Karl Scotland – Using Agile to Deliver Value
Posts tagged Conference
Agile 2008 – Thursday
Aug 8th
Thursday morning was take up with presenting “KFC Development”. We were really pleased with how this went – around 20 people came along, and I think everyone stayed the course! Unfortunately we ran a bit over and had to stop short the final simulation, but I think we had got the ideas across by then. If you attended, please leave feedback in a comment!
In the afternoon I made it to Joshua Kerievsky’s “Estimating Considered Wasteful”. It was great to hear someone like Joshua proclaiming that he didn’t use backlogs (“piles of stories” instead), timeboxed iterations or estimates. It sounded like a very simple kanban system. He also asserted that his wasn’t an advanced technique, which I also agree with. Rather, I think were learning new ways of explaining and teaching these new ideas. A couple of other new terms – feature fat (i.e. gold plating) and bargains (i.e. high value, low cost features)
The day finished with the conference banquet. Bob Martin gave the keynote, and was on top form as usual. A great political metaphor, comparing Scrum to Obama and XP to McCain. The 2008 Gordon Pask Awards were also announced. It was delighted that the winners were Arlo Belshee and Kenji Hiranabe. Arlo’s “Naked Planning” last year was big influence on my interest in kanban, and Kenji has also been a vocal kanban advocate. Kenji also arranged a performance of “Dear XP” at the banquet. Rather then try and describe this, simply have a look!
Agile 2008 – Wednesday
Aug 8th
Wednesday kicked off for me with a talk by Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson on “Natural Laws of Software Development” where they began with some basic ideas about delivering features and value early, and from that, derived most of the XP practices. On the way they described some continuum, which struck me as good ways of thinking about approaches to software development:
Paper <-----> Conversation Distance <-----> Close Infrequent <-----> Continuous Abstract <-----> Examples
Two things struck me as conspicuous by their absence – timeboxing and estimation. Asking Ron about this afterwards, he suggested that they weren’t critical, although he didnt know how to develop without them. I was reassured to hear this, given my focus on kanban systems for software development.
No other highlights, unfortunately. In the afternoon, I went to “Come and Take It! Lean Pull Applied”, but found it disappointing, although the exercise had potential.
We also presented our “Managers’ Guide To TDD” which went well and was videoed for InfoQ. I hope the edit turns out OK and will post details when its available.
Thanks to VersionOne for finding me a ticket onto their cruise in the evening. A great trip round the lake with beer, food, conversation and gambling (with fake money).
Agile 2008 – Tuesday
Aug 6th
This is a quick brain dump of the day for me – brief summaries and key highlights that stood out.
The conference kicked off with an interesting keynote by James Suroweicki, author of Wisdom of the Crowds. Essentiallly this is about how collective intelligence can be better than individual intelligence. For example, we had a live experiment where all attendees were asked to guess the number of lines of code in Visual Studio as part of the registration process. The average guess was 47 million and the actual answer was 43.2 million – only an 8 percent difference. In fact only 2 out of the 15000 attendees had better guesses. (The closest guess as actually by a Conchango colleage, Toby deBelder). Other examples given were Who Wants To Be a Millionaire’s Ask The Audience option, where the audience is correct 90% of the time, and horse racing betting, where the ‘favourite’, as determined by the crowd of gamblers, is invariable the winner. In order for the wisom of the crowds to work however, a number of conditions are needed, including cognitive diversity, in order to have different perspectives, and independence, to avoid group think. All of this makes perfect sense when relating it to cross functional teamwork as a basis for agile software development teams being successful.
The Feature Injection by tutorial Chris Matts was essentially a guide to how the business analysis role fits into Agile. Rather than trying to push every requirement into a system (via documentation) the BA ‘injects’ value-derived features using a pull model by describing examples. From a kanban perspective, Feature Injection describes how the features in the system are discovered and scheduled.
In the afternoon I was part of an Open Jam on the Evolution of the Agile Model. This was a follow up to a similar conversation last year, planning on how we can be more active in taking things forward next year. More to follow soon hopefully.
