text:
This blog posting has been replaced by the more detailed article: Full Agile Delivery Lifecycles.
Thank you for your patience.
Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) Lifecycles
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  lifecycle scrum discipline dad agileadopt disciplined-agile-deliver... 25 Comments 65,790 Views
This blog posting has been replaced by the more detailed article: Full Agile Delivery Lifecycles.
Thank you for your patience.
Reworking the Agile Manifesto for Enterprise-Class Development
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agility-at-scale agileadopt disciplined-agile-deliver... agile manifesto 19 Comments 61,813 Views
This article has been replaced by an official "Disciplined Agile Manifesto".
The text of the original article remains below.
I've recently been working with Mark Lines of UPMentors and we've had some interesting discussions around evolving the Agile Manifesto which I thought I would share here to obtain feedback. Note that this is not any sort of official position of IBM, nothing in my blog is by the way (unless explicitly stated so), nor is it some sort of devious plot to take over the agile world (although if we did have some sort of devious plot, we'd make the exact same claim). What we hope to accomplish is to put some ideas out there in the hopes of getting an interesting conversation going.
Updates Since this Was First Published:
Requirements Envisioning on Agile Projects at Scale
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  requirements modeling agility-at-scale agileadopt 8 Comments 21,835 Views
Contrary to popular belief, agile development teams do in fact model and yes, they even do some up front requirements and architecture modeling. Two of the best practices of Agile Modeling are Requirements Envisioning and Architecture Envisioning where you spend a bit of time at the beginning of the project doing enough initial modeling to get you going in the right direction. The strategy is to take advantage of modeling, which is to communicate and think things through without taking on the risks associated with detailed specifications written early in the lifecycle. In this blog posting I will focus on requirements envisioning, in a future posting I'll cover architecture envisioning.
The goal of initial requirements envisioning is to identify the scope of your effort. You need to do just enough modeling early in the project to come to stakeholder concurrence and answer questions such as what you're going to build, roughly how long it's going to take (give a range), and roughly how much it's likely to cost (once again, give a range). If you can get the right people together in the room, which can sometimes be a logistics challenge but not one that you couldn't choose to overcome, there are very few systems (I suspect less than 5%) that you couldn't initially scope out in a few days or a week. I also suspect that most of the remaining systems could be scoped out with less than 2 weeks of modeling, and if not then I'd take that as an indication that you're taking on too large of a project. I'm not saying that you'll be able to create big detailed specifications during this period, and quite frankly given the problems associated with "Big Requirements Up Front (BRUF)" you really don't want to, but I am saying that you could gain a pretty good understanding of what you need to do. The details, which you'll eventually need, can be elicited throughout the lifecycle when you actually need the information. A common saying in the agile community is that requirements analysis is so important for us that we do it every single day, not just during an initial phase. I'll discuss just in time (JIT) approaches to requirements modeling in a future posting.
To envision the requirements for a business application, you might want to consider creating the following models:
For small teams simple tools such as whiteboards and paper are usually sufficient for requirements envisioning. But what happens at scale? What if you're working on a large agile team, say of 50 people, 200 people (IBM has delivered software into the marketplace with agile teams of this size), or even 500 people (IBM currently has teams of this size applying agile techniques)? What if your team is distributed? Even if you have people working on different floors of the same building, let alone working from home or working in different cities or countries, then you're distributed (see my postings about distributed agile development). Suddenly whiteboards and paper-based tools (index cards, sticky notes, ...) aren't sufficient. You're still likely to use these sorts of tools in modeling sessions with stakeholders, but because of one or more scaling factors you need to capture your requirements models electronically.
In January Theresa Kratschmer and I gave a webcast entitled Agile Requirements: Collaborative, Contextual, and Correct which overviewed agile approaches to requirements elicitation and management, including requirements envisioning. We also showed how Rational Requirements Composer (RRC) can be used to electronically capture critical requirements information, enabling you to address the needs of large and/or distributed agile teams, while still remaining lightweight and flexible. I suspect that you'll find the webcast to be very illuminating and RRC something that you want to take a look at (the link leads to a trial version). Of course RRC can be used in other situations as well, but that's not what I'm focused on right now.
Teams which find themselves in regulatory environments will likely need to do more than just use RRC, as might very large teams. Regulatory compliance often requires more complex requirements documentation, which in turn requires more sophisticated tools such as DOORS or Requisite Pro, and I would consider using those tools in the types of situations that warrant it. One of the things that people often struggle to understand about agile approaches is that you need to tailor your strategy to reflect the situation at handle. One process size does not fit all, so you will end up using different tools and creating different artifacts to different extents in different situations. Repeatable results, not repeatable processes, is the rule of the day.
Further reading:
[Read More]
Bureaucracy Isn't Discipline
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agileadopt disciplined-agile-deliver... repeatability culture antipattern 7 Comments 19,683 Views
Again and again I've seen IT organizations suffering from what I call the "Bureaucracy is Discipline" antipattern. For example, filling out forms and reviewing documents are both bureaucratic activities, neither of which require significant skill nor discipline to accomplish. However, agile practices such as developing potentially shippable software every iteration is easy to say but requires great discipline to accomplish. Respecting the decisions of your stakeholders, particularly those pertaining to requirements prioritization, is easy to talk about but proves to require great discipline in practice (particularly when you don't agree with a decision). It's easy to talk about taking a test-driven approach to development, but in practice it requires significant skill and discipline to actually do.
A "process smell" which indicates that your organization is suffering from this antipattern is a focus on following repeatable processes instead of focusing on repeatable results. An example of repeatable processes is following the same route to work every day regardless of driving conditions. An example of repeatable results is getting to work on time every day, but being willing to change your route as required, bicycling into work instead of driving, taking public transit, and so on. Nobody really cares how you get to work each day (the process), what they really care about is that you got to work on time (the result). Sadly, we've been told for decades now that repeatable processes are critical to our success in IT, yet when you step back and think about that's really a reflection of a bureaucratic approach. On the other hand, a focus on repeatable results is a reflection of a more disciplined approach. Interestingly, the DDJ 2008 Process Framework survey found that given the choice that people would much rather have repeatable results over repeatable processes when it comes to IT.
Mistaking bureaucracy for discipline, or rigour if you prefer that term, is a reflection of the cultural damage that has occurred over the years in IT organizations as the result of traditional philosophies and techniques. Unfortunately, this mistaken belief is a significant inhibitor to software process improvement (SPI) efforts, in particular agile adoption efforts, which must be addressed if you're to be successful. Overcoming this challenge will require a significant cultural shift in some organizations, and many people (particularly the bureaucrats) will find this uncomfortable.
Further reading:
I'd like to leave you with this parting thought: Bureaucracy is bureaucracy and discipline is discipline, please don't confuse the two.[Read More]
Scaling Agile with Risk-Based Milestones
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  disciplined-agile-deliver... agile risk agileexec governance rup phases agility-at-scale 6 Comments 16,411 Views
The explicit phases of the Unified Process -- Inception, Elaboration, Construction, and Transition -- and their milestones are important strategies for scaling agile software development to meet the real-world needs of modern organizations. Yes, I realize that this is heresy for hard-core agilists who can expound upon the evils of serial development, yet these very same people also take a phased approach to development although are loathe to admit it. The issue is that the UP phases are like seasons of a project: although you'll do the same types of activities all throughout a project, the extent to which you do them and the way in which you do them change depending on your goals. For example, at the beginning of a development project if you want to be effective you need to do basic things like identify the scope of the project, identify a viable architecture strategy, start putting together your team, and obtain support for the project. Towards the end of a project your focus is on the activities surrounding the deployment of your system into production, including end-of-lifecycle testing efforts, training, cleaning up of documentation, piloting the system with a subset of users, and so on. In between you focus on building the system, including analysis, design, testing, and coding of it. Your project clearly progresses through different phases, or call them seasons if the term phase doesn't suit you, whether your team is agile or not.
The UP defines four phases, each of which address a different kind of risk:1. Inception. This phase focuses on addressing business risk by having you drive to scope concurrence amongst your stakeholders. Most projects have a wide range of stakeholdres, and if they don't agree to the scope of the project and recognize that others have conflicting or higher priority needs you project risks getting mired in political infighting. In the Eclipse Way this is called the "Warm Up" iteration and in other agile processes "Iteration 0".2. Elaboration. The goal of this phase is to address technical risk by proving the architecture through code. You do this by building and end-to-end skeleton of your system which implements the highest-risk requirements. Some people will say that this approach isn't agile, that your stakeholders should by the only ones to prioritize requirements. Yes, I agree with that, but I also recognize that there are a wide range of stakeholders, including operations people and enterprise architects who are interested in the technical viability of your approach. I've also noticed that the high-risk requirements are often the high-business-value ones anyway, so you usually need to do very little reorganization of your requirements stack.3. Construction. This phase focuses on implementation risk, addressing it through the creation of working software each iteration. This phase is where you put the flesh onto the skeleton.4. Transition. The goal of this phase is to address deployment risk. There is usually a lot more to deploying software than simply copying a few files onto a server, as I indicated above. Deployment is often a complex and difficult task, one which you often need good guidance to succeed at.
Each phase ends with a milestone review, which could be as simple as a short meeting, where you meet with prime stakeholders who will make a "go/no-go" decision regarding your project. They should consider whether the project still makes sense, perhaps the situation has changed, and that you're addressing the project risks appropriately. This is important for "agile in the small" but also for "agile in the large" because at scale your risks are often much greater. Your prime stakeholders should also verify that you have in fact met the criteria for exiting the phase. For example, if you don't have an end-to-end working skeleton of your system then you're not ready to enter the Construction phase. Holding these sorts of milestone reviews improves your IT governance efforts by giving senior management valuable visibility at the level that they actually need: when you have dozens or hundreds of projects underway, you can't attend all of the daily stand up meetings of each team, nor do you even want to read summary status reports.
These milestone reviews enable you to lower project risk. Last Autumn I ran a survey via Dr. Dobb's Journal (www.ddj.com) which explore how people actually define success for IT projects and how successful we really were. We found that when people define success in their own terms that Agile has a 71% success rate compared with 63% for traditional approaches. Although it's nice to that Agile appears to be lower risk than traditional approaches, a 71% success rate still implies a 29% failure rate. The point is that it behooves us to actively monitor development projects to determine if they're on track, and if not either help them to get back on track or cancel them as soon as we possibly can. Hence the importance of occasional milestone reviews where you make go/no-go decisions. If you're interested in the details behind the project, they can be found at http://www.ambysoft.com/surveys/success2007.html .
Done right, phases are critical to your project success, particularly at scale. Yes, the traditional community seems to have gone overboard with phase-based approaches, but that doesn't mean that we need to make the same mistakes. Let's keep the benefit without the cost of needless bureaucracy.[Read More]
Agility at Scale: Become as Agile as You Can Be
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agility-at-scale agile 5 Comments 14,154 Views
I recently wrote an "e-book" for Internet Evolution overviewing agile software development at scale. The goal of the Agility at Scale: Become as Agile as You Can Be ebook is to get people thinking outside of the box a bit when it comes to agile development strategies and see that they really are ready for primetime.
[Read More]
Criteria for a Disciplined Agile Team
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  governance agileadopt spi criteria disciplined-agile-deliver... 5 Comments 18,300 Views
Although it might not be obvious, and important success factor in adopting agile techniques is to be able to determine whether a team is agile or not. The challenge that many organizations face is that many teams will claim to be agile, yet management, who often has little or no experience with agile approaches, cannot tell which claims are true and which are over zealous (I'm being polite). The following are the criteria that I suggest you look for in a disciplined agile team:1. Produce working software on a regular basis. This is one of the 12 principles behind the Agile Manifesto, and in my experience is a critical differentiator between the teams that are agile and those that are merely claiming it. Ideally the team should produce potentially shippable software each iteration. That doesn't mean that they'll deploy the system into production, or the marketplace, each iteration but they could if required to do so. Typically the team will deploy into a pre-production testing environment or a demo enviroment at the end of each iteration (or more often for that matter).2. Do continuous regression testing, and better yet take a Test-Driven Development (TDD) approach. Agile developers test their work to the best of their ability, minimally doing developer regression testing via a continuous integration (CI) strategy and better yet do developer-level TDD. This approach enables development teams to find defects early, thereby reducing the average cost of addressing the defects, it also helps them to deliver higher quality code and to move forward safely when adding or changing functionality.3. Work closely with their stakeholders, ideally on a daily basis. A common practice of agile teams is to have an on-site customer or product owner who prioritizes requirements and provides information on a timely manner to the team. Disciplined agile teams take it one step further and follow the practice active stakeholder participation where the stakeholders get actively involved with modeling and sometimes even development.4. Are self-organizing within a governance framework. Agile teams are self-organizing, which means that the people doing the work determines how the work will be done, they're not told by a manager who may not even be directly involved with the work how it will be done. In other words the team does its own planning, including scheduling and estimation. Disciplined agile teams are self governing within an effective governance framework.5. Regularly reflect on how they work together and then act to improve on their findings. Most agile teams hold a short meeting at the end of each iteration to reflect upon how well things are working and how they could potentially improve the way that they are working together. Sometimes this is done in a more formalized manner in the form of a retrospective, but often it's done informally. The team then acts on one or more of their suggested improvements the next iteration. Disciplined agile teams take this one step further and measure their software process improvement (SPI) progress over time: the act of taking these measures, perhaps via a product such as Rational Self Check, helps to keep the team on track in their SPI efforts.
