Agile

As regular readers will know I’m a fan of the Kanban software development process championed by David Anderson. However it has to be said that the jury is still out on Kanban.

I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the dangers with Kanban is actually one of the reasons I like it. To properly implement Kanban you need to create a learning culture, there really needs to be a drive towards learning, change and improvement. Kanban raises the importance of understanding and creating a learning organization. Let me explain…

Depending on your point of view, Kanban might be:
a. The first second generation Agile development method
b. A collection of common heuristics
c. Dangerously unAgile
d. None of the above (a-c)
e. All of above (a-c)
f. Just another marketing term

Over at the Peripatetic Axiom blog Keith Braithwaite was voicing some doubts last week.

I had lunch with a Scrum trainer recently who commented “There’s nothing really new there, its stuff people have been recommending for a while”. I’ve said some similar myself – I find Kanban as described fits better with the way I’ve been coaching and running Agile teams for five years.

But then, isn’t that where Agile itself started? – people collecting heuristics and making sence out of them?

The Kanban community is not ignorant of some of the issues, Karl Scotland has a recent blog post about not mistaking Kanban for waterfall.

I have to say, some parts of Kanban worry me. For example, I’ve been telling teams for a while to think management by routine, the drum beats you have a planning meeting, a drum beats again and you do a demo, and so on, it all happens in a predictable fashion. So dropping iterations gives me the willies.

Keith’s point about batch size is well taken. Its all very well to talk about Minimally Marketable Features (MMF) but sometimes what the business thinks of as a MMF is a pretty large project in its own right. I remember one customer who’s idea of an MMF was “Works on Mac” which was a pretty major piece of work before we started to even consider the design limitations imposed, and the ones the engineers dreamt up.

Perhaps one of the reasons so many Kanban success stories involve maintenance teams (I have one too, I promise to publish it soon) is because bug fixes make nice MMFs.

However I don’t think this problem is confined to Kanban. All the Agile process suffer with a version of it. Scrum encourages teams to focus sprints on some meaningful goal, basically an MMF at the sprint level. The work breakdown, from business feature to developer tasks is a central plank of Blue-White-Red Agile.

I’m not doubting that teams can come up with small, non-bug fix, MMFs, I just think its difficult. Some technologies make it easier than others, e.g. its easy to come up with an MMF if you are coding a Ruby on Rails website and much harder if you are coding a C++ shrink-wrap legacy app.

Its also a sign of team maturity – both the development team and business team. The more experience the development team is the more likely they are to come up with a work breakdown were each item makes a meaningful contribution to the overall goal and delivers value to the business. It helps if the teams management is good at getting the team to look at options before deciding on what to do.

The business also needs to be experienced in both identifying small deliverable elements and they need to trust the development team. Rather than ask for the World (because they expect to be delivered Luxembourg) they need to be prepared to ask for Holland (and expect to get Holland).

There is something about Kanban that has troubled me for a while and I’ve not been able to put my finger on. Oddly its related to the fact that I’ve found teams pick it up more easily than Scrum based processes. And it goes back to Karl’s point about a superficial resemblance to waterfall.

I’ve finally worked it out: Kanban needs a culture of learning and improvement. Without a relentless drive to improve teams can fall back to glorified waterfall.

With Scrum, or XP, you know you are doing it because there is a lot of information on how to do it. If you start breaking a Scrum practice (without agreeing it in a retrospective) sooner or later someone will pull you up on it. Kanban removes that safety net.

At the moment the safety net doesn’t exist for Kanban. In five years it might be different because there will be more published on it. But in a way I hope not because the need to learn and improve is what I value in Kanban and its why it maps better to my model of development. A safety net might limit the learning and improvement.

The learning culture you need for Kanban is, perhaps, the result of it drawing more directly on Lean than some other Agile methods. In the absence of a safety net teams must think through problems and find their own solutions.

I think Kanban is here, it is here to stay and it will be found useful. But like other methods it won’t work in some places. With any Agile or Lean method there is an riding consideration:

There is no reason why one method is universally applicable.

Some times one method is more appropriate and sometimes another works better – horses for courses. Scrum is best in some work, XP elsewhere and Kanban in others. And all methods need to tailoring, sometimes you need to roll your own method.

A footnote to the recent discussion of requirements….

In Competitive Engineering Tom Gilb argues that development groups spend a lot of time focusing on functional requirements but they should actually focus on performance and quality requirements:

“ From the point of view of understanding ‘competitiveness’, ‘levels of achievement’ and ‘associated risk’, the performance requirements are by far the most interesting requirements. Yet, traditionally, too much attention has been given to specification of functional requirements and resource requirements.” Tom Gilb, 2005

Put that in the context of an imaginary payroll software company: understanding what payroll software needs do do is fairly straight forward, most products on the market will do the same thing. But what makes the product competitive is how well it does it.