Finally, I went to the talk on Code Metrics & Analysis for Agile Projects by Neal Ford and Ram Singaram. The metrics themselves are really useful, but its important to remember that they are just numbers – information to be shared and used to inform decisions about the code base. They need to be “read like tea leaves” as they are context dependant. One really cool things I found was the use of tree maps to visualise the state of the code base.
Agile 2008 Recommendations
Aug 1st
Following on from some posts that have been shared in the Agile2008 FriendFeed Room, here are my recommendations for what to attend (excluding my sessions!)
Tuesday Morning
- Behaviour Driven Development Using Plain Old JUnit, Elizabeth Keogh & Dan North – should given an interesting insight to how BDD is compared to plain old TDD.
- Learning Kaizen from Toyota (with Mindmaps), Kenji Hiranabe – a great opportunity to learn more about Lean and Mindmaps at the same time
- Feature Injection, Chris Matts & Julie Chickering – an interesting take on how to schedule features on demand
Tuesday Afternoon
- Coaching Self Organizing Teams, Joseph Pelrine & Steve Freeman – Joseph has some great insights into coaching and teamwork
Wednesday Morning
- Resistance As A resource, Dale Emery – Dale is the expert on this topic!
- Natural Laws Of Software Development – Deriving Agile Practices, Ron Jeffries & Chet Hendrickson – Ron and Chet always have something interesting to say
- Value Stream Mapping – Extending Our View To The Enterprise, Alan Shalloway – an essential lean tool for agile in the enterprise
- New Car Development In Toyota, Kenji Hiranabe – more lean material from about Toyota
Wednesday Afternoon
- Come and Take It! Lean Pull Applied, Rod Coffin & Don McGreal – pull is an emerging art
- Metrics for Agility, Dan Rawsthornw – an insight into what metrics can add value
- GTD + Kanban + Round Robin for Product Owners, Thomas Nilsson – an interesting mix of techniques
- Prioritising and Sequencing Features: Several Techniques Including “Minimal Marketable Features”, Evan Campbell – MMFs are gaining recognition
Thursday Morning
- Future Direction For Agile, David Anderson – David has some unique ideas and insights
- User Story Mapping: Making Sense Out Of Your User Story Backlog, Jeff Patton – some really practical ideas for managing large backlogs
Thursday Afternoon
- Artful Making For Agile Team, Lee Devin & Stacia Broderick – a refreshingly different take on things!
- Estimating Considered Wasteful: Introducing Micro Release, Joshua Kerievsky – a really lean approch to agile
- Exploring User Stories Through Mind Mapping, Kenji Hiranabe & Takeshi Kakeda -a powerful use of mind mapping
Friday Morning
- Starting A Kanban System for Software Engineering With Value Stream Mapping and Theory Of Constraints, Corey Ladas – Corey is a master of kanban
Agile 2008 Sessions
Jul 17th
Agile 2008 is almost here and I’m looking forward to presenting 3 sessions this year.
Managers Introduction to Test Driven Development (with Dave Nicolette)
Wednesday 6th, 16:00 – 17:30, Civic Ballroom South, Customers & Business Value Stage
The purpose of this session is to help non-technical managers understand the business value of one of the popular agile software development techniques. It is designed to help managers understand the impact on their projects when their technical teams use the agile technique, test driven development (TDD). We begin by demonstrating the technique of TDD using a tool familiar to nearly all managers: Microsoft Excel. Clarke Ching developed a TDD exercise using Microsoft Excel that many others have used as the basis for demonstrations and presentations on the subject. We use this exercise to demonstrate the red-green-refactor TDD cycle with a tool familiar to nearly all managers so that they can see what the buzzword means and get a feel for the technique. This is followed by a presentation focusing on the effect of TDD on a project’s timeline, code quality, cost of development, cost of ownership/support, and longevity of the code in production. The core of the message is that TDD helps a team control the accumulation of technical debt in the codebase, and this in turn controls costs, reduces time to market, and results in a cleaner product that will have a longer production lifetime.
KFC Development – Finger Lickin’ Good (with Aaron Sanders)
Thursday 7th, 8:30 – 12:00, Essex Ballroom, Breaking Acts Stage
This workshop explores three important Lean concepts – Kanban, Flow and Cadence (KFC) – which can be combined to generate a more pipeline-based approach to software development, as opposed to the more common timebox-based approaches of more traditional Agile methods. We will describe our experiences implementing these ideas at Yahoo! and explain the concepts using examples, simulations and games. In addition, because this is a new and emerging way of working, there will be an opportunity for discussion between the participants about how the ideas might be applied in their own situations, in order to advance the art.