I have yet to discover an ad-hoc development team which met all five criteria, and most of them rarely meet two or three.
Further reading:
[Read More]
Acceleration: An Agile Productivity Measure
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  metrics velocity acceleration governance agileexec 5 Comments 48,277 Views
A common goal of IT governance is to determine the productivity of various techniques, tools, and people as part of the overall effort to improve said productivity. If you can easily measure productivity you can easily identify what is working for you in given situations, or what is not working for you, and adjust accordingly. A common question that customers ask me is how do you measure productivity on agile teams. Although you could use traditional strategies such as function point (FP) counting, or another similar strategy, this can require a lot of effort in practice. Remember that we don't only want to measure productivity, we want to do so easily. Ideally it would be nice to do so using information already being generated by the team and therefore we won't add any additional bureaucratic overhead.
A common metric captured by agile teams is their velocity. Velocity is an agile measure of how much work a team can do during a given iteration. At the beginning of an iteration a team will estimate the work that they're about to do in terms of points. At the beginning of a project the team will formulate a point system, which typically takes a few iterations to stabilize, so that they can consistently estimate the work each iteration. Although the point system is arbitrary, my team might estimate that a given work item is two points worth of effort whereas your team might think that it's seven points of effort, the important thing is that it's consistent. So if there is another work item requiring similar effort, my team should estimate that it's two points and your team seven points. With a consistent point system in place, each team can accurately estimate the amount of work that they can do in the current iteration by assuming that they can achieve the same amount of work as last iteration (an XP concept called "yesterday's weather"). So, if my team delivered 27 points of functionality last iteration we would reasonably assume that we can do the same this iteration.
So, is it possible to use velocity as a measure of productivity? The answer is not directly. For example, we have two teams, A and B, each of 5 people and each working on a web site and each having two-week long iterations. Team A reports a velocity of 17 points for their current iteration and team B a velocity of 51 points. They're both comprised of 5 people, therefore team B must be three times (51/17) as productive as team A. No! You can't compare the velocity of the two teams because they're measuring in different units. Team A is reporting in their points and B in their points, so you can't compare them directly, The traditional strategy would be to ask the teams to use the same unit of points, which might be a viable strategy with two teams although likely not if you have twenty agile teams and particularly not if you have two hundred teams. Regardless of the number of teams that you have it would minimally require some coordination to normalize the units and perhaps even some training and development and support of velocity calculation guidelines. Sounds like unnecessary bureaucracy that I would prefer to avoid. Worse yet, so-called "consistent" measurements such as FPs are anything but because there's always some sort of fudge factor involved in the process which will vary by individual estimator.
An easier solution exists. Instead of comparing velocities you instead calculate the acceleration of each team. For example, consider the reported velocities of each team below. Team A's velocity is increasing over time whereas team B's velocity is trending downwards. All things being equal, you can assume that team A's productivity is increasing whereas B's is decreasing. Of course it's not wise to manage simply by the numbers, so instead of assuming what is going on I would rather go and talk with the people on the two teams. Doing so I might find out that team A has adopted quality-oriented practices such as continuous integration and static code analysis which team B has not, indicating that I might want to help team B adopt these practices and hopefully increase their productivity.
Team A: 17 18 17 18 19 20 21 22 22 ...Team B: 51 49 50 47 48 45 44 44 41 ...
There are several advantages to using acceleration as an indicator of productivity over traditional techniques such as FP counting:1. It's easy to calculate. For example, the acceleration of team A from iteration 1 to iteration 6 is (20-17)/17 = 0.176 whereas for team B it is (45-51)/51 = -.118. Of course, you don't need to calculate the acceleration over such a long period of time, you could do it iteration by iteration, although I find that doing it over several iterations gives a more accurate value. You'll need to experiment to determine what works for you.2. It is inexpensive. Acceleration is based on information already being collected by the team, their velocity, so there is no extra work to be done by the team. 3. It is unlikely to be gamed. Teams aren't motivated to fake their velocity because it provides them with important information required to manage themselves effectively. 4. It is easy to automate. For example, Rational Team Concert (RTC) calculates velocity automatically from its work item list (an extension of Scrum's product backlog) and does trend reporting via it's web-based project reporting functionality, providing a visual representation of the team's acceleration (or deceleration as the case may be).5. It offers the opportunity for more effective governance. This approach reflects three of the practices of Lean Development Governance: Simple and Relevant Metrics, Continuous Project Monitoring, and Integrated Lifecycle Environment.6. You can easily adjust for changing team size. If the size of a team varies over time, and it will, this metric falls apart the way that I've described it. To address this issue you need to normalize it by dividing by the number of people on the team to get the average acceleration per team member.7. You can easily monetize this metric. By knowing the acceleration of the project team and knowing how much they're spending each iteration, you can estimate the amount of money you're saving through process improvement. For example, if you're spending $100,000 per iteration and your acceleration is 2%, your cost savings is $2,000 per iteration.
Of course, nothing is perfect, and there are a few potential disadvantages:1. It is an indirect measure of productivity. Truth be told velocity really is a productivity measure, it's just that because it's measured in different units it's difficult to compare between teams. Acceleration is merely an indicator of the change in productivity.2. You actually need to measure what you're interested in. When you step back and think about it, you're not really interested in measuring your productivity, regardless of what the metrics wonks have been telling you the past few decades. In this case what you really want to know is your change in productivity because your real goal is to improve your productivity over time, which is what acceleration actually measures.3. Management must be flexible. For this to be acceptable senior management must be willing to think outside the "traditional metrics box". Using a non-standard, simple metric to calculate productivity? Preposterous! Directly measuring what you're truly interested in instead of calculating trends over long periods of time? Doubly preposterous!4. Your existing measurement program may be questioned. Once management learns how easy it can be to obtain metrics which enables them to truly govern software development projects they may begin to question the investment that they've made in the past in overly complex and expensive metrics schemes. This can be dangerous for the metrics professionals in your organization, particularly if your metrics group doesn't have valid measurements around the value of their own work. Ummmmm....5. The terminology sounds scientific. Terms such as velocity and acceleration can motivate some of us to start believing that we understand the "laws of IT physics", something which I doubt very highly that as an industry we understand. All it would take is for someone to start throwing around terms like "standard theory" and "unified model" and we'd really be in trouble. Wait a minute..... ;-)
In summary, measuring the acceleration of development teams is an easy to collect, straightforward measure of team productivity. I hope that I've given you some food for thought, and would be eager to hear about your experiences applying this metric in practice.
[Read More]
Context Counts - Choose the right tools for the job
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agility-at-scale tools agile rrc 4 Comments 33,396 Views
For some reason, it seems as if everyone's grandfather at one point in time recommended to use the right tools for the job. That's practical wisdom from my point of view, one that is certainly an issue for agile development.
One of the primary messages, I hope, of the Agile Scaling Model (ASM) is that context counts. Although the focus of the ASM is on describing a contextual framework for tailoring your process to meet the needs of the situation that you find yourself in, it's also applicable to your tooling selection. For example, the tool choices of a co-located team will be much different than that of a geographically distributed team. A co-located team will likely use a whiteboard or paper for their agile modeling efforts, whereas distributed team members may need to capture their diagrams using a more sophisticated tool such as Rational Requirements Composer (RRC) so that their work can be shared electronically. Having said that, RRC would be overkill for a co-located team (unless they had regulatory compliance issues). Different teams, different situations, therefore different tooling choices.
One of the concerns that I run into from customers is that some of our legacy products don't support agile very well. Once again, it's a matter of context because many of our legacy products reflect the realities faced by more traditional teams. The challenge occurs when you try to take a legacy product which is well suited for traditional development, such as Rational ClearCase, and try to apply it on agile projects. Although ClearCase makes sense in certain scaling situations, particularly very large teams that are geographically distributed, you'd be better advised to use something like Rational Team Concert (RTC) for configuration management on most agile teams (note that RTC does far more than just SCM).
So, if you're taking an agile approach you should consider Rational tools such as RTC, RRC, Rational BuildForge, Rational AppScan, and others which support agile development. Granted, some you would only use at scale -- for example Buildforge is a good option in really complex environments, but if you don't face that complexity then you'll likely find that RTC's build engine is sufficient. Similarly, if you're taking a traditional approach to development then you'll likely consider products such as ClearCase, Appscan, RTC, and Rational Software Architect (RSA) instead. Different situations, different tooling choices.
What's even more confusing is that some products support a range of process paradigms. For example, RTC supports agile, lean, iterative, and traditional approaches to development. The same can be said of Appscan and several other products. Notice how I listed RTC and Appscan for both agile and traditional development above.
So, if anyone tells you that Rational tools don't support agile development don't believe them. Ask them which tools that they're talking about, and ask them if they're aware of the Rational products that do support agile development. Context counts.
You Can't "Cherry Pick" Agile Projects at Scale
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agility-at-scale agile smarter-work agileadopt measured-improvement 4 Comments 16,610 Views
When you are first adopting agile techniques in your organization a common strategy is to run one or more pilot projects. When organizing these projects you typically do as much as you can to make them successful, such as finding:
In North America we refer to this as "cherry picking" because you're picking the cherry/best situation that you can find.
Some thoughts:
Our integrity debt continues to grow
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agile scrum certification integrity-debt 4 Comments 20,992 Views
Recently I spent some time in the UK with Julian Holmes of Unified Process Mentors. In one of our conversations we deplored what we were seeing in the agile community around certification, in particular what the Scrum community was doing, and he coined the term "integrity debt" to describe the impact it was having on us as IT professionals. Integrity debt is similar to technical debt which refers to the concept that poor quality (either in your code, your user interface, or your data) is a debt that must eventually be paid off through rework. Integrity debt refers to the concept that questionable or unprofessional behavior builds up a debt which must eventually be paid off through the rebuilding of trust with the people that we interact with.
The agile community has been actively increasing their integrity debt through the continuing popularity of Scrum Certification, in particular the program around becoming a Certified Scrum Master (CSM). To become a CSM you currently need to attend, and hopefully pay attention during, a two-day Scrum Master Certification workshop taught by a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST). That's it. Granted, some CSTs will hold one or more quizzes which you need to pass, an optional practice which isn't done consistently, to ensure that you pay attention in the workshop.
Scrum Masters, as you know, take the leadership position on a Scrum team. The idea that someone can master team leadership skills after two entire days of training is absurd. Don't get me wrong, I'm a firm supporter of people increasing their skillset and have no doubt that many of the CSTs deliver really valuable training. However, there is no possible way that you can master a topic, unless it is truly trivial, in only two days of training. From what I can tell the only thing that is being certified here is that your check didn't bounce.
The CSM scheme increases the integrity debt of the IT industry by undermining the value of certification. When someone claims that they're certified there's an assumption that they had to do something meaningful to earn that certification. Attending a two-day course, and perhaps taking a few quizzes where you parrot back what you've heard, clearly isn't very meaningful. The problem with the term Certified Scrum Master is two-fold: not only does the term Certified imply that the holder of the certification did something to earn it, the term Master implies that they have significant knowledge and expertise gained over years of work. It is very clear that people are falling for the Scrum certification scheme.
A quick search of the web will find job ads requiring that candidates be CSMs, undoubtedly because they don't realize that there's no substance behind the certification. Whenever I run into an organization that requires people to be CSMs I walk them through the onerous process of earning the designation and suggest that they investigate the situation themselves. Invariably, once they recognize the level of deception, the customer drops the requirement that people be CSMs.
