Business

“I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, … in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still” President Ronald Reagan, Farewell to the Nation, January 11, 1989

Back in 2001 when the word agile appeared it was a manifesto – a set of ideas, the term “agile” also served to group a bunch of tools and techniques which could make software development “better.” More importantly to my mind, it painted a picture of a shining city on a hill we all wanted to live in.

Agile was a place you wanted to go, it was a journey you wanted to make, it offered hope. More important as the tools – sprints, stand-ups, etc. – and approaches – just in time, last responsible moment, test first – were the stories agile people – including myself – told. These were stories of a better world, of that shining city on the hill.

And not unimportantly, in a world of search engines “agile” gave you something to search for. Before agile you could search “make my software development team better” or “software development process improvement” but what you got was a very mixed offering. AltaVista (and the young Google) would suggest links for CMMI, or ISO-9000, or vendor tools to “fix it”, or proper design, or… there was no coherent message. Most of these ideas resolved around senior people making big decisions and then imposing them.

Then along came agile: it offered to involve everyone, everyone made decisions, everyone was happy and we could all go to that shining city on a hill – more than that, we all had an important part to play in building that city.

Today everyone is agile. Nobody is promoting traditional (“waterfall”) working, CMMI, PMI and everyone else has incorporated agile (to some degree). Not being agile is about as popular as leprosy.

But very few of us have reached the shining city on the hill.

Along the way agile has been watered down, in becoming compatible with everything else it is less different, it is less attractive, fewer workers are motivated to take the journey. And as “the powers that be” have found ways to bring control-and-command back to teams (maybe in the name of scaling) fewer people are invited to help build the city.

Ironically, as we (the agile community) has made agile management friendly we have made it less worker friendly. Today senior managers “get agile” and want their organisations to be agile. But those at the code face seem to have less and less motivation. And those in the middle… sometimes they seem to want to change just enough to declare success but no so much that things really change.

For some people agile has become completely discredited – I wrote Why do Dev’s hate agile? last year and I’m presenting it in London next week. Agile isn’t a shining city on a hill, agile is trench warfare.

And Googling “agile” presents a long long list of links with less and less coherence.

Agile won the war. Agile is respectable and everyone is agile now. Big business rush to be agile, Governments want to be agile, blue-chip consultancies will sell you agile.

But agile lost the peace.

While many say they are agile, few software developers live in a shiny city. The place they live in might be better than the place they came from but it doesn’t live up to the dream many of us shared 15 years ago. Agile has become an excuse for failure and a thing to be imposed.

The thing that passes for “agile” today is too often a watered down version of the original dream. Worse still, we don’t have a word to describe that shining city we all want to get to. Russians have an expression for this:

“We wanted the best, it turned out like always.” Viktor Stepanovich Chernomyrdin, Prime Minister Russia, 1998-1999

Me? – I still dream of that shining city on the hill, I still believe agile is the right way to get there, I still wave the flag for agile but more and more I feel the need to explain myself and tell people that the agile I dream of is not the agile they may experience.

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Back when I was still paid to code I had a simple question I posed to troubled development efforts:

“Why can’t we release tomorrow?”

This short simple question turns out to be amazingly powerful. I remember one effort I was involved with in California where a new CEO took over and started cutting jobs. I posed this question to the team and in a week or two we did a “beta release” – we did those sort of things back then. Asking this question was the key that allows us to question everything, to cut the feature list – or rather push work back, it stayed on the to-do list but we didn’t let it stop us from pushing to release.

We rethought what we were trying to achieve: we didn’t need the whole product, we just needed enough of the product to work to show to one specific target customer. Even if they signed there and then we had weeks before they used it in anger. But until we released something, until we had something “done” our team, our product, look like just another “maybe.” We had to draw a line under it so the new CEO wouldn’t draw a line under us.

Saying “only do the essential” is easy and come up again and again, whether it is Minimal Viable Product, Minimal Subset, Must haves in Moscow rules, but it is far easier said than done. One persons “essential” is so often another persons “optional extra.” In this context, when I say “essential” I mean “the parts needed to make the system work end to end” – I’m far closer to the old walking skeleton idea.

I was reminded of this question by a couple of endeavours that came to my attention during the summer. Well, I say came to my attention, I feel a bit responsible. Both endeavours are happening at clients; clients who I had fallen out of touch with. My style of working is to help clients who want help, I don’t like selling myself. These clients didn’t ask for more help so I didn’t jam my foot in the door, in retrospect maybe I should have.

In one case the team were doing very well. They were iterating, they were TDD/BDD’ing, they were demoing, they were working with the client, they were doing everything … except releasing. Then one day the client asked “when will it be done?”

Now think for a moment: What if you could release your product tomorrow?

The thing is, without actual products those around the team look for signs that the team can be trusted, that they team will deliver, that the team are thinking about what is to be done. People ask for proxy-products: plans, schedules, risk-logs, budget forecasts and so on. When stakeholders can’t see progress they look for things to assure them that there is (or will be) progress (soon).

Who needs plans and predictions about the future when the future is here tomorrow?

Actual releases are they key to reaching the new world, they change everything.

So I feel guilty: I should have inflicted myself on these teams, I should have been there again and again bugging them “Go to release”, “Remove that barrier”, “Force it through”.

Being able to ship an update of your product has a transformative effect.

