Agile

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Some years ago I was managing a team at an internet TV pioneer. Shortly after a release our biggest customer – ITV – was on the phone complaining about a bug. Unfortunately one set of data fields were retaining their value when they should be wiped clear. It took a couple of months before we could include a fix in the release but we were confident we would make ITV happy.

A couple of hours after the fix went live ITV were on the phone. Why had we removed the daily cache? They weren’t just “working around” the bug, they were utilising it as a feature.

Sometimes it seems the problem you think you are dealing with isn’t the problem you are dealing with. Sometimes the way to solve a problem is not to fix the problem head on. Rather the solution comes from reframing the problem so that it is easier to solve. To put it another way: the problem you are trying to solve is knowing the problem you are trying to solve.

I sometimes think of this as “go and look at it from a different place”. Whatever you are looking at – problem, opportunity, objective, way of life – looks different if you go and stand somewhere else. The more different the place you stand in the more different the thing looks.

Clearly one way of solving a problem is to define it as not a problem: “it is not a bug, it is a feature.” As the story above shows, one person’s “bug” can be another person’s “feature.”

The question is then: is the reframing acceptable to others? – can others share the reframed perspective?

By way of example, lets apply this to agile.

A big part of agile is focus: small user stories, morning stand-ups and sprint planning all help create focus. Once you decide what you are going to tackle you focus on it, push other things out of the way and do it. And do it to completion.

You might call this “eating the elephant”: don’t eat it all at once, carve off a small piece, eat and repeat.

Pushed to either extreme this approach has bad side effects. Focus too tightly or too inflexibility and you might deliver a thing but not a thing which others recognise as a solution to the problem. But taking a view too broadly, or being very flexible, negates the way of working because you don’t deliver anything, – or the solution you deliver doesn’t please anyone (the “you can’t please all the people all the time” problem.)

Reframing can be a powerful technique but it can also work against you if other’s reframe the problem.

So, how do you know, or rather how do you frame and decide what your objective is?

Deciding what the problem is requires some imagination, it requires focus and flexibility – to stare at the problem but be flexible in how you see it. It also requires understanding and then the ability to communicate that understanding to others.

While I often hear people say “we should focus on the problem” I wish we could spend more time focusing on the problem of knowing what the problem is.

Reframing the problem is an inherently human thing. While machines may now, or in the near future, be able to solve many problems there is a problem of knowing what problem to present to the machine.

A big part of human work – often managerial work – is framing problems and deciding which to solve and which not to solve. Framing can make a small problem big, or a big problem small. That is inherently a human activity.

So, how do you know what problems to address? how do you know where to look for opportunities?

Now isn’t that a problem in itself? – surely we could set that up as an objective in its own right. Again it needs defining and framing and… So how does one decide to eat an elephant? And which elephant? And even, why eat an elephant at all?

It all becomes recursive. You can’t recurse for ever so hopefully sooner or later you need to come to the top – otherwise you have just reinvented paralysis by analysis. Detailed problem thinking needs to be combined with vaguer, even oblique, thinking.

To make this very real: I’m a big fan of metrics, they help focus, they help you know if you are going in the right direction. But I detest metrics too because they are a blunt instrument which can mislead so easily.

Metrics are great for focus but they need to be combined with a healthy dose of scepticism and oblique thinking. Metrics have limitations.

Sorry no solutions today. Just awareness of the problem of problems.

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Those of us who don’t code any more, and perhaps many of those who do, need Electronic Monks to help us with software development.

There is an old Douglas Adam’s book (Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency) which features an Electric Monk. The job of an electric monk is to believe things for you. In Adam’s story people have too many things to believe so they offload all that believing to an electric monk. In my mind I’ve always considered part of the monk’s work to include worrying. I can’t remember if Adam’s says this explicitly or just implies it. (And as I no longer have a copy of the book I can’t check.)

I’m currently very engaged with one client as an Agile Coach (although I sometimes wonder if “Shadow Manager” might be a better term, more of that another day). I regularly find myself staring at the board thinking about the work it shows and worrying about whether it will be done. Sometimes my mind plays “what if games” – “If that card is finished soon, then the other one could move down and…”

The same worry plays out when looking at the backlog showing work not on the board. Or when I’m talking to the Product Owner. Or indeed when I find myself talking to middle managers and others in the company who have an interest in the work the team is doing.

Basically, there is very little any of us can do to move the work through.