Another quick search of the web will find people bragging about being a CSM, presumably being motivated by the employment opportunities within the organizations gullible enough to accept Scrum certification at face value. My experience is that the people claiming to be CSMs are for the most part decent, intelligent people who 99.99% of the time have far more impressive credentials to brag about than taking a two-day course. Yet, for some reason they choose to park their integrity at the door when it comes to Scrum certification. I suspect that this happens in part because they see so many other people doing it, in part because they're a bit desperate to obtain or retain employment in these tough economic times, and in part because the IT industry doesn't have a widely accepted code of ethical conduct. These people not only embarrass themselves when they indicate on their business cards or in their email signatures that they're Certified Scrum Masters they also increase the integrity debt of the agile community as a whole.
Yet another search of the web will find people bragging about being Certified Scrum Trainers (CSTs), the people whom have been blessed by the Scrum Alliance to deliver Scrum master certification courses. Once again, my experience is that these are intelligent, skilled people, albeit ones who have also parked their integrity at the door in the pursuit of a quick buck. Surely these people could make a decent living via more ethical means? I know that many of them have done so in the past, so I would presume that they could do so in the future. The actions of the CSTs increase our integrity debt even further.
The group of people who have most embarrassed themselves, in my opinion, are those whom we consider thought leaders within the agile community. Leaving aside the handful who are directly involved with the Scrum certification industry, the real problem lies with those who have turned a blind eye to all of this. The Scrum certification scheme was allowed to fester within our community because few of our thought leaders had the courage to stand up and publicly state what they were talking about in private. This of course is all the more galling when you consider how much rhetoric there is around the importance of courage on software development projects. As Edmund Burke once observed, all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
There are several things that we can do today to start paying off some of our integrity debt:
Suggested Reading
Is software development an art or a science?
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  philosophy agile mcif 4 Comments 22,217 Views
I was recently in Bangalore speaking at the Rational Software Conference, which was really well done this year, and visiting customers. In addition to discussing how to scale agile software development approaches, particularly when the team is distributed geographically and organizationally, I was also asked about what I thought about a software factory approach to development. My instinctual reaction was negative, software factories can result in lower overall productivity as the result of over specialization of staff (I prefer generalizing specialists), too many hand-offs between these specialists (I find close collaboration to be far more effective), and too much bureaucratic overhead to coordinate these activities. I initially chalked it up to these people still believing that software development was mostly a science, or perhaps an engineering domain, whereas my experiences had made me come to believe that software development is really more art than it is a science. Yet, the consistent belief in this strategy by very smart and experienced people started me thinking about my position.
Just let me begin by saying that this blog posting isn't meant to be yet another round in the age old, and relatively inane, "art vs. science" debate within the software development community. That debate is a symptom of versusitis, a dread disease which particularly plagues the IT industry and which can any of us at any time. There is no known cure, although the combination of experience, open-mindedness, and critical thought are the best inoculation against versusitis that we have so far. In that vein, let me explore the issues as I see them and I will let you think for yourself.
On the one hand software development has aspects of being an art for several reasons. First, the problem definition is never precise, nor accurate, and even when we have detailed specifications the requirements invariably evolve anyway. The lack of defined, firm requirements requires us to be flexible and to adjust to the situation that we find ourselves in. Second, teams typically find themselves in unique situations, necessitating a unique process and tool environment to reflect this (assuming that you want to be effective, otherwise there's nothing stopping you from having a "repeatable process" and consistent tool environment). Third, software is built by people for people, requiring that the development team have the ability to build a system with a user interface which meets the unique needs of their end users. One has only to look at the myriad UI designs out there to see that surely there is a bit of art going on. Fourth, if software development wasn't at least partially art then why hasn't anyone succeeded at building tools which take requirements as inputs and produce a viable solution that we can easily deploy? It's been over four decades now, so there's been sufficient time and resources available to build such tooling. Fifth, regardless of how much of a scientific/business facade we put over it, our success rate at producing up front detailed cost estimates and schedules speak for itself (see Funding Agile Projects for links to articles).
On the other hand software development has aspects of being a science for several reasons. First, some aspects of software development have in fact been automated to a significant extent. Second, there is some mathematical basis to certain aspects of software development (although in the case of data-oriented activities the importance of relational theory often gets blown way out of proportion and I have yet to see a situation where formal methods proved to be of practical value).
What does this have to do with Agility@Scale. As you know, one of the agile scaling factors is Organizational Complexity, and cultural issues are the hardest to overcome. Whether your organization believes that software development is mostly an art or mostly a science is a cultural issue which will be a major driver in you choice of methods and practices. Organizations which believe that software development is more of a science will prefer strategies such as software factories, model-driven architecture (MDA), and master data management (MDM). And there is ample evidence to support the claims that some organizations are succeeding at these strategies. Although you may not agree with these strategies, you need to respect the fact that many organizations are making them work in their environments. Similarly, organizations which believe that software development is more of an art will find that agile and lean strategies are a better fit, and once again there is ample evidence that organizations are succeeding with these approaches (there's also evidence that agile projects are more successful than traditional projects, on average). Once again, you may not agree with these strategies but you need to respect the fact that other people are making them work in practice.
Trying to apply agile approaches within an organization that believes software development is mostly a science will find it difficult at best, and will likely need to embark on a multi-year program to shift their culture (likely an expensive endeavor which won't be worth the investment). Similarly, trying to apply a software factory strategy in an organization that believes that software development is mostly an art will also run aground. The bottom line is that one size does not fit all, that one strategy is not right for all situations and that you need to understand the trade-offs of various strategies, methodologies, techniques, and practices and apply them appropriately given the situation that you face. In other words, it depends! If you are embarking on a software process initiative, and you don't have the broad experience required to effective choose between strategies (very few organizations do, although many believe otherwise), then you should consider Measured Capability Improvement Framework (MCIF) to help increase your chance of success.
Agile Scaling Factors
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  asm agile agility-at-scale scale 4 Comments 35,166 Views
In the early days of agile, the applications where agile development was applied were smaller in scope and relatively straightforward. Today, the picture has changed significantly and organizations want to apply agile development to a broader set of projects. Agile hence needs to adapt to deal with the many business, organization, and technical complexities today's software development organizations are facing. This is what Agility@Scale is all about – explicitly addressing the complexities which disciplined agile delivery teams face in the real world.These agile scaling factors which we've found to be important are:
Further reading:
[Read More]
Should We Train Contractors in Agile Techniques?
ScottAmbler 120000HESD 3 Comments 17,633 Views
I recently ran into an interesting issue at a customer organization. This customer is in the process of transitioning to Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) and part of that effort is to train, mentor, and coach their people in these new ideas and techniques. The challenge is that some of "their people" are full time employees (FTEs) and some are contractors/consultants. When we were planning an upcoming DAD workshop with them, part of the planning effort was to identify who should get that training, which we're delivering in a just-in-time (JIT) basis on a team-by-team basis. The only people invited to take the training were FTEs because the customer has a policy of not training contractors. I pushed back a bit on this, but they were adamant about not training contractors because their view was that contractors should either have the skills required to do their jobs or be willing to get those skills on their own time. Fair enough, but from an agile team building point of view this isn't ideal.
This situation got me thinking a bit. One issue is that not all contractors are the same. Some are short term contractors that are brought in for a specific purpose, they're paid well, and then they move on. Other contractors stay much longer, sometimes months or even years, and as a result gain deeper knowledge and understanding of your business. For these longer term contractors it seems to me that there is little difference between them and FTEs, perhaps only in the way that they're remunerated. Some countries such as the United States now have laws in place limiting how long someone is allowed to remain a contractor because these similarities lead to interesting legal questions around extending benefits to them.
Another issue is that if you intend to build teams from both FTEs and contractors, it behooves you to ensure that these people get similar training, coaching and mentoring to streamline the transition effort.
Here's the logic I would suggest to address the issue of whether or not to train a contractor:
As always, let the context of the situation drive your strategy.
10 Reasons to Consider Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agile disciplined-agile-deliver... enterprise-agile 3 Comments 43,547 Views
A fair question to ask is why should your organization consider adopting the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework. I believe that there are several clear benefits to doing so:
In short, DAD provides a lot of proven advice culled from years of experience applying agile software techniques in enterprise-class environments. Instead of figuring all of this stuff out on your own, why not jump ahead and leverage the hard-won lessons learned from other organizations that have already dealt with the challenges that you're struggling with today?
The primary shortcoming of the DAD framework is it makes it very clear that software development, oops I mean solution delivery, is quite complex in practice. As IT practitioners we inherently know this, but it seems that we need to be reminded of this fact every so often. DAD doesn't provide a simplistic, feel-good strategy that you can learn in a few hours of training. Instead it defines a coherent, tailorable strategy that reflects the realities of enterprise IT.
There is a wealth of information at DAD posted at the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) web site and great discussions occuring on the DAD LinkedIn discussion forum. For those of you interested in agile certification, the Disciplined Agile Consortium site will prove valuable too, in particular the list of upcoming DAD workshops provided by several IBM partners. And of course the book Disciplined Agile Delivery: A Practitioner's Guide to Agile Software Delivery in the Enterprise (IBM Press, 2012) written by Mark Lines and myself is a very good read.
My Agile Scaling Model (ASM) White Paper has Been Superceded
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  scale agile asm whitepaper 3 Comments 22,671 Views
In 2009 I wrote a white paper entitled The Agile Scaling Model (ASM): Adapting Agile Methods for Complex Environments for IBM Rational. Apparently it's been taken down, which I think is unfortunate as it contains some interesting ideas that your organization may be able to benefit from.
The original white paper addresses several key issues:
Defining Disciplined Agile Software Development
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agileadopt disciplined-agile-deliver... 3 Comments 15,850 Views
When adopting agile software development techniques across a large number of teams within your organization it is important to provide a definition for what agile software development is, in addition to criteria for what it means to be agile. Many people will point to the four values of the Agile Manifesto and claim that's a good definition. Well... it might be a good definition for the visionaries and early adopters among us, but for people on the right-hand side of the technology adoption chasm (the early majority, late majority and the laggards) this isn't enough. Don't get me wrong, I'm a firm believer in the agile values but I like to cast them as philosophies instead of as a definition.
At IBM Software Group, the definition of disciplined agile software delivery which we have been sharing with our customers is:Disciplined agile software delivery is an evolutionary (iterative and incremental) approach to delivery which regularly produces high quality software in a cost effective and timely manner. It is performed in a highly collaborative and self-organizing manner, with active stakeholder participation to ensure that the team understand and addresses the changing needs of its stakeholders. Disciplined agile delivery teams provide repeatable results by adopting just the right amount of ceremony for the situation which they face.
I think that this is a pretty good definition, although I have no doubt that we'll evolve it over time.
I also suspect that the agile community will never settle on a common definition for what agile is and more than likely are smart enough not to even try. ;-)
Further reading:
[Read More]
Questioning Case Studies
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agileexec agileadopt 3 Comments 11,652 Views
I'm often asked by customers for case studies of successful agile adoptions or agile projects in general. This is definitely a valid request, and yes, such case studies exist. But I'm often concerned that the people making these requests don't appreciate the implications of what they're asking for. My concerns with case studies are:
Further reading:Read More]
Large Agile Teams
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  large teams agility-at-scale 3 Comments 28,575 Views
A common misunderstanding about agile software development approaches are that they're only applicable to small, co-located teams. Yes, it's much easier to be successful with small teams, and with co-located teams, and as a result agilists being smart people prefer to work this way. After all, why take on extra risk when you don't need to do so? But, sometimes reality gets in the way and you find yourself in a situation where you need a large team, or you need to distribute your team (see previous blog postings for strategies for distributed agile development), and you would still like to be as agile as possible. The good news is that it's still possible to be agile with a large team, although you will need to go beyond some of the popular "agile in the small" strategies to succeed.
Here are some disciplined agile strategies to succeed at large-team agile:
Further reading:
Scaling Test Driven Development (TDD)
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  design tdd agileadopt amdd testing agility-at-scale specification requirements 3 Comments 14,607 Views
Test-driven development (TDD) is a common agile programming technique which has both specification and validation aspects. With TDD, you specify your software in detail on a just-in-time (JIT) basis via executable tests that are run in a regression manner to confirm that the system works to your current understanding of what your stakeholders require.
TDD is the combination of test-first development (TFD) and refactoring. With TFD, you write a single test (at either the requirements level with customer/acceptance tests or the design level with developer tests) and then you write just enough software to fulfill that test. Refactoring is a technique where you make a small change to your existing code to improve its design without changing its semantics.
TDD offers several benefits:1. It enables you to take small, safe steps during development, increasing programmer productivity.2. It increases quality. Agile developers are doing more testing, and doing it more often, than ever before. We're also fixing the problems that we find right on the spot.3. It helps to push validation activities early in the lifecycle, decreasing the average cost to fix defects (which rises exponentially the longer it takes you to detect them).4. Through single sourcing information, by treating tests as both specifications and as tests, we reduce the work required, increasing productivity.5. We leave behind valuable, up-to-date, detailed specifications for the people who come after us. Have you ever met a maintenance programmer who wouldn't want a full regression test suite for the code that they're working with?