Integrating Scrum with the Process Framework at Yahoo! Europe (with Alexandre Boutin)
Friday 8th, 8:30 – 10:00, Kenora, Agile & Organisational Culture Stage
This presentation describes how Yahoo! International, and in particular, the Yahoo! Europe, has moved from having a very waterfall inspired process framework, to having one which is very lightweight and flexible, and thus compatible with Agile methodologies. This was achieved through Agile teams collaborating with the Process Group in its own iterative inspect and adapt cycle. The Process Group has evolved from being a control-oriented team, with a process-centric framework, to being a coaching-oriented team, with an organisational-centric framework. Thus, rather than telling teams how to run their projects, they help teams ensure they are meeting business needs.
XP2008 – Day 5
Jun 16th
The final morning of the conference was faily quiet again. I did go to “The Agile Technique Hour” which was fun and interesting. David Parsons has posted the materials online, but in brief, we were split into teams in order to deliver features, which were drawings on functionality on overhead acetate. The features were integrated by overlaying the acetate sheats. Neat idea. Initially we had policies in place to inhibit productivity, and gradaully the policies were relaxed to allow us to collaborate better, refactor, regression test, continuously integrate etc.
What I found interesting was that our teams approach was to have a clear vision (a basic bicycle) and to focus on delivering the simplest ‘minimal’ solution for each ‘marketable feature’ and to focus on delivering the ‘minimal viable product’ e.g. the smallest set of features which gave a valuable useable product. In effect, we limited work in progress. We ended up completing nearly all the features without too much trouble (unlike the other team 
)
Here’s the final product:
XP2008 – Day 4
Jun 14th
An excellent workshop by Mary and Tom Poppendieck today entitled “Stop Thrashing: Pull Schedule Techniques for Level Workflow”. It really left me buzzing, for two reasons. Firstly, Mary talked about her real experiences implementing a kanban system at 3M which was fascinating, and secondly, I ended up being invited up to the front to share my experiences with implementing a kanban system at Yahoo!
Mary described how 3M moved from an MRP (Material Resource Planning) system which was software based and delivered 60% against plan, to a kanban system which was physical token based and delivered 95% against plan. The reason it worked was that ultimately, the system was designed by the floor workers who operated it – not by management – so when there were problem, the flow workers understand how to solve them. To quote Mary, “Computers destroy our capability to schedule”.
The key to a kanban system working is what Mary called ‘setup time’ – the time to get the system ready for production. A large setup time means that there need to be large batch sizes to be economically viable, whereas a small setup time means that batch sizes can be smaller. The smaller the batch size, the more just-in-time is possible, and the better the flow. Setup time for software is generally the merge/test/deploy process and this matched my experience. At Yahoo! we had a release cycle of one week, because that was how long the release setup time was. Reducing the time needed for the release process by employing more automation (e.g. testing) would have enebled us to release even more frequently. One of the goals for a lean manufacturing organisation is ‘single digit setup’, or a setup time of 9 minutes or less. Mary described a visit to a Toyota factory where the setup time was so small that they were able to achieve a batch size on one – each car in the line was different.
Mary also talked about Building the Empire State which was built in recored time (20 months from the start of the entire project) at a rate of one floor a day. The bottom floors were being built before the top had been designed by using a number of techniques:
- Collaborative teamwork between the owner, architects and builders
- Deigning such that construction was quick and easy (as opposed to cheap)
- Breaking dependencies so that elements of the building could happen in diffierent orders
- Focussing on the constraint to enable a flow of material
- Eliminating waste – for example having restuarants on the buildng during construction
In the afternoon I ran an OpenSpace session on kanban which had around 15 people come along to and I did a quick run through of my latest KFC slides. There seems to be a real growing interest in the community about these new ideas, and I think the explanations and understands are gradually becoming clearer.