It relatively easy to list the things your software should do but listing how the software will be more competitive than the opposition, or delivery real business value – rather than a shopping list of features – is more difficult.

Continuing my follow up to my latest tell of the Alignment Trap in the Agile Journal and on InfoQ.

Lets get one thing straight: I’m not saying requirements don’t matter.

What I’m saying it: when the context is a broken development organization the most important thing is fixing the delivery process.

In which case, you can, and should, take liberties with the requirements process. Then, when delivery shapes up you should come back and fix the requirements issues. Because requirements is where the long term gain is.

Anyone who thinks I don’t value requirements should look at all the postings on this blog about the importance of Product Managers. The requirements is also where the long term future of Agile is.

Look again at those 4 quadrants:
• Maintenance zone: this segment explains why so many of my friends work at dysfunctional IT shops.
• Alignment trap zone: this explains the traditional approach has failed so badly; companies tie themselves in knots trying to do the right thing when they can’t actually do very much.
• Well oiled IT: this is where Agile takes you. But it leaves you there.
• IT Enabled growth: where we all want to be.

Most companies are currently stuck in the maintenance zone. There are three types of company here:
• those who are happy in the mud; i.e. those who lack the will to do something about it, those who believe IT is always like this, those who earn so much money elsewhere it doesn’t matter.
• those who are trying to move to the Alignment Trap; many will still be drinking “do the right thing” cool aid and are making it worse for themselves
• those who are trying to get to the Well Oiled IT, probably via Agile development

The downturn will finish off many of the companies in the first two groups. Those in Well Oiled will probably be OK, and those who can move quickly will hopefully survive. Still, too many companies will survive despite being stuck in the Maintenance Zone.

There is a whole Agile industry (including me!) helping companies make this shift. To be honest, I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the easy bit. (Don’t believe me? Call me.)

But, what do you do once you get to Well Oiled?

The problem is that while Agile as we know it will get you there it won’t take you any further. It runs out of ideas.

Companies could happily stay in Well Oiled, its a (relatively) nice place to be. And you will probably out compete your competitors. But some of the companies that make it – and those who are already there – will look to go further.

This is where Chris Matt’s point on the Agile Journal site are relevant. Agile as we know it, has largely ignored the Business Analyst and Product Manager roles.

The onsite-customer in XP lacks any kind of strategic view. It worked for the C3 team but they were just replacing an existing system, not inventing a new product or doing great innovation. Even so, the original customer nearly had a breakdown.

Scrum is slightly better, it has a full Product Owner role, but it says nothing about how this role is undertaken. It only speaks about the Product Owner in the Scrum process.

And Chris is right about “user stories.” They are a simple tool for communication with developers. They are not sufficient. To make matters worse most teams use them isolation, they do no adopt scenarios, actors or personas.

How do we fix the problem?

Here are three steps to get started:
1. Recognise the importance of the Product Owner role and staff it properly. You need 1 Product Owner for every 3 to 7 Developers. The newer and more innovative your product the more you need. If you have an older less innovative product you might have 7 developers to 1 Product Owner.
2. Stop looking to Project Managers to fill the Product Owner role. They are not Product Owners and their training is very different.
3. Decide whether Product Owners in your company are Business Analysts or Product Managers. If you develop software for your own internal use (or one client) then they are BAs. If you sell your software (shrink wrap or online) they are Product Managers.

If we are to move beyond Agile software development and build Agile companies it is essential we respect requirements. So far our success has all been based on shifting out the maintenance zone, the next challenge is to move on up.

I’m used to getting a reaction from people when I outline the Alignment Trap, and my article in the Agile Journal – and the subsequent report on InfoQ – certainly stirred up some reaction.

Immo Huneke mailed to point out that the Sloan piece doesn’t discuss how you measure alignment. I’m not sure how I would go about measuring alignment myself, after all what is alignment? Can it be measured objectively?

There is a point here, and I myself am a guilty of making a jump from alignment to requirements. I’ve also used the phrases “doing the right thing” and “doing things right” quite loosely.

The other point which we could argue about is “IT”. The Sloan piece talks about IT. There is no information on whether this relates to hardware, software, IT support or software development.

Despite these caveats I think the central message still holds: getting effective is more beneficial than getting.

Still, I want to make it clear I think knowing what you are doing is essential. And in the long term requirements aligned to the business are very important – see the blog entry that comes after this one.

Its all a question of context.