Sure I can call a meeting and talk about optimising our workflow. But I’ve done that a few times already.

I could call a meeting and emphasis how important the work is to the company. I’ve seen this done many times. Some non-coders – call them “the business” – seem to think “If only the coders appreciated how important this work was then they would do it faster.” I hated this when I was a coder and I hate it when I hear others saying things like “Do they know how important this is?” Business folk sometimes seem to believe coders sit around drinking tea and coffee for most of the day.

By the way, I almost wrote “and Testers” in that last paragraph but then realised testers CAN make work go faster: they can just drop their standards, turn a blind eye to issues, accept things they wouldn’t have accepted last week. Piling pressure on Testers is a more effective route to getting work done than pressuring coders. But in both cases it is probably just piling up more work.

Pressuring people to do work faster usually creates problems which come a back and bite you pretty damn quick. As I’ve said before: There is no such thing as “Quick and Dirty” … “Quick and Dirty” actually means “Slow and Dirty”

I could go to the coders and ask “Are you done yet?” – or as 5-year olds say in the back of a car on a long journey (or just any journey) “Are we there yet?” In both cases it doesn’t change the time it takes to get to the end, the answer doesn’t usually say much but asking the question will annoy parents and coders alike.

But if I do anything – like calling a meeting or asking “are we there yet?” – which involves distracting coders from working then I am slowing work down. It is self-defeating.

Yes there are things I can do to make work go more smoothly but once a piece of work is in flight there is little I can do. Most of the change I can make are to do with the way work happens. Or to put it another way: I can influence the climate work happens in but I can’t control the individual weather events which are the work items.

All I can do is worry. Thus my desire to offload that worrying to an electronic monk. Maybe more people in and around software developerment need to recognise they are in the same position.

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I hate the “building software is like building buildings” metaphor. For a start most software people know so little about physical building that they are comparing the messy world of software construction with a idealised image of what they think happens in construction.

The above is a picture from my back garden last week. Only a couple of weeks ago the back of this house looked much like the back of my house, except it had an small, ugly, 2m x 1m kitchen extension on it. And it had an over grown garden, a third of which houses this big extension while the rest of it is full of building debris.

The builders moved into this house less than six week ago. During that time they have: cleared the garden, cleared the house of remaining furniture, dug foundations, concreted foundations, built a two story side and back extension, ripped the roof off both this house and the ajoining house and replaced the roof while also constructing loft conversions on both houses. The roof came off on Monday and the new one was done by Saturday.

Builders – roofers and brick layers – go fast. Three years ago I had some work done on my house. I was well impressed with the speed the builders ripped the back rooms apart, tore down a wall, bricked up a door, and built a new wall.

Then it goes slow.

Once the actual “building” is done the wiring, plumbing, plastering, decorating and other fitting-out starts and o my, it goes so slow. Hold ups are regular as parts and people are not available when needed. There is a constantly changing cast of workers as specialists appear for a few days and then disappear.

I expect it will be four or five months before anyone is living in my neighbours house again.

During that time it goes slow, work people come in but it is hard to see progress. And the progress is far less clear than when a wall disappears, or a new wall comes into being overnight.

And so it is in software… usually.

The thing about construction – both physical and software – is that so often the most visible bits are actually among the most quickest and straight forward. These are the bits where not only can progress be made rapidly but visibly too.

But lots of time is spent on less visible bits – the tricky bits. The Devil is in the Detail as the saying goes.

When people say “How can is possibly take so long?” they are speaking from the experience of seeing the visible bits happen fast. The less visible bits, where the time is consumed, they don’t know what is happening during the less visible bits and have few memories to guide them – but they did remember it went fast last month!

When my house was being worked on I often felt like saying “why isn’t it done yet?”. The big changes, the heavy lifting, was done. How could all this other stuff? – the minor bits, the bits which didn’t require actual building – take so long?

Fortunately, software doesn’t need to be like this. There are alternatives. But working such ways means slowing down the early stages to deal with the detail as you go. Overall you get a more consistent (and sustainable) pace, and may well finish sooner but you loose the quick start that impresses people. Almost from day-1 they start complaining about the lack of progress.

Not being a builder I don’t know, but I do know I hired experts and I have to trust them. And I never tried to say to them “If this was software you would be done by now.”

(Now I’ve written this blog I remember, I’ve said something two years ago… Heavy Lifting is the Easy Bit. Worth saying again I think.)