It demonstrates the team have the ability to do the job in hand.
It demonstrates you have quality. It obliterates the need for a test-fix-test-fix aka stabilisation aka hardening phase.
It blows away sunk costs because something has been delivered.
It removes “maybe” and “ready but…”
It is probably the greatest risk mitigation strategy possible.
It creates trust and provides a platform for solid conversations.

Most of all, a released product is a far better statement of progress than any number of plans or forecasts.

This does not mean everything is done. Sure there are things left undone but there will be things left undone when I’m on my deathbed, that is the nature of life. As much as we (especially men) love to collect entire sets there are few prizes in life for completing everything on your bucket list.

Having a released product utterly changes the nature of the conversation. Conversations are no longer full of “ifs” “maybes” “shoulds” “how long will it take?” “what are the quick wins?”. Those questions can go away. In its place you can have serious conversations about prioritisation and “what do you want tomorrow?”

This is all part of the reason I love continuous delivery. Teams can focus on real priorities and stop wasting time on conjecture.

In my book if you don’t have a releasable product at least every two weeks – say every second Thursday – you are not Agile. And if you haven’t released a product to live in the last two weeks you are probably not Agile.

I don’t care how close you get to a releasable product: it isn’t a release if it isn’t released to a live environment – close but no cigar as they say. (OK, I’ll accept the live environment may not be publicly know, or might be called a beta, but it has to be the real thing.)

Nor should you rest on your laurels once you have regular releases (to live) every second week. That is but first base. You have opened the door, now go further. There are at least 13 opportunities to improve.

If you cannot do that now then ask yourself: Why can’t we release tomorrow?

And start working to remove those obstacles:

• Reduce the number of work items you are aiming to put in the release.
• Fix show-stopper defects now.
• Running tests now.
• Get those people who need to sign-off to sign-off.

Software development has diseconomies of scale: many small is cheaper than few large.

And once you have your release you can turn your attention to making sure these things don’t happen again:

• Reduce the amount of work you accept into development at one time.
• Fix every defects as soon as they are found.
• Automate tests so they can run more often. (Automate anything that moves, and if it doesn’t move, automate it in case.)
• Find a way to reduce the time it takes to get sign-offs: remove the sign-off, make sure the signer prioritises signing or delegate someone else to sign (or automate the signature.)

If there are essential processes, activities, third-parties (or anything else) that has limited bandwidth which need to be done before release but inject delay then re-orientate your process around that bottleneck. For example, if your code needs to pass a security audit before release (an audit you can’t automate that is) then, downsize all the other activities so that the audit process is 100% utilised. (OK, 100% is wrong, 76% might be better, but thats a long conversation about queuing theory.)

Again and again I seem condemned to learn the lesson: nothing counts but working software which is used.

As for my team, and my job in California, it didn’t save me. I regret not asking the question sooner.

I’ve long worried about “Best Practices”. Sure I usually play along at the time but lurking in the back of my mind, waiting for a suitable opportunity are two questions:

• Who decided this was best practice?
• Who says this practice can’t be bettered?

I was once told by someone from the oil industry that it was common for contracts to specify “best practice” should be used. But seldom was the actual practice specified. Instead each party to the contract would interpret best practice as they wished, until something went wrong. At that point, after an accident, after money was lost they would go to court and a judge would decide what was best practice.

Sure practice X might be the best know way of doing things at the moment but how much better could it be? By declaring something “best practice” you can be self limiting and potentially preventing innovation.

Now a piece in MIT Sloan Management Review (Why Best Practices Often Fall Short, Jérôme Barthélemy, February 2018) adds to the debate and highlights a few more problems.

Just for openers, sometimes people mistakenly identify the practice creating the benefits. Apparently some people looked at Pixar animation and decided that having rest rooms (toilets to us English speakers) in the centre of an office floor enhances creativity. They might do, but there is so much else happening at Pixar that moving all the toilets in your organization will probably make no difference at all.

But it is worse than that.

Adopting best practice from elsewhere does not mean it will be best practice in your environment but adopting that “best practice” will be disruptive. Think of all the money you will need to spend relocating the toilets, all the people who will be upset by a desk move they don’t want, all the lost productivity while the work is going on.

The author suggests that in some cases that disruption costs are so high the “best practice” will never cover the costs of the change. Organizations are better shunning the best practice and carrying on as they are. (ERP anyone?)

It gets worse.

There is risk in those best practices. Risk that they will cost more, risk that they won’t be implemented correctly and risk that they will backfire. What was best practice at one organization might not be best practice in yours. (Which might imply you need even more change, even more disruption at even more cost.)

In fact, some best practices – like stock options for executives – can go horrendously wrong and induce behaviours you most definitely don’t want.

So what is a poor company to do?

Well, the author suggests something that does work: copying good practices. Not best but “just OK”. That works. Copy the mundane stuff, the proven stuff. The costs and risks of a big change are avoided. (This sounds a bit like In Search of Mediocracy.)

In my world that means you want to be getting better at doing Agile instead of trying to leapfrog Agile and move to DevOps in one bound.

The author also suggests that where your competitive advantage is concerned keep your cards close to your chest. Do thinks yourself. Work out what your best practice is, work out how you can improve yourself.

I’ve long argued that I want teams to learn and learn for themselves rather than have change done to them. But I also want teams to steal. When they see other teams – at home or elsewhere – doing good things they should steal practices. The important thing from my point of view is for the teams to decide for themselves.

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