But TDD isn't perfect. Although TDD is great at specifying code at a fine-grain level, tests simply don't scale to address higher level business process and architectural issues. Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD) enables you to scale TDD through initial envisioning of the requirements and architecture as well as just-in-time (JIT) modeling at the beginning and during construction iterations. To scale requirements-level TDD, you must recognize that customer tests are very good at specifying the details, but not so good at providing overall context. High-level business process models, conceptual domain models, and use cases are good at doing so, and these work products are often created as part of your initial requirements envisioning and iteration modeling activities. Similarly, to scale design-level TDD you must recognize that developer tests are very finely grained but once again do not provide overall context. High-level architecture sketches created during envisioning activities help set your initial technical direction. During each construction iteration, you'll do more detailed design modeling to think through critical issues before you implement them via TDD.
You also need to scale the validation aspects of TDD. TDD is in effect an approach to confirmatory testing where you validate the system to the level of your understanding of the requirements. The fundamental challenge with confirmatory testing, and hence TDD, is that it assumes that stakeholders actually know and can describe their requirements. Therefore you need to add investigative testing practices which explore issues that your stakeholders may not have thought of, such as usability issues, system integration issues, production performance issues, security issues, and a multitude of others.
For further reading, I suggest:1. My article "Introduction to TFD/TDD" at http://www.agiledata.org/essays/tdd.html which overviews TDD.2. My February 2008 column in Dr. Dobb's Journal entitled "Scaling TDD" at http://www.ddj.com/architect/205207998 which explores this issue in detail. 3. Andrew Glover's article "In pursuit of code quality: Adventures in behavior-driven development" at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-cq09187/ which describes a new-and-improved take on TDD called BDD.[Read More]
Agile Stakeholders at Scale
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agileadopt amdd xp analysis scrum agility-at-scale outside-in-development agile disciplined-agile-deliver... modeling 3 Comments 15,805 Views
The popular Agile literature can often seam naive when it comes to how Agilists work with project stakeholders:- Extreme Programming (XP) has a practice called On-Site Customer where one or more people work closely with your team to provide information and to make decisions in a timely manner.- Scrum has the role of Product Owner who is the one single person that the development team goes to for decisions about requirements. - Agile Modeling (AM) has the practice of Active Stakeholder Participation which extends On-Site Customer to get the stakeholder(s) actively involved with the modeling effort through the use of inclusive tools and techniques.
These are great strategies for small, co-located teams doing straightforward development, but they quickly fall apart at scale. This occurs for several reasons:1. Stakeholders are a diverse group. Your stakeholders include end users, business management, project funders, enterprise architects, operations staff, support staff, other system development teams, and many others. Different people have different, and often contradictory, requirements and they certainly have different priorities. It's questionable whether a single person, or a handful of persons, can adequately represent this diverse group.2. One person becomes a bottleneck. Even with a small co-located team this is a problem, let alone one that is geographically distributed or one that is very large. There's no way that a single person can be available 24/7 in a responsive manner to support distributed teams.3. It's a difficult role. The Product Owner/Customer (POC) is responsible for representing the business to the development team. They're making important decisions on a regular basis, decisions which they'll be held accountable for.4. One person becomes a serious project risk. Not only is it questionable whether a single person can fairly represent all stakeholders, even if they could what happens if you lose that person? They effectively become a single point of failure for your team.
To scale this role, consider the following strategies:1. Recognize the true scope of the POC role. Not only are they stakeholder proxies they also are a development team representative to the stakeholder community as a whole. As stakeholder proxies they'll make decisions and prioritize the work, they'll run requirements elicitation sessions, they'll negotiate priorities, and they'll put the development team in contact with stakeholders who have expertise in specific aspects of the domain. As team representatives they'll often demo the current version of the system to other stakeholders, communicate the status of the project to people, and respond to various requests for information from the stakeholders.2. Have multiple people in it. A single POC works well for small, co-located teams developing simple software. At scale you'll soon discover that you need multiple people in this role so that they don't become a bottleneck. For distributed teams it's common to see each subteam have one or more POCs who are managed by a primary/chief POC. The primary POC typically works on the coordinating team with the chief architect (I'll talk about this role in a future blog posting) and the program manager (also a topic for a future blog posting).3. Train them in business analysis skills. The person(s) in the POC role need good business analysis skills. If fact, it's common for people who were formerly BAs for traditional teams to step into the POC role, particularly with BAs who originally come from the business side of your organization. This strategy has its advantages and disadvantages. As a BA they've likely got solid business knowledge but their instincts may motivate them to take a documentation-driven approach to providing information to the development team instead of a collaboration-based approach. Be careful.4. Consider the full system development lifecycle. There's far more to the POC role than supporting the development team during Construction iterations. During "Iteration 0", the Inception phase for an Agile RUP project or the warm-up phase for an Eclipse Way project, the POC(s) will often lead the initial requirements envisioning efforts. The product backlog, or better yet your work item list, needs to come from somewhere after all. During the release iteration(s), the Transition phase for RUP or the End-Game phase for Eclipse Way, the POC(s) will focus on communicating the upcoming release to the stakeholder community, will be actively involved with any final user acceptance testing (UAT), and may even be involved with training end users.
In my January 2008 column in Dr Dobb's Journal, posted at http://www.ddj.com/architect/204801134 , I provide detailed advice about how to scale the way that you work with stakeholders on Agile projects by applying the practices of Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD). There's no magic solution, you just need to choose to organize yourself effectively. The good news is that you can easily work with stakeholders at scale.[Read More]
Agile Software Development at Scale
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  rup xp agility-at-scale agile scrum 3 Comments 13,786 Views
It's customary to start a blog by describing the vision for it. Although this vision will undoubtedly evolve over time, it's always good to put a stake in the ground to get things started. Agile software development is clearly taking off and in my opinion is becoming the dominant development paradigm. Furthermore it appears that Agile approaches enjoy a higher success rate, providing better value for your IT investment, than do traditional approaches. Although organizations are succeeding at simpler projects with agile, many are struggling when applying Agile in more complex situations. They're finding that the "Agile rhetoric" doesn't always live up to its promises once you move into these complex situations. My goal with this blog is to share strategies for applying Agile techniques at scale.
When applying Agile strategies at scale you are likely to run into one or more of the following complexity factors:1. Geographical distribution. Is your team, including stakeholders, in different locations? Even being in different cubicles within the same building can erect barriers to communication, let alone being in different cities or even on different continents.2. Regulatory compliance. Regulations, including the Sarbanes-Oxley act, BASEL-II, and FDA statutes, to name a few, can increase the documentation and process burden on your projects. Complying to these regulations while still remaining as agile as possible can be a challenge.3. Entrenched policies, people, and processes. Most agile teams need to work within the scope of a larger organization, and that larger organization isn't always perfectly agile. Hopefully that will change in time, but we still need to get the job done right now. Your existing culture and organization can really hinder your ability to scale agile approaches, then a few "simple" changes can really help your efforts.4. Legacy systems. Although the politically correct term would be "proven assets" the reality is that it can be very difficult to leverage existing code and data sources due to quality problems. The code may not be well written, documented, or even have tests in place, yet that doesn't mean that your agile team should rewrite everything from scratch. Some legacy data sources are questionable at best, or the owners of those data sources difficult to work with, yet that doesn't given an agile team license to create yet another database.5. Organizational distribution. When your teams are made up of people working for different divisions, or if you have people from different companies (such as contractors, partners, or consultants), then your management complexity rises.6. Degree of governance. If you have one or more IT projects then you have an IT governance process in place. How formal it is, how explicit it is, and how effective it is will be up to you. IBM has been doing a lot of work in this topic over the past few years, and just recently Per Kroll and I have done some work around Lean Governance strategies. 7. Team size. Large teams will be organized differently than small teams, and they'll work differently too.8. System complexity. The more complex the system the greater the need for a viable architectural strategy. An interesting feature of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) is that it's Elaboration phase's primary goal is to prove the architecture via the creation of an end-to-end, working skeleton of the system. This risk-reduction technique is clearly a concept which Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum teams can clearly benefit from.
It is definitely possible to scale Agile software development to meet the real-world complexities faced by modern organizations. Based on my experiences, I believe that over the next few years we'll discover that Agile scales better than traditional approaches. Many people have already discovered this, but as an industry I believe that there isn't yet sufficient evidence to state this as more than opinion. My goal with this blog is to provide advice for scaling Agile so as to increase your chances of success.
So, it looks like I have my work cut out for me. My strategy will be to address common questions which I get when working with customers and with internal IBM development teams. I have the privilege to work with a variety of software development teams worldwide, helping them to become more agile. They're all struggling with the same basic issues although don't recognize it because they're too focused on their own situation. So hopefully I'll be able to spread the word about what's actually working in practice.
I hope that you stay tuned.
- Scott[Read More]
Scrum Alliance 2.0
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  scrum 2 Comments 32,046 Views
I'm happy to announce that I've accepted the role of Managing Director of the Scrum Alliance (SA), a part-time position in addition to my duties here at IBM. On the surface this must appear to be a radical and unpredictable departure for me, considering my history of being critical when it comes to some of the past activities of the Scrum Alliance. To be fair, I've actually been critical of the Certified Scrum Master (CSM) scheme, and rightfully so. But I have also actively embraced the good ideas contained in Scrum and have incorporated them, with attribution, in my writings about Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) and other agile topics. I believe that I've made this very apparent in this blog and in other sources such as the Agile Modeling site. So, it really isn't such a radical departure for me afterall, although still arguably one that was difficult to predict. In fact, one of the reasons why the Scrum Alliance approached me to be Managing Director is the fact that I have been critical of many of the Scrum community's behaviors.
So, over the next few months you're going to see what I believe to be some welcome changes at the Scrum Alliance. Our first step at serving you better will be to apply agile strategies and principles in the way that we work. Importantly, we'll be taking a three pronged strategy based on respect, clarity, and integrity. We have dubbed this strategy "Scrum Alliance 2.0".
Respecting people
To be more respectful of existing and potential SA members, we will begin executing the following activities:
Clarity through openness and honesty
We are also starting to execute on four activities for improving the clarity of how we operate:
The fundamental idea here is that the Scrum Alliance should have nothing to hide from our membership. We've preached open and honest communication for years, now we're going to start actually living by those words. Yes, it may be a bit painful to work to this level of clarity, but we feel that you deserve this.
Integrity through actions, not words
Finally, we're taking three actions to increase the overall integrity of the Scrum community:
As I hope you have guessed by now this blog is an April Fool's joke. I have no intention of becoming the Managing Director of the Scrum Alliance and my condolences go out to anyone who would take on this position. This blog posting does however reflect what I would do to bring greater clarity, integrity, and respect to the Scrum community. The Scrum Alliance can and should choose to do a lot better. I hope it has been food for thought.
Survey Says: We're Not as Agile as We Claim
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  survey agileadopt agile 2 Comments 16,563 Views
My current agile newsletter for Dr. Dobb's Journal, How Agile Are We? discusses some of the results from my recent How Are Are You? survey. The survey investigated how well "agile teams" met the following five agile criteria:
Some interesting results include:
I believe that there are several important implications:
Agile and regulatory compliance
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  regulatory-compliance agility-at-scale agile asm 2 Comments 25,112 Views
One of the scaling factors called out in the Agile Scaling Model (ASM) is "regulatory compliance". This name is a bit of a misnomer because this scaling factor really addresses two issues: complying to regulations imposed upon you from external sources and choosing to adhere to internal regulations willingly adopted by your organization. It is relatively common for agile teams to find themselves in such situations. For example, in the 2009 Agile Practices Survey one third of respondents said that they were applying agile on projects where one or more industry regulations applied.
First let's consider external regulatory compliance. In these situations you may face the need to undergo an audit by an external regulatory body with consequences for non-compliance ranging from anywhere to a warning to a fine or even to legal action. Sometimes even a warning may be a grave thing. A few years ago I was working with a pharmaceutical company which had discovered that a warning from the FDA for non-compliance with their CFR 21 Part 11 regulation, when reported in major newspapers, resulted on average in a half-billion dollar loss to their market capitalization as the result of a dip in their stock price. There are financial regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II, informational regulations such as HIPAA which focuses on health information privacy, technical regulations such as ISO 27002 for security practices, and even life-critical regulations such as some of the FDA regulations.
