response
  • Rapid, targeted, and effective action

The difference is easier to understand if you watch a couple cat videos.

This Cat is A G I L E

From Parkour Cats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCEL-DmxaAQ

This cat is continuously scanning for information about its environment. It’s young and in shape, and it navigates its environment like a pro, whizzing from floor to ceiling. If it’s about to fall off something? No problem! This cat is A G I L E and can quickly adjust. It can easily achieve its goal of scaling any of the cat towers in this video. Agile is also about trying new things to quickly assess whether they will work. You’ll see this cat attempt to climb the wall with an open mind, and upon learning the ineffectiveness of the approach, abandoning that experiment.

This Cat is L E A N

From “How Lazy Cats Drink Water”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlVo3yUNI6E

This cat is using as LITTLE energy as possible to achieve its goal of hydration. Although this cat might be considered lazy, it is actually very intelligent, dynamically figuring out how to remove non-value-adding activity from its process at every moment. This cat is working smarter, not harder. This cat is L E A N.

Hope this has been helpful. Business posts definitely need more cat videos.