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Yuval Yeret

Kanban development oversimplified: a simple explanation of how Kanban adds to the ever-... - 0 views

agileproductdesign.com/...kanban_over_simplified.html

lean kanban

shared by Yuval Yeret on 03 Jun 09 - Cached
  • It’s a lot easier to estimate a story that’s small — which can lead to more accurate estimates, and better predictability.
  • It’s easier to plan with smaller stories. With big stories — stories that might take weeks for a developer to implement — it becomes difficult to plan a development time-box — particularly when the iterations are only a couple of weeks. It seems that only a couple stories fit — and there’s often room for half a story — but how do you build half a story? Splitting them into smaller stories makes it easier to plan those time-boxes.
  • Shrinking stories forces earlier elaboration and decision-making. Where product owners could write their stories fairly generally and consider many of the details later, now breaking them down into smaller stories forces more thinking earlier in a planning lifecycle.
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • Managing little stories forces us to keep better track of how they fit together. Product owners are often asked to break down stories to a level where a single story becomes meaningless. To keep track of what’s meaningful to them and other stakeholders, they often need to keep track of bigger items such as the features of the product and how many stories contribute to building up that feature.
  • The result of these herniated time-box activities is a cycle that’s actually 3-4 times longer than our time-box. To get work done, we’ll use a time-box to elaborate stories, one to develop them, another to more thoroughly test them, and if there are bugs, possibly another to fix them.
  • During an ideal Agile time-box we’ll have frequent discussions between developers, testers, and those on a product owner team — like business analysts, user experience people, and business people. We’ll do this to understand what we need to build and describe what we’ll do to validate the story was really done. When time-boxes are short, there’s less time for this conversation. It’s common to move many of the conversations to detail the story and describe acceptance to the time-box before so we can be ready to really get moving with development when the time-box starts.
  • It’s difficult to fit thorough validation of the story into a short time-box as well. So, often testing slips into the time-box after. Which leaves the nasty problem of what to do with bugs� which often get piped into a subsequent time-box.
  • Anyone who’s attended an Agile planning meeting knows they can often last about an hour longer than you can stand it
  • As time-boxes shrink those on the product owner team and testers find themselves in a constant mode of getting ready for a next time-box and evaluating past time-boxes
  • work long hours, attend lots of meetings, and seem to have less time to be available to help developers with the current time-box. Since their focus is on a future or past time-box, questions about this time-box seem like interruptions. Collaboration decreases and tensions increase. Their work load is heavy, bumpy, not smooth or even.
  • Kanban cards are used to limit the amount of inventory the factory builds. It doesn’t do the Toyota factory any good to build doors faster then they can assemble cars. It just wastes money on excess doors, and parts of doors. Excess work in progress is considered to be waste in Lean manufacturing. (It’s probably waste in non-Lean manufacturing too.) In the above completely made up example, you’ll never have more than 15 finished doors hanging around. (Mudha is Japanese for waste. Learn it to impress your Lean friends.)
  • “Kan” means visual, and “ban” means card or board.
  • Kanban thinking in software development attempts to do a similar thing. We want to limit unnecessary work in progress to be no higher than it needs to be to match the throughput of the team.
  • In Kanban development: time-boxed development is out stories are larger and fewer estimation is optional or out completely velocity is replaced by cycle time
  • Exactly what’s left of Agile if we get rid of time-boxes, change the meaning of stories, and stop measuring velocity. And, exactly what do car doors and Kanban cards have to do with software development? Don’t get hung up on process. Remember, agile development isn’t a process.
  • You might have a column where business analysts spend time tracking down technical details that developers need to understand to write code.
  • These columns aren’t set. You should discuss with your team the phases that stories go through to be completed. Some organization may use columns for writing documentation, or preparing customer service people to support the feature in production.
  • The top is used for stories currently in progress in that phase. The bottom is the buffer. When work for that phase of the story is completed, it moves from “in progress” to the “buffer” where it’ll wait to be pulled into the next phase.
  • When we set limits for work in progress, we’ll set a total number for the process step that includes both “in process” and the “finished buffer” for that process step.
  • Stories must be minimal marketable features
  • To be marketable the feature needs to be large enough to be useful — probably larger than the teeny stories that take a couple days to build and seem to be best practice in Agile development today. A MMF may take weeks to build. But the important thing isn’t how long it takes to build, but that it be understandable and valuable to those who’ll receive it. To identify a MMF some folks ask the question “Would I announce it in my company’s product blog?” If it’s too tiny to mention, then it’s not a MMF.
  • To be lean, we’ll limit the number of stories we allow onto the board. A common formula is to add up all the members of the team in all roles and divide by two. All roles includes developers, analysts, user interfaced designers, testers, deployment people — anyone immediately responsible for getting features to market. For example, if team members total 20, we might limit the number of MMF-style stories on the board to 10.
  • Today developers have finished a story, and s they walk to the Kanban board to move it out of development, they notice their single buffer slot is full — and the “testing in progress” column is filled to its limit. What now? The developers talk to the testers. “We’re really struggling to keep up here. It’ll be till tomorrow morning before we can get some of these stories moved out.” “Hmm�” says a developer “Can we help test?” “Of course you can!” says the tester. “With your help we can get these cleared out by the end of the day.“ The tester grins “I just don’t want you validating a story you implemented.”