External regulations are typically managed by a government organization or industry watchdog will range in complexity and can have a myriad of effects on project teams. For example, you may need to be able to prove that you had a documented process and that you followed it appropriately; you may need to produce extra artifacts, or more detailed artifacts, than you normally would; you may need to add extra features to your solution, such as tracking financial information, that you wouldn't have normally implemented; you may need to produce specific reports to be submitted to the regulatory body; or you may even need to submit your team to audits, sometimes scheduled and sometimes not, to ensure regulatory compliance. Interestingly, even though many of those requirements go against the agile grain, the 2009 Agility at Scale Survey found that organizations were successfully applying agile techniques while still conforming to external regulations. So yes, it is possible to scale your agile strategy to address regulatory compliance.
Second, let's consider compliance to internally adopted, or sometimes even developed, "regulations" which you will be potentially evaluated/appraised against. Perfect examples of these are process improvement frameworks such as CMMI and ISO 900x. Similar to external regulations, the 2009 Agility at Scale Survey found that some agile teams are succeeding in situations where they have chosen to adopt such frameworks. It's important to note that frameworks such as CMMI aren't primarily about ensuring the compliance of development teams to a standard process, regardless of what CMMI detractors may claim, but instead about process improvement. Process improvement at the IT department (or beyond) is an enterprise discipline issue from the point of view of ASM, implying that frameworks such as CMMI affect more than one scaling factor.
When you find yourself in a regulatory situation, whether those regulations are imposed or willingly adopted, the best advice that I can give is to read the regulations and develop a strategy to conform to them in the most agile manner possible. If you let bureaucrats interpret the regulations you'll likely end up with a bureaucratic strategy, but if you instead choose to take a pragmatic approach you will very likely end up with a very practical strategy. Part of that strategy is to treat the regulatory representative(s) within your organization as important stakeholders whom you interact with regularly throughout the project.
The SEMAT Vision
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  process-improvement semat 2 Comments 14,428 Views
The SEMAT vision has recently been posted online. SEMAT is short for Software Engineering and Method and Theory (SEMAT) and I am one of several signatories and a provider of input into the effort.
There are several reasons why I'm involved with SEMAT:
I have several thoughts about the SEMAT vision which I'd like to share with you:
Next steps:
Mapping Scrum Terms to Standard Terms
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agileadopt scrum 2 Comments 13,393 Views
The Scrum community has adopted a different set of terms than the other agile methodologies. This is done on purpose to help people realize that Agile approaches are different than traditional approaches, which can help in their adoption, but it can also hinder people's understanding because some of the terminology is not only non-standard it really doesn't make much sense. Because of this I'm often asked by people that I'm coaching to convert back and forth between terms, and recently wrote a detailed article on the subject. The following summarizes the mapping:
For more details read my article Translating Scrum Terminology which includes explanations of a wider range of Scrum terms and discussions of why some of them really are questionable.
Further reading:
[Read More]
Scaling Daily Stand Up Meetings
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  metrics agility-at-scale agile scrum 2 Comments 13,091 Views
Recently I visited a customer who had adopted Scrum. They were a few sprints, what Scrum calls iterations, into the project and were running into some difficulties. Although I was primarily brought in to educate senior management on disciplined agile software development, I was also asked to sit in on the team's daily stand-up meeting so that I could hopefully provide some suggestions as to how to address the problems they were running into.
Their work area was fairly typical. They had some whiteboards which they were using for project planning and tracking, with sticky notes to indicate what work had been taken on by each team member. The current status of the task (not yet started, in progress, and completed) was indicated by putting each sticky note in a corresponding column for the status and corresponding column for the team member. This allowed everyone on the team to easily share their status and to see the status of everyone else. On the sides were sketches of the architecture as well as some business oriented models. In addition to Scrum the team had adopted several practices from Agile Modeling, in this case they had done some initial requirements envisioning and architecture envisioning, as well as practices from Extreme Programming (XP) for construction. In short, they had followed a fairly common strategy of combining practices from various agile methods.
This would have worked perfectly fine if they had tailored the practices to reflect the situation that they were in, but instead they adopted them "straight out of the book". First, the team was distributed, with most of the team in the location that I was visiting but some people located in two other distant cities. Therein was the source of most of their problems. The people at the other two locations weren't getting much value out of the daily stand-up meetings, even though they would dial in, because they couldn't see the project status information. Although people at this location were trying their best to represent these distant people in the daily stand-ups it wasn't working well – their status information wasn't being kept up to date and for some people it was a bit of mystery as to what they were actually working on at all.
This team also had 30 people in it, which isn't a big deal although it can stretch the limits of the simple modeling and planning tools (in this case paper and whiteboards) that they were using. Because the team was larger they were investing a fair bit of time creating burn down charts at both the iteration/sprint and project levels. One of the unfortunate implications of using manual tools for project management is that any associated metric/status reporting in turn becomes manual as well. Considering how the agile community is so concerned with working efficiently, I find it comical that we have a tendency to overlook our own potentially unnecessary bureaucracy such as this.
The problem was that the team was applying strategies, in this case using sticky notes and whiteboards to capture the detailed iteration plan, applying similar strategies to capture key models, and were verbally relaying of status information between sub-teams. There are perfectly fine strategies for smaller co-located teams, but not so good for large or distributed teams. The solution was to recognize that they were in an Agility@Scale situation and needed to tailor their approach to reflect this fact. In this case they needed to forgo some of the manual tools and instead use electronic tooling such as Rational Team Concert (RTC) to share information across disparate locations, in particular the work assignment and corresponding status information. RTC also creates common agile reports such as burn-down charts based on the activities of the developers, providing accurate (nearly) real-time information while removing the burden of status reporting. The RTC project dashboard does more than just this, to see an actual example of one visit www.jazz.net to see the dashboard for the RTC development team itself. You can also see their actual work item list too, a more advanced version of Scrum's product and sprint backlogs.[Read More]
Examining Acceleration
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  governance agileexec agile metrics velocity acceleration 2 Comments 16,228 Views
I've been getting a lot of questions lately about applying the acceleration metric in practice. So, here's some answers to frequently asked questions:
1. How do I monetize acceleration? This is fairly straightforward to do. For example, assume your acceleration is 0.007 (0.7%), there are five people on the team, your annual burdened cost per person is $150,000, and you have two week iterations. All these numbers are made up, but you know how to calculate acceleration now and IT management had darn well better know the average burdened cost (salary plus overhead) of their staff. So, per iteration the average burdened cost per person must be $150,000/26 = $5,770. Productivity improvement per iteration for this team must be $5,770 * 5 * .007 = $202. If the acceleration stayed constant at 0.7% the overall productivity improvement for the year would be (1.007)^26 (assuming the team works all 52 weeks of the year) which would be 1.198 or 19.8%. This would be a savings of $148,500 (pretty much the equivalent of one new person). Of course a 20% productivity increase over an entire year is a really aggressive improvement, regardless of some of the claims made by the agile snake oil salesman out there, although at 10-15% increase is a reasonable expectation. What I'd really want to do is calculate the acceleration for the year by comparing the velocity from the beginning of the year to the end of the year (in Western cultures I'd want to avoid comparing iterations near to the holidays). So, if the team velocity the first week of February 2008 was 20 points, now the same team's velocity the first week of February 2009 was 23 points, that's an acceleration of (23-20)/20 = 15% over a one year period, for a savings of $112,500.
2. Is acceleration really unitless? For the sake of comparison it is. The "units" are % change in points per iteration, or % change in points per time period depending on the way that you want to look at it. Because it's a percentage I can easily monetize it, as you see above, and use it as a basis of comparison.
3. How do I convince teams to share their data? This can be difficult. Because acceleration is easy to calculate for agile teams, and because it's easy to use to compare teams (my team has .7% acceleration whereas other teams down the hall from mine have accelerations of .3% and -.2% of teams), people are concerned that this metric will be used against them. OK, to be fair, my team might be OK with this. ;-) Seriously though, this is a valid fear that will only be addressed by an effective governance program based on enablement, collaboration, and trust instead of the traditional command-and-control approach. Management's track record regarding how they've used measurements in the past, and how they've governed in general, have a great effect on people's willingness to trust them with new metrics such as acceleration. The implication is that you need to build up trust, something that could take years if it's possible at all.
4. Why does this work for agile teams? Agile teams are self organizing, and an implication of that is that they will be held accountable for their estimates. Because of this accountability, and because velocity is a vital input into their planning and estimation efforts, agile teams are motivated to calculate their velocity accurately and to track it over time. Because they're eager to get their velocity right, and because acceleration is based on velocity, there's an exceptionally good chance that it's accurate.
5. What about function points or similar productivity measures? Function points can be calculated for projects being developed via an agile approach, or other approaches for that matter, but it's a very expensive endeavor compared to calculating acceleration (which is essentially free) and likely will be seen as a bureaucratic overhead by the development team. My rule of thumb is that if you're not being explicitly paid to count function points (for example the US DoD will often pay contracting companies to create estimates based on function point counts) then I wouldn't bother with them.
6. What about calculating acceleration for iterative project teams? Iterative project teams, perhaps following Rational Unified Process (RUP), can choose to calculate and track their velocity and thereby their acceleration. The key is to allow the team to be self organizing and accountable for their estimates, which in turn motivates them to get their velocity right just like agile teams (RUP can be as agile as you want to make it, don't let anyone tell you differently).
7. What about calculating acceleration for traditional project teams? In theory this should work, in practice it is incredibly unlikely. Traditional teams don't work in iterations where working software is produced on a regular basis, they're typically not self organizing, and therefore there really isn't any motivate to calculate velocity (even if they do, there is little motivation to get it right). Without knowing the velocity you can't calculate acceleration. If you can't trust the velocity estimate, and I certainly wouldn't trust a traditional team's velocity estimate, then you can't trust your acceleration calculation. So, my fall back position to calculate productivity improvement would be to do something like function point counting (which is expensive and difficult to compare between teams due to different fudge factors used by different FP counters) and then looking at change in FPs delivered over time.
8. How can I apply this across a department? It is fairly straightforward to roll up the acceleration of project teams into an overall acceleration measure for a portfolio of teams simply by taking a weighted average based on team size. However, this is only applicable to teams that are in a position to report an accurate acceleration (the agile and iterative teams) and of course are willing to do so.
9. What does a negative acceleration tell me? If the acceleration is negative then productivity on the team is going down, likely an indicator of quality and/or team work problems. However, you don't want to manage by the numbers so you should talk to the team to see what's actually going on.
10. What does a zero acceleration tell me? This is an indication that the team's productivity is not increasing, and that perhaps they should consider doing retrospectives at the end of each iteration and then acting on the results from those retrospectives. Better yet they can "dial up" their process improvement efforts by adopting something along the lines of IBM Rational Self Check.
Further reading:
[Read More]
Strategies for Agile SOA
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  architecture reuse agileadopt soa disciplined-agile-deliver... agility-at-scale 2 Comments 16,591 Views
A common question that I keep running into with customers is whether you can take an agile approach to service oriented architecture (SOA). The quick answer is yes, because Agile is orthogonal to the implementation technologies used. You can take an agile approach developing COBOL applications running on mainframes, fat-client Java applications, multi-tier J2EE applications, and yes, even services. Granted, it's easier to do with some technologies than others, either because of the nature of the technology or because of the supporting tools.
The long answer is "yes, but". You don't adopt an SOA approach for the sheer joy of doing so, instead you very likely want to improve the level of reuse within your organization. To succeed at SOA-driven reuse you need an enterprise focus, something that doesn't appear to be very common on many agile teams. Therein lies the challenge. Several strategies for improving your chances with Agile SOA, and SOA in general, follows:1. Invest in some initial enterprise architecture modeling. You don't need to identify all of the details up front, that would take too long and actually put the effort at risk, but you do need to set a starting point to guide development teams. Identifying the technical architecture is critical, and identifying a few basic services which would provide immediate business value to one or more teams is critical. Involve people from several application project teams to ensure that you get a wide range of input. See http://www.agiledata.org/essays/enterpriseArchitecture.html for a streamlined approach to enterprise architecture modeling. Creating big, detailed models often proves to be a waste of time because development teams are rarely motivated to read mounds of documentation.2. Build out the initial infrastructure on a real application development project. This proves that your SOA strategy actually works and puts the technical foundation in place for future teams. During this period you'll be tempted to try to support several development teams, which is feasible but dramatically increases your risk. It's also tempting to focus simply on getting the infrastructure in place without delivering any business functionality, but this risks producing an ivory-tower architecture that nobody is interested in.3. Spread the service architects out onto application development teams. The people that formulated and then proved your SOA should be actively involved on the development teams that are working with it to ensure that the teams use it appropriately and to ensure that the architects get concrete feedback which they can use to evolve the architecture. When working on agile teams, these people will need to work in a collaborative and evolutionary approach just like other team members.4. Fund reuse separately. I've lost track of the number of organizations that I've run into that fail at reuse because their development teams never have the resources to develop reusable assets. That's simply the nature of the beast -- project teams will always be more interested in addressing their own specific requirements than they are in investing the time and effort to make something reusable. The real problem here is that you expect them to act differently. A better strategy is to have a separate reuse engineering team that has the resources to monitor existing projects to look for potentially reusable assets. When they find said assets this team does the work to harvest the asset, to reengineer it to make it reusable, and then to integrate back into the original source project. The goal is to make it as painless as possible to produce reusable assets such as services. If you expect project teams to do this work out of the goodness of their hearts then you're effectively punishing them when they do the right thing. That's not a very good governance strategy, IMHO.5. The reuse team now owns the asset. Any reusable asset, including services, will need to be maintained, evolved over time, and supported. This isn't free nor is it viable for project teams to do so.