If you want to fix a broken IT organization I claim, and I believe the Alignment Trap supports this claim, it is best to start by making the organization effective then determining what needs doing.

This context implies that there is an organization, and it is doing “stuff”. It knows some of what needs doing. You might be able to remove some “stuff” (or add more) but basically it is not short of work to do.

I believe that in this situation discussions over what to do (alignment, requirements) are not effective because the history of failed deliveries means there is no trust and it means the business side tries to game the system by asking for more than they need because they believe It will always under deliver.

This context also implies that the IT group is, in general, supporting the business. If your company sells Payroll software and your developers are currently writing a competitor to Grand Theft Auto then I think you would be right in question requirements on day one. But in general, if you sell Payroll software it is likely that your development group are working on Payroll software.

In other words: you are better off being generally right than precisely wrong.

Before you can tackle the requirements problem (and alignment) you need to build a delivery machine that can tackle it.

The Machine that Changed the World contains an example I think illustrates the point here.

Producing the body of a car requires a “stamp” to shape the metal for the car body. These stamps are large and take many months to create. In the 1980’s at General Motors a new car would be designed and when the design was finished work on a “stamp” would start. This created a delay of a year or more in producing the new car.

At Toyota the general size parameters of a new car would be agreed early on in the process. The stamp team would start work on the new stamp before the design was finished. Only as the design neared completion would the stamp team complete the stamp. As a result Toyota did not have the same delay.

The Toyota guys started off being generally right and narrowed in on the exact dimensions over time. At GM the desire to be always right held work back.

A provocative piece from me in this month’s Agile Journal – Requirements Come Second.

If you’ve not checked out the Agile Journal recently you might want to have a look, they’ve given the site a make-over and have added blogs, forums and all that community stuff.

Bristol BCS are holding a series of sessions entitled “Spring School – An Introduction to Agile Development”. I will be presenting the fourth and final session (23 March) on the “Future of Agile”.

I’ve not written it yet but it will probably include plenty about Lean and Kanban, the Change Problem and the importance of Business Analysts and Product Managers.

Fellow ACCU member Giovanni Asproni is doing the session on 16 March on Agile testing and TDD.

If your in the Bristol and Bath area I’m sure it will be worth the £30-£50 charge.

After slogging my way into London’s through the worst snow in 18 years on Monday and Tuesday this week to deliver a Agile Project Management course, I was a little relieved when Kingston & Croydon BCS cancelled last nights presentation – because of the weather. Still I was a sorry to miss the evening.

If you were one of those who planned to come along all I can say is Sorry, I believe it will be rescheduled for a later date.

But, when I opened my e-mail I had a very nice surprise…

My book, Changing Software Development: Learning to become Agile is going to be translated into Japanese. I can’t wait to see it. This was quite unexpected and I think goes to show how well the book has been received.

Now if any Japanese readers would like me to do a talk in Japan I’m more than happy to oblige, although I will have to ask for expenses.

Writing that last blog entry on my introduction of Kanban also led me to reflect a bit on my Blue-White-Red Agile method.

I’ve long felt Blue-White-Red was largely derived from XP, thats what the developers were excited about. I called it Blue-White-Red because it was a cut down XP, I was introducing the ideas incrementally. Also, the word “extreme” frightened the managers and “pair programming” frightened most developers.

In the last few years I seen more and more Scrum in BWR. At the time I “invented” it I hadn’t read much about Scrum books so maybe it is surprising how much like Scrum it looks. But, big but, I think this also goes to show how little difference there is between XP and Scrum. I’d have to go back and read the original XP book to be sure but it seems to me the main difference is XP’s emphasis on engineering practices (TDD, refactoring, etc.) while Scrum emphasis the project management bit (just without the project manager).

The other influence was Lean. I’d started reading about lean sometime around 2000. In fact I wrote about “Thinking Beyond Lean” in the April 2002 issue of Overload. I’d also been exposed to a lot of lean on my MBA course.

I distinctly remember telling people the white board was a “Kanban board” and when people asked “What if I have too many cards to put see the board?” | telling them “That is a sign you have too much work on the go” – I was attempting a crude form of work in progress limits.

So what would I recommend to teams in future?

Well as always it depends. But I’m going to favour Kanban. I think Scrum (and BWR) still have their place, they are more suited to environments were large project specifications exist up front. In addition, Scrum has the advantage when the organization needs to see external validation and BWR has the advantage because there is less baggage. There is less written about it.

That last bit might seem a little off but I mean it. The fact that it is less well knows means it brings fewer assumptions, fewer stories about how it failed and perhaps a cleaner sheet. Kanban has many of those advantages today but I don’t expect it to last, success will remove them.