XP2008 – Day 3
Jun 12th
Dave Snowden‘s keynote was entertaining and interesting, although quite a lot of it went over my head. Dave talked about the need to understand why something works in order for it to scale, with reference to agile development. His work covers Complex Adaptive Systems, Cognitive Systems and Evolutionary Phsycology and Anthropology.
Some points which stuck out for me were:
- Adopt a safe-fail experimentation rather than a fail-safe design approach
- Hindsight doesn’t lead to foresight
- Manage and monitor boundaries and attractors
- Measure impact, not outcome
I also attended Lasse Koskela‘s Retrospective Exploration Workshop. I was primarily interested in seeing how the exercises worked as I’m putting together our own similar course for Conchango as most of the content was based on the agile retropsectives bible. Unfortunately, there wasn’t really enough time for a good hands-on simulation, although it was enough to trigger some thoughts. One key thing is to have a shared context which participants to use. Another conundrum is whether to do lots of powerpoint up front, followed by a full retropsective simulation, or whether to interleave presentation with experience. One final nice idea which Lasse used was for situations where you don’t have much wall space. He lifted a table up onto its end, so the table top became a temporary wall which he could stick paper to.
Finally, Sean Hanly spoke about his experiences with a strartup TicketSolve. This was fairly standard stuff until he mentioned the magic work ‘kanban’! It turns out that they had difficulty in release planning due to the constantly changing priorities, so adopted a basic kanban approach whereby they only planned short term for the immediate customer needs, and pulled features in iteration by iteration. It sounded like they had lost some of the big picture as a result which a quarterly planning cadence could have helped with.
As usual side conversations have been as interesting as the main conference. A theme that has emereged for me is the shift from delivering ‘working’ software to delivering ‘successful’ software. That’s what Jeff Patton is aiming for, and I think its a goal of the KFC. Rather than simple asking ‘what do you want?’, ask ‘whats your goal?’ or even ‘what problem are you trying to solve?’. This helps focus on the value being developed and delivered.
XP2008 – Day 2
Jun 11th
I went to Jeff Patton‘s tutorial on User Story Mapping this afternoon. I first met Jeff in London last year at XP Day and the Scrum Gathering. We talked about kanban, and his ideas, and the two seemed very compatible, so I was keen to see how they matched in more detail. Jeff has also been working with former Yahoo! colleagues Joe Arnold and Aaron Sanders on a kanban related article, so he also sees a connection.
Jeff is trying to solve a number of problems with User Stories that I’ve also seen:
- they are difficult to prioritise because it is usually a collection of stories that provide value.
- it can be difficult to understand the dependenies between stories.
- it can be difficult to understand the whole system from a backlog of stories.
- creating more smaller stories makes the above even worse!
Jeff’s solution is to break a system down into the following hierarchy:
Goals -> Activities -> Tasks -> Tools
- Goals are the user centred things which are trying to be achieved
- Activities are role based themes of functionality
- Tasks are more specific, but still high level features, which make up an activity
- Tools are typical more detailed user stories
By creating this hierarchy and generating a physical map using index cards, the relationship between the various parts of the system, and the value that they are delivering, can be communicated and evolved. Activities form the ‘backbone’ of the system, and Tasks can be prioritised to form a ‘walking skeleton’, or a ‘fully formed, but immature’ system.
From a kanban perspective, it seems to me that the Tasks are similar to MMFs, and are what make up the kanban cards, and that the Story Map is a tool to inform both the value that they generate, and the order in which they should be scheduled.
XP2008 – Day 1
Jun 10th
I’m at XP2008 in Limerick this week. Today was pretty quiet as its all tutorials for the first couple of days, which cost extra, so I didn’t actually go to anything. However, I did hang around and catch up with some old friends.
In particular, I had an interesting chat with Tom Poppendieck about my experiences with kanban systems. Tom felt that while a kanban system was great for small pieces of work such as sustaining engineering, it wasn’t so suitable for larger pieces of work such as new product development. This is counter to my experience that a kanban system using larger MMFs as the kanban actually helps the focus on delivering value with a reduced cycle time.
While generally talking about Lean, Tom also recommended a new book, Ready, Set, Dominate: Implement Toyota’s Set-Based Learning for Developing Products and Nobody Can Catch You by Michael N. Kennedy, Kent Harmon. Another one to add to the reading list.