If you're interested, I provide agile strategies for both enterprise architecture and strategic reuse in the book "Enterprise Unified Process". Although written under the assumption that you're taking a RUP-based approach to development, the reality is that the EUP can extend any evolutionary/agile software development process so that it addresses the larger-scale needs of modern IT organizations.
- Scott[Read More]
Lean Development Governance
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  governance lean agileexec 2 Comments 17,518 Views
During 2007 Per Kroll and myself invested a significant amount of time development a framework for lean development governance. This effort resulted in a series of three articles that were published in Rational Edge and a recently published white paper. The articles go into the various practices in detail whereas the paper provides an overview aimed at executives. I also recently did a webcast which is now available online. The URLs are at the bottom of this blog posting.
Development governance isn't a sexy topic, but it critical to the success of any IT department. I like to compare traditional, command-and-control approaches to governance to herding cats – you do a bunch of busy work which seems like a great idea in theory, but in the end the cats will ignore your efforts and stay in the room. Yet getting cats out of a room is easy to accomplish, as long as you know what motivates cats. Simply wave some fish in front of their noses and you'll find that you can lead them out of the room with no effort at all. Effective governance for lean development isn't about command and control. Instead, the focus is on enabling the right behaviors and practices through collaborative and supportive techniques. It is far more effective to motivate people to do the right thing than it is to try to force them to do so.
This framework is based on the philosophical foundation provided by the 7 principles proposed in the book "Lean Software Development" by Mary and Tom Poppendieck. The 7 principles are:1. Eliminate Waste. The three biggest sources of waste in software development are the addition of extra features, churn, and crossing organizational boundaries. Crossing organizational boundaries can increase costs by 25% or more because they create buffers which slow down response time and interfere with communication. It is critical that development teams are allowed to organize themselves, and run themselves, in a manner which reflects the work that they're trying to accomplish. 2. Build Quality In. If you routinely find problems with your verification process then your process must be defective. When it comes to governance, if you regularly find that developers are doing things that you don't want them to do or are not doing things that they should be then your approach to governance must be at fault. The strategy is not to make governance yet another set of activities that you layer on top of your software process but instead should embed into your process to make it as easy as possible for developers to do the right thing. 3. Create Knowledge. Planning is useful, but learning is essential. 4. Defer Commitment. You do not need to start software development by defining a complete specification, but instead work iteratively. You can support the business effectively through flexible architectures that are change tolerant and by scheduling irreversible decisions to the last possible moment. This also requires the ability to closely couple end-to-end business scenarios to capabilities developed in potentially several different applications by different projects. 5. Deliver Fast. It is possible to deliver high-quality systems fast and in a timely manner. By limiting the work of a team to their capacity, by not trying to force them to do more than they are capable but instead ask them to self-organize and thereby determine what they can accomplish, you can establish a reliable and repeatable flow of work. 6. Respect People. Sustainable advantage is gained from engaged, thinking people. The implication is that you need a human resources strategy which is specific to IT, that you need to focus on enabling teams not on controlling them. 7. Optimize the Whole. If you want to govern your development efforts effectively you must look at the bigger picture, not just individual project teams. You need to understand the high-level business process which the individual systems support, processes which often cross multiple systems. You need to manage programs of interrelated systems so that you can deliver a complete product to your stakeholders. Measurements should address how well you're delivering business value, because that is the raison d'etre of your IT department.
Based on our experiences, and guided by the 7 principles, Per Kroll and I identified 18 practices of lean development governance. We've organized these practices into 6 categories:1. The Roles & Responsibilities category: - Promote Self-Organizing Teams. The best people for planning work are the ones who are going to do it. - Align Team Structure With Architecture. The organization of your project team should reflect the desired architectural structure of the system you are building to streamline the activities of the team.
2. The Organization category: - Align HR Policies With IT Values. Hiring, retaining, and promoting technical staff requires different strategies compared to non-technical staff. - Align Stakeholder Policies With IT Values. Your stakeholders may not understand the implications of the decisions that they make, for example that requiring an "accurate" estimate at the beginning of a project can dramatically increase project risk instead of decrease it as intended.
3. The Processes category: - Adapt the Process. Because teams vary in size, distribution, purpose, criticality, need for oversight, and member skillset you must tailor the process to meet a team's exact needs. - Continuous Improvement. You should strive to identify and act on lessons learned throughout the project, not just at the end. - Embedded Compliance. It is better to build compliance into your day-to-day process, instead of having a separate compliance process that often results in unnecessary overhead. - Iterative Development. An iterative approach to software delivery allows progressive development and disclosure of software components, with a reduction of overall failure risk, and provides an ability to make fine-grained adjustment and correction with minimal lost time for rework. - Risk-Based Milestones. You want to mitigate the risks of your project, in particular business and technical risks, early in the lifecycle. You do this by having throughout your project several milestones that teams work toward.
4. The Measures category: - Simple and Relevant Metrics. You should automate metrics collection as much as possible, minimize the number of metrics collected, and know why you're collecting them. - Continuous Project Monitoring. Automated metrics gathering enables you to monitor projects and thereby identify potential issues so that you can collaborate closely with the project team to resolve problems early.
5. The Mission & Principles category: - Business-Driven Project Pipeline. You should invest in the projects that are well-aligned to the business direction, return definable value, and match well with the priorities of the enterprise. - Pragmatic Governance Body. Effective governance bodies focus on enabling development teams in a cost-effective and timely manner. They typically have a small core staff with a majority of members being representatives from the governed organizations. - Staged Program Delivery. Programs, which are collections of related projects, should be rolled out in increments over time. Instead of holding back a release to wait for a subproject, each individual subprojects must sign up to predetermined release date. If the subproject misses it skips to the next release, minimizing the impact to the customers of the program. - Scenario-Driven Development. By taking a scenario-driven approach, you can understand how people will actually use your system, thereby enabling you to build something that meets their actual needs. The whole cannot be defined without understanding the parts, and the parts cannot be defined in detail without understanding the whole.
6. The Polices & Standards category: - Valued Corporate Assets. Guidance, such as programming guidelines or database design conventions, and reusable assets such as frameworks and components, will be adopted if they are perceived to add value to developers. You want to make it as easy as possible for developers to comply to, and more importantly take advantage of, your corporate IT infrastructure. - Flexible Architectures. Architectures that are service-oriented, component-based, or object-oriented and implement common architectural and design patterns lend themselves to greater levels of consistency, reuse, enhanceability, and adaptability. - Integrated Lifecycle Environment. Automate as much of the "drudge work", such as metrics gathering and system build, as possible. Your tools and processes should fit together effectively throughout the lifecycle.
The URLs for the 3 articles:Principles and Organizations: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/jun07/kroll/Processes and Measures: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/jul07/kroll_ambler/Roles and Policies: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/aug07/ambler_kroll/
The URL for the white paper:https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/preLogin.do?lang=en_US&source=swg-ldg
The URL for the webcast:https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/preLogin.do?lang=en_US&source=dw-c-wcsdpr&S_PKG=112907C[Read More]
Agile and Rational Unified Process (RUP)?
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  rup agileadopt 2 Comments 34,630 Views
There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding around the topic of "Agile RUP", so I thought I'd put in my $0.02 on the subject. I suspect that some of the misunderstanding stems from lack of knowledge about RUP, either because the person either hasn't looked at RUP and is simply parroting the misinformation they heard from other people or because they've seen or been involved with questionable implmentations of RUP in the past. For the first problem I suggest reading "Agility and Discipline Made Easy" by Per Kroll and Bruce MacIsaac because it gives a pretty good overview of applying RUP in an Agile manner.
The second problem is a bit more challenging to overcome because of the very nature of RUP. RUP isn't a software process, it's actually a software process framework from which you instantiate software processes. Big difference. You select, and tailor where appropriate, the process elements appropriate to your situation. Unfortunately many organizations appear to have struggled with this concept. A common anti-pattern which are organizations that look at the RUP and say "there's a lot of really good stuff here" (absolutely true) and then conclude "we need to do it all" (yikes). That's the equivalent of going to a buffet and trying to eat all of the food in it, very clearly a bad dietary strategy. Just like you need to pick and choose only the food that you should eat, hopefully being mature enough to choose food that is good for you, you need to pick the appropriate process elements which are good for you. This requires significant experience and process knowledge to do effectively because software development is a complex endeavor and the best approach for one situation may be completely different for another situation. A second anti-pattern is when organizations assign their existing process engineers, who are often used to document-heavy serial processes, and ask them to tailor the RUP. It isn't surprising that they often produce a document-heavy and serial version of the RUP (at that point I would argue that it's no longer RUP).
The point is that these problems are self-inflicted, that these organizations could just as easily have chosen to instantiate the RUP in a light and effective manner, and better yet in a truly agile manner. In practice the RUP can be as agile as you want it to be, but you need to choose to work this way.
Some important observations:1. RUP socialized many of the concepts that Agile was built on. Although the concept of iterative development was around long before RUP, for many organizations RUP made the concept palatable through its mature approach (particularly when compared to some of the RAD/Spiral strategies at the time). In many organizations RUP also socialized testing throughout the entire lifecycle, delivery of working software each iteration, and collaborating closely with stakeholders throughout the project (to name but a few). These ideas seem straightfoward today, and they've been taken to even greater extremes in some cases , but back in the mid-90s this was pretty heady stuff for the vast majority of practitioners within the IT community. 2. RUP has adopted many of the "new" agile techniques. RUP is a process framework containing a wealth of IT practices, including both agile and traditional practices (and a lot in between). RUP continues to evolve, capturing industry best practices from many sources. So naturally RUP has adopted many agile concepts such as test-driven development (TDD), continuous integration, embracing change, and others. Check it out and see for yourself.3. RUP is as agile, or non-agile, as you want to make it. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- the RUP is a process framework from which you instantiate processes. You've got complete control over how agile the RUP is.4. RUP contains many of critical techniques for scaling agile. In a previous blog posting I overviewed the issues around scaling, not only is team size an issue but so is geographical distribution, regulatory compliance, application complexity, legacy systems/policies, governance, and organizational distribution.
I'm sure some people are reading this and thinking to themselves "of course this is what Scott is going to say, that's his job." Well, think what you want, but I was writing about how to take an agile approach several years before joining IBM. In fact, I believe that I'm the first to do so, writing about it in print in my Software Development column back in 2001 and more importantly in my book Agile Modeling: Effective Practices for XP and UP in 2002. And, if you go poking around the web a bit, you'll see a lot other have written about this too, including Craig Larman, Ivar Jacobson, Bob Martin, Gary Evans, Doug Rosenberg and many more.
I'd like to leave you with a sound bite: "The RUP done right is Agile. The RUP done wrong is just plain wrong."[Read More]
Offshoring Agile Testing
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  offshoring testing scaling-agile geographic-distribution distributed agile 1 Comment 20,544 Views
Over the past few months I've had several people ask me whether it makes sense to offshore agile testing, and more importantly when it makes sense to do so. So I thought I would share my thoughts on the subject:
I suspect that you're going to find yourself in serious trouble if:
In short, it can make sense to offshore agile testing in a very narrow range of situations. Be very careful.
Answering Questions about Disciplined Agile Delivery
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agile enterprise disciplined-agile-deliver... 1 Comment 24,040 Views
On April 25, 2013 I gave a webcast for the Global Rational User Community entitled Disciplined Agile Delivery: Going beyond Scrum . During the webcast a large number of questions were asked but unfortunately I couldn't get to all of them. So I've taken the opportunity to write up the answers in this blog posting.
What Three-Year Olds Can Teach Us About Software Development
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  rup scrum dad 1 Comment 30,573 Views
I have a young daughter and she's at the age where she wants to dress herself. The problem is that if we pick a single outfit and try to get her to wear it she refuses (I've lost count of the times I've heard "I don't want that"). At the other extreme if we let her pick her own outfit from the closet she'll be there for hours trying everything on. As experienced parents advise what we need to do is present her with two or three choices and ask her to pick what she wants.
So how does this relate to software development? Once again, let's look at extremes. First, consider Scrum's approach of prescribing a single way of doing things. For example, Scrum prescribes that you hold a daily meeting, called a Scrum, where everyone stands up and answers the same 3 questions. Scrum also prescribes a single change management strategy where you have a stack of requirements prioritized by business value. Scrum prescribes three roles - ScrumMaster, Product Owner, and Team Member - as well as other things. Don't get me wrong, these strategies are all great in certain circumstances but not for all. Prescribing one way of doing things is an extreme, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised when people refuse to do it that way or struggle to make it work given the situation that they face.
At the other extreme consider RUP's approach where it presents repository of techniques from which to select the ones appropriate for you. The problem is that now we have an overwhelming way of doing things from which to choose, all of them good options in certain situations. So why are we surprised when teams struggle to identify a coherent tailoring of RUP?
Now let's consider the middle ground. The Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process decision framework takes a goals-driven approach. So, instead of saying "hold a daily stand up meeting and answer these three questions" it says to regularly coordinate within the team and there are several ways of doing so (hold a Scrum meeting, hold a Kanban-style meeting, and so on). Yes, DAD does provide a large number of techniques to choose from (as does the agile community in general) but it also provides a straightforward way to choose between them. DAD does this by describing the advantages and disadvantages of each technique and suggests when, and when not, to use each approach. When people are presented with viable options, and the trade-offs associated with each, it's much more likely that they'll choose an approach that is better suited for their situation.
Scrum's single prescribed strategy works well only when that strategy is appropriate for the situation at hand. Similarly, telling my daughter exactly what to wear works well only when she's in the mood to wear that outfit. RUP's cafeteria approach to software process works well when you have the expertise, and time, to choose what's best for you. Similarly, asking my daughter to pick out her outfit from all the choices in her closet only works well when I've got a lot of time to wait for her. In both situations a better strategy is to present options, describe the trade offs, and then let people pick what's right for them given the context of the situation that they face. This is exactly what the DAD framework promotes.
I believe the goals-based approach of Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) represents an important step forward in the software process realm. It's time to recognize the extremes for what they are and move to a more viable middle ground.
Advanced Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) Workshop
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agileadopt disciplined-agile-deliver... training 1 Comment 19,705 Views
I'm happy to announce that IBM Rational's RP252 Advanced Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) workshop is now available. This is a 3-day, hands-on workshop which teaches students the fundamentals of Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). This workshop is offered both publicly and privately.
Removing the cost barriers to getting the agile tools you need
Rolf Nelson recently recorded a short (5 min) podcast about IBM Rational Team Concert (RTC). RTC is a complete agile collaborative development environment providing agile planning, source code management, work item management, build management, and project health, along with integrated reporting and process support. I've worked with RTC for a couple of years now and have been truly impressed with it. What should be of interest to many people is the Express-C version which is a free, fully-featured, 10-license version of RTC which can be easily downloaded from www.jazz.net.
Funding Agile Projects
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agileadopt management agileexec agile estimating 1 Comment 27,615 Views
For several years now I've written various articles and newsletters on the topics of estimating and funding strategies for software development projects, and in particular for agile software development projects. Whenever I talk to people about agile software development, or coach them in how to succeed at it, some of the very first questions that I'll be asked, particularly by anyone in a management role, is how to fund agile software development projects. Apparently a lot of people think that you can only apply agile strategies on small, straightforward projects where it makes sense to do a time and materials (T&M) approach. In fact you can apply agile strategies in a much greater range of situations, as the various surveys that myself and others are showing time and again. My goal with this blog posting is to summarize the various strategies for, and issues surrounding, the funding of agile software development projects.Modified on by ScottAmbler
There are three basic strategies for funding projects, although several variations clearly exist. These strategies are:
The point is that there are several strategies for funding agile software development projects, just like there are several strategies for funding traditional software development projects. My experience is that fixed-price funding strategies are incredibly poor practice which increases the risk of your software development projects dramatically. I recognize how hard it can be to change this desire on the part of our business stakeholders, but have also had success changing their minds. If you choose to perservere, which is a difficult decision to make, you can help your organization's decision makers to adopt more effective strategies. Like you they want to improve the effectiveness of your IT efforts.
Further reading: (In recommended order)
[Read More]
Agile Myth:High Quality Costs Less than Low Quality - Busted! (at scale)
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  quality rup agility-at-scale 1 Comment 13,470 Views
Yesterday I was involved with a workshop around agile development at scale. At one point in the conversation we started talking about the relationship between cost and quality. Some of the people in the workshop were relatively new to agile and still believed the traditional theory that to build in high quality it costs more, sometimes substantially more. This does appear to be true on traditional waterfall projects, but some people were making the mistake that this was an "natural law of IT" which also must apply to agile project teams. I naturally jumped on that idea and described how agile developers have found that writing high quality code leads to lower development costs and shorter time to value, in direct contradiction to traditional theory. A few people struggled with the idea for a bit, and one was pretty adamant that in some cases the need for very high quality does in fact lead to greater cost and time. He talked about his experiences on large-scale Rational Unified Process(RUP) projects and in particular how some URPS (usability, reliability, performance, and supportability) requirements can increase your cost. At this point Per Kroll, co-author of Agility and Discipline Made Easy: Practices from OpenUP and RUP, jumped into the conversation and pointed out although higher quality does lead to lower cost in most cases, using Toyota's lean approach to manufacturing as an example, that the agile community didn't completely have the relationship between quality and cost completely correct. My spidey sense told me that a learning opportunity was coming my way.
Per and I had an offline discussion about this to explore what he'd been observing in practice. In most situation it appears to be the case that higher quality does in fact lead to lower costs and shorter time for delivery, something that Per and I had observed numerous times. This happens because high quality code is much easier to understand and evolve than low quality code -- the agile community has found that it is very inexpensive to write high quality code by following practices such as continuous integration, developer regression testing [or better yet test-driven development(TDD)], static code analysis, following common development conventions, and agile modeling strategies. When you "bake in" quality from the start through applying these techniques, instead of apply traditional techniques such as reviews and end-of-lifecycle testing (which is still valid for agile projects, but should not be your primary approach to testing) which have long feedback cycles and therefore prove costly in practice. But, as we've learned time and again, when you find yourself in more complex situations of Agility@Scale sometimes the mainstream agile strategies fall down. For example, in situations where the regulatory compliance scaling factor is applicable, particularly regulations around protecting human life (i.e. the FDA's CFR 21 Part 11), you find that some of the URPS requirements require a greater investment in quality which can increase overall development cost and time. This is particularly true when you need to start meeting 4-nines requirements (i.e. the system needs to be available 99.99% of the time) let alone 5-nines requirements or more. The cost of thorough testing and inspection can rise substantially in these sorts of situations.
In conclusion, it does seem to be true in the majority of situations, which is what the level 1 rhetoric focuses on, that higher quality leads to lower development costs. But at scale this doesn't always seem to hold true.
PS -- Sorry for the corny title, but a couple of days ago at the Rational Software Conference I had the pleasure of interviewing Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage from the Discovery Channel's Mythbuster's show as part of the conference keynote. They're great guys, BTW, who have had a really positive impact on motivating children to be interested in science (apparently kids like to see stuff get blown up, go figure).[Read More]
Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  discipline manifesto maturity agileadopt 1 Comment 15,423 Views
I just wanted to share with you the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship which extends the Agile Manifesto. The Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship states:As aspiring Software Craftsmen we are raising the bar of professional software development by practicing it and helping others learn the craft. Through this work we have come to value:
That is, in pursuit of the items on the left we have found the items on the right to be indispensable.
I view this manifesto as an important step in the maturation of software development. More on this in a future blog posting.[Read More]
Agility at Scale at Rational Software Conference
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  conference 1 Comment 11,130 Views
And now, a brief message from our sponsor. ;-)
Just wanted to let you know that Agility@Scale will be a major theme at this year's IBM Rational Software Conference being held in Orlando May 31 through to June 4. I'll be giving two presentations, Agility at Scale: Mitigating the Percieved Risks of Agile Adoption and Distributed Agile Software Development: Best Practices, facilitating a panel entitled Experience Reports from the Agile Trenches: What's Really Working, What's Not Working, and Why, and running a half-day workshop entitled Become as Agile as You Need to Be: Scaling Agile Software Development to Meet Your Real-World Situation. As usual, it will be a busy conference for me. ;-)
There are of course other sessions and workshops specific to agile topics. Some highlights include:
Of course there's a lot more going on at the conference when it comes to scaling agile software development than just these sessions, but I thought I'd give you a feel for what's going on. Hope to see you at the conference. There's a "March Madness" sale going on right now at the registration page where if you purchase one pass you get the second for half price.
Further reading:
[Read More]
Rational Agile Page
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  rational 1 Comment 8,252 Views
And now for some blatant advertising. ;-)
I just wanted to point out our agile development page to you as it contains links to a lot of interesting agile resources produced by the folks here at Rational. There's links to white paper, recorded web casts, and Rational's Agility@Scale poster. Short story is that the page is worth checking out.
- Scott[Read More]
Agile Adoption Antipattern: We're Special
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  antipattern agileadopt 1 Comment 17,151 Views
An inhibitor that I run into again and again within organizations that are still in the process of adopting agile development techniques is something that I call the "We're Special" anti-pattern. The people involved believe that their situation is special, that some unique factor in their environment makes it all but impossible to adopt agile techniques, and therefore they need to continue to work in the manner that they've always worked, regardless of the obvious inefficiencies of doing so.
An organization suffers from this agile adoption anti-pattern when they start giving domain-based or technology-based excuses for why they can't become more agile. For example, I've heard bank employees claim that "Agile works fine for building web sites, but we're building financial systems therefore agile won't work for us", telecom employees claim "Agile works fine for building financial systems, but we're building embedded systems therefore agile won't work for us", and government employees claim "Agile works fine for embedded systems, but we're building web sites therefore agile won't work for us." Needless to say I often struggle to not roll my eyes.
The reality is that the business domain that you're working in doesn't dictate your ability to adopt agile strategies. I've seen very successful agile projects in banks, insurance companies, manufacturing companies, retail companies, pharmacueticals (yes, life critical applications), telecoms, and government agencies. I've also met people working in those domains claim that they're special because of the inherent challenges of the domain.
Similarly, technology isn't an issue. I've seen project teams that were successful at applying agile approaches using Java, VB, COBOL, C, Linux, Windows, System Z, on PCs, and so on. Granted, some technology platforms suffer from a plethora of "agile tooling", PL/1 comes to mind and I'm sure that there's a few more niche platforms where this is the case, but with a little online searching it's often possible to find good open source tools out there (or what's stopping you from starting such a project?).
The primary issues around agile adoption are cultural in nature. Can you become more flexible in your thinking? Can you become more disciplined (agile requires greater levels of discipline than traditional approaches)? Can you build a collaborative environment with your business stakeholders? Can you move away from bureaucratic processes to ones which focus on adding real value? Can you invest in your IT staff to give them modern development skills required for test-driven development (TDD), continuous integration, and agile database techniques (to name a few)? Addressing the "people issues", the cultural issues, is the hard part of moving towards agile.
If you're looking for valid excuses for why your organization can't move to agile, here's some valid adoption inhibitors that I see in organizations all the time:
The above list is just the tip of the iceberg. The point is that the real problems that you face are cultural in nature, not domain-based nor technology-based. It is possible to overcome these inhibitors to success, but you need to understand that you're suffering from them, what the implications are, and how to overcome them. This is one of the facets of the Health Assessment portion of our new Measured Capability Improvement Framework (MCIF) service, the goal of which is to help organizations improve their internal IT processes. Although MCIF isn't specifically about becoming more agile, the reality is that there are a lot of great agile practices out there, and some of them are good options for your organization. Assuming of course you get over your misconception that you're special for some reason and instead accept the need that you've got some hard slogging ahead of you to improve your IT game.
Further reading:
[Read More]
Agility at Scale Poster Now Available
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agile large governance 1 Comment 10,002 Views
I'm happy to announce Rational's Agility at Scale poster which is currently available free of charge from the Rational poster order page.
Although I'm obviously biased as I was involved with its creation, the poster includes some really good information about how to scale agile software development practices effectively. It summarizes the scaling factors, such as large teams, distribution, regulatory compliance, application complexity, and so on that you should be concerned with. It also presents a full agile software development lifecycle that goes beyond the construction focused lifecycles of common "agile in the small" processes. It also summarizes the practices of lean development governance, giving you some insight into how to govern your IT environment more effectively.
I think it's a pretty good poster that's worth checking out. It's free, so it's hard to argue with the price. Most importantly, it would look pretty good hanging on your office wall.
[Read More]
Strategies for Distributed Agile Teams, Part 3
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  sdcf geographic-distribution gdd scaling-agile distributed agility-at-scale 1 Comment 16,069 Views
I just wanted to round out my discussion about agile approaches to geographically distributed development (GDD) with a few important words of advice:1. Get some experience. Worry less about enterprise adoption and instead get started with a small project, or better yet a series of increasingly more complex projects. There will be learning experiences as you build a relationship with the offshore service provider. This advice is applicable whether you're working with your own offshore division or with an independent service provider.2. Have a long-term staffing strategy. It may be great in the short term to have work done in a lower cost country, but how are you going to transfer the necessary skills to the maintenance and support team. Outsourcing that work is also an option, but it can be a risky one as you would need to build up expertise in "your" systems if you ever decide to insource that work again.3. Be concerned about intellectual property (IP). The rules are different around the world, and you may inadvertently be financing the creation of a new international competitor if you don't have a clear division of ownership. And yes, this may mean that some components of your systems are still built internally by your own organization.4. Show off locally before you go global. GDD makes things harder to manage, so if you're struggling to manage local teams you're really going to struggle managing teams at a distance. Make sure you have local success first and are good at agile development in general. Furthermore, if your agile GDD projects run into trouble, don't end your local agile adoption just because of difficulties with distributed projects.5. Let your offshore partners lead. The offshore partner likely has more experience than you at successful distributed development, and this is particularly true when you're dealing with an established service provider.6. Do some reading. There's a great IBM Redbook entitled "Global Development and Delivery in Practice: Experiences of the IBM Rational India Lab" which can be downloaded free of charge from http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247424.html7. Do some viewing. We recorded a Rational Chat a few months ago entitled "Being Agile in a Global Development Environment" which is posted at https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/reg/acceptSignup.do?lang=en_US&source=dw-c-wcsdpr&S_PKG=120607&S_TACT=105AGX23&S_CMP=TALKS&cp=UTF-8 . I also gave a keynote on Agile approaches to GDD at Software Development Practices 2007 held in Boston in the Autumn of 2007. The video can be downloaded free of charge from http://www.life20.net/video/scottambler.mov .[Read More]Modified on by ScottAmbler
Strategies for Distributed Agile Teams Part 1
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  gdd agility-at-scale distributed scaling-agile teams 1 Comment 18,286 Views
A common misunderstanding about agile software development is that it's only for co-located teams. Things are definitely easier for co-located teams, and as I found with both the Dr. Dobb's 2007 and 2008 Agile Adoption surveys (www.ambysoft.com/surveys/) co-located agile teams appear to have a higher success rate than distributed teams, Having said that, many organizations are in fact succeeding at distributed agile development.Modified on by ScottAmbler
I'd like to share some strategies that I'm seeing work in practice, and in this blog posting summarizes generic strategies for distributed teams whether or not they're agile. These strategies are:1. Do some up front planning. Distributed development is higher risk than co-located development, and one way to address that risk is to think things through. That doesn't mean that you need to create a monolithic, 1000+ task Gantt chart, but it does mean that you should identify your major dependencies and milestone dates. Effective teams do this planning with the distributed developers actively involved (they are part of the team after all), they strive to consider all associated costs, and in particular they don't overlook the low probability/high impact risks which often prove to be project killers.
2. Organize the team effectively. Once of the practices of Lean Development Governance (https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/preLogin.do?lang=en_US&source=swg-ldg) is to organize your team structure around either your architecture or the lines of business (LOB) supported by the programme that you're working on. Ideally each sub-team should be responsible for one or more subsystems or modules, something that can be difficult if some of your team works alone from home, to reduce the amount of information sharing and collaboration required between disparate teams. In other words, maximize the responsibilities of the "offshore" team(s) as much as possible. A very common mistake is to organize the subteams around job specialties – for example the architects are in Toronto, the developers in Mumbai, and the testers in Singapore – because to support this team structure you have to create a phenomenal amount of documentation to support communication between the teams.
3. Do some up front modeling. The implication of organizing your team around the architecture (or LOB) is that you also need to do a bit of architecture envisioning up front. Your architecture efforts should provide guidance regarding the shared infrastructure as well as critical development conventions such as coding guidelines and data naming conventions. Architecture envisioning is also a good idea for co-located agile teams too. See http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/initialArchitectureModeling.htm for strategies to get the benefits of architecture modeling without the costs of needless documentation.
4. Recognize that communication is critical. GDD puts many barriers to communication in place, increasing overall project risk. To overcome these risks you will first need to be aware of them and act accordingly, and second, you'll need to write more documentation than you would likely prefer. The risks associated with long-distance communication include cultural differences, time-zone differences, and the challenges with written documentation (which is the least effective way to communicate information). I make it a habit of asking open-ended questions so that I can determine whether or not the other people understand the topic under conversation. Particularly I will never ask a yes/no style of question because the simple answer of yes can mean a range of things depending on the culture. It may mean "Yes, I heard you", "Yes, I understand what you're saying", or "Yes, I understand and agree with you". When you're dealing with people at other locations it's good practice to ask them to summarize the conversation in writing, in particular to identify key action items and ownership of them, to ensure that everyone agrees with what was discussed. A good approach is to have the team lead on other end to do the summary so that they own it going forward.
5. Put a good technical infrastructure in place. Automate, automate, automate. In a GDD environment you need to work with collaborative multi-site tools such as ClearCase, ClearQuest, and Jazz Rational Team Concert (www.jazz.net) which enable you to share and evolve your work products (i.e. test scripts, code, documents) effectively.
In my next posting I'll describe a collection of agile-specific strategies for distributed software development teams.[Read More]
Large Agile Teams
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agility-at-scale safe agile architecture discipilnedagiledelivery product-management scaled-agile agile-exec agileexec testing 22,700 Views
I recently wrote a detailed article about Large Agile Teams that was a detailed walkthrough of how to structure agile teams of various sizes. I suspect that this is the most comprehensive online discussion of this topic. The article addressed the following topics:
I welcome any feedback that you may have about Large Agile Teams.
How to Scale Agile Software Development
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  agile-exec devops agility@scale disciplined-agile agile 20,950 Views
The following diagram summarizes a safe and proven strategy for scaling agile delivery strategies at the team level. There are three features of this strategy:
To scale agile successfully you must be able to tailor your approach to reflect the context that you face. To do this you must understand what your process and organizational structure options are and what tradeoffs each of those options has. Unless you're a process expert, this can be challenging. This is where DAD's process goal strategy comes in. Instead of prescribing a single way to do things, as we see in methods such as Scrum and SAFe, DAD instead captures your options in terms of process goals and guides you through making the decisions that best address the situation that you find yourself in. An example of a process goal diagram, in this case for the Inception phase goal Explore Initial Scope, is shown below.
The critical thing is that with a goal-driven approach it becomes much easier to understand how to scale agile. Depending on the context of the situation that a team finds itself in you will address each goal differently. The strategy for a small, co-located team facing a fairly straightforward situation in a non-regulatory environment works well for that team, the same strategy prescribed to a team in a different situation would put that team at risk of failure. Instead of prescribing a single way of working that is optimized for a specific situation we need to instead allow, and better yet enable, teams to adopt strategies that reflect the context of the situation that they face.
We've found that four of the twenty-two process goals seem to take about 80% of the tailoring impact. These goals are:
For a more detailed discussion of how these four process goals are the key to scaling your agile software delivery process, please refer to the whitepaper Scaling Agile Software Development: Disciplined Agile Delivery at Scale.
Measuring Benefits of Software Development: Traditional vs. Agile
ScottAmbler 120000HESD Tags:  continuous-delivery metrics devops agile project-management measures 26,432 Views
I was recently involved in an online discussion about how to calculate the benefits realized by software development teams. As with most online discussions it quickly devolved into camps and the conversation didn't progress much after that. In this case there was what I would characterize as a traditional project camp and a much smaller agile/lean product camp. Although each camp had interesting points, the important thing for me in the conversation was the wide cultural and experience gap between the people involved in the conversation.
The following diagram summarizes the main viewpoints and the differences between them. The traditional project camp promoted a strategy where the potential return on investment (ROI) for a project would be calculated, a decision would be made to finance the project based (partly) on that ROI, the project would run, the solution delivered into production, and then at some point in the future the actual ROI would be calculated. Everyone was a bit vague on how the actual ROI would be calculated, but they agreed that it could be done although would be driven by the context of the situation. Of course several people pointed out that it rarely works that way. Even if the potential ROI was initially calculated it would likely be based on wishful thinking and it would be incredibly unlikely that the actual ROI would be calculated once the solution was in production. This is because few organizations are actually interested in investing the time to do so and some would even be afraid to do so. Hence the planned and actual versions of the traditional strategy in the diagram.
The agile/lean camp had a very different vision. Instead of investing in upfront ROI calculation, which would have required a fair bit of upfront requirements modelling and architectural modelling to get the information, the idea was that we should instead focus on a single feature or small change. If this change made sense to the stakeholders then it would be implemented, typically on the order of days or weeks instead of months, and put quickly into production. If your application is properly instrumented, which is becoming more and more common given the growing adoption of DevOps strategies, you can easily determine whether the addition of the new feature/change adds real value.
Cultural differences get in your way
The traditional project camp certainly believed in their process. In theory it sounded good, and I'm sure you could make it work, but in practice it was very fragile. The long feedback cycle, potentially months if not years, pretty much doomed the traditional approach to measuring benefits of software development to failure. The initial ROI guesstimate was often a work of fiction and rarely would it be compared to actuals. The cultural belief in bureaucracy motivated the traditional project camp to ignore the obvious challenges with their chosen approach.
The agile/lean camp also believed in their strategy. In theory it works very well, and more and more organizations are clearly pulling this off in practice, but it does require great discipline and investment in your environment. In particular, you need investment in modern development practices such as continuous integration (CI), continuous deployment (CD), and instrumented solutions (all important aspects of a disciplined agile DevOps strategy). These are very good things to do anyway, it just so happens that they have an interesting side effect of making it easy (and inexpensive) to measure the actual benefits of changes to your software-based solutions. The cultural belief in short feedback cycles, in taking a series of smaller steps instead of one large one, and in their ability to automate some potentially complex processes motivated the agile/lean camp to see the traditional camp as hopeless and part of the problem.
Several people in the traditional project camp struggled to understand the agile/lean approach, which is certainly understandable given how different that vision is compared with traditional software development environments. Sadly a few of the traditionalists chose to malign the agile/lean strategy instead of respectfully considering it. They missed an excellent opportunity to learn and potentially improve their game. Similarly the agilists started to tune out, dropping out of the conversation and forgoing the opportunity to help others see their point of view. In short, each camp suffered from cultural challenges that prevented them from coherently discussing how to measure the benefits of software development efforts.
How Should You Measure the Effectiveness of Software Development?
Your measurement strategy should meet the following criteria:
Not surprisingly, I put a lot more faith in the agile/lean approach to measuring value. Having said that, I do respect the traditional strategy as there are some situations where it may in fact work. Just not as many as traditional protagonists may believe.
Eliminating Waste Depends on Context
ScottAmbler 120000HESD 14,295 Views
On Twitter one of the people that I follow recently tweeted in jest "I am waste". He had been tweeting about the problem that people will often pay consultants for their advice yet will not follow that advice once it's been provided (yet will often still keep paying for more advice). Perhaps in this situation his efforts were a waste, or perhaps the real issue was that the customer had a long learning process and hadn't yet come to the point where they were willing to act on the advice, we may never know. But I have to think that there are other situations where this person isn't a waste, regardless of his claims.
This got me thinking that something is a waste in one context yet in another context may be quite valuable. Or, as the old saying goes, one man's trash is another man's treasure.
For example, consider the following simple value stream:
[Activity A: 10 min] [Wait time: 20 min] [Activity B: 10 min]
Without considering the context, the wait time of 20 min represents 50% waste in the overall process that we should try to eliminate.
What if that wait time provides people with a much needed rest? With time to contemplate? With time to destress? Eliminating that wait time, or even reducing it, could result a degradation of performance. In this case, one person's waste (the wait time) is another person's treasure (rest time). The implication is that we need to work closely with the people intimately involved in a process if we're to help them to improve it.
Context counts.