  • For the limits of the story process steps, the limit is often half the number of people that can perform the work for that phase of development. For instance if you have 6 developers, you might limit the development in progress column to 3. Now, this will force developers to work together on stories. I do find in practice that this may not work out for all teams — so I often see limits that equal the number of developers (or those that can perform the process step) or often 1.5 * the number of people in a role. Of course if you do this, it’ll raise the overall work in progress — and as you might expect, items will take longer to finish.
  • When a column in a Kanban board is full, we know that group is at capacity. We also know that if this keeps happening that that process step is likely where a bottleneck is.
  • If you’ve ever waited in line for the Pirates of the Caribbean in Disneyland you might remember signs along the way that say “Your wait time from here is 30 minutes” — something like that. Now you can post your own wait times on your Kanban board. At the bottom of your story queue post the average cycle time with wait time. It’ll say something like “Your wait time for a story here is approximately 18 days.” At the top of the queue post the average working cycle time. It might say “your wait time from here is 14 days.”
  • When you place focus on how quickly you can get functionality done, and have the ability to measure just that, then the estimates don’t much matter. In fact, many using a Kanban approach have simply stopped estimating at all. Yes story sizes vary, but being able to give a wait time plus or minus a few days is sufficient for many organizations’ concerns.
  • But, since there’s no development time-box in Kanban development, we’ll measure story-by-story how long they took to complete — the “cycle time” of the story.
  • Some do still estimate stories. Then use those estimates in conjunction with cycle time. Using a spreadsheet we can calculate the average cycle time for stories with a given estimate. If you do this, consider placing a handy chart next to your Kanban board showing estimate in one column, and wait times in adjacent columns. With this you’re answering the real question stakeholders are asking for when they get estimates: “when am I going to see this functionality in the software?”
  • If your stakeholders are like mine, they don’t want to know when they’re going to get this functionality, the want to know when they’re going to get all this functionality. I find that if I place stories into a spreadsheet with start and end dates, and calculate cycle time, if I select an arbitrary time period — say a two or three week time period — I can see how many stories where completed during this time period. For instance I might see the team finished 22 stories in 3 weeks — that’s about 7.3 stories per week. Given a backlog of 100 stories I can reasonably infer that it’ll take between 13 and 14 weeks (100/7.3). That’s yesterday’s weather for Kanban — at least the way I calculate it.
  • If I know that during three week time period there where 15 working days and that 5 developers worked the entire time, that’s 75 developer days. Knowing that lets me calculate the average number of developer days per story: 3.4 (75/22) — Which is darn close to pi — which makes me believe it has to be right. ;-) This number, 3.4, is what XP practitioners referred to as load factor.
  • Evaluation cycles, not development time-boxes
  • The only difference is the cycles aren’t used to plan and commit to stories any longer.
  • The daily standup or daily scrum meeting occurs as normal, but now it occurs in front of the Kanban board. Instead of the regular meeting ritual of checking in with each person to find out what they worked on yesterday and will work on today, the discussion revolves around the Kanban board and what will likely move on and off the board today, where “traffic” seems the heaviest, and what we could do to clear bottlenecks.
  • Reflect every few weeks
  • Lean practices help teams increase throughput. They don’t make developers type faster, rather they draw attention to bottlenecks that slow things down, help you see them and respond to them quicker. Using a Kanban board lets you easily visualize work in progress across different roles and lets you see when someone is taking on too much work simultaneously.
  • Demonstrate every few weeks
  • A task board as it’s commonly used in an agile approach can give you the visualization too. But, widening the task board to separate testing from development from acceptance or other process steps helps me better visualize where things are clogging up — helps me better diagnose problems. And, setting hard limits for process steps and respecting them really makes me deal with the problem in a way that dropping a pile of stories into a sprint or iteration didn’t. But, maybe it’s just me who’s lazy and avoids dealing with tough problems. I’m sure you’d never run into a situation where you and your team let lots of finished development work pile up waiting to be tested.
  • There’s no one as zealous as the newly converted There’s a lot of folks pretty excited about Kanban out there. I am too. Sometimes that zeal takes the form of telling people practicing common agile time-boxed development that they’re wrong. But, I guess I’m crusty enough to know that there’s lots of right ways to succeed and anyone who believes they’ve found the best ways is likely wrong. Don’t let those voicing opinions strongly for, or against, Kanban approaches stop you for digging in deeper and understanding the ideas behind it.
  • Yuval Yeret on 03 Jun 09
     
    one of the best articles about Kanban and its relation to Agile I've encountered so far - focusing on Feature development (not maintenance)
Yuval Yeret

Using a Task Board with One Remote Team Member | Mike Cohn's Blog - Succeedin... - 0 views

blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/rd-with-one-remote-team-member

physical taskboard

shared by Yuval Yeret on 01 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Try to get the one person to move to where the rest of the team is.
  • Having one remote is a cost that must be borne by the full team. For the right person, it’s easily worth it. But sometimes, the person who is remote has not special skills, knowledge or experience to justify the added hassle.
  • continue to use the physical task board–it is simply too beneficial to the collocated team members to give it up in favor of a product backlog tool, especially if team members are already used to it and like it.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The remote person in this case could identify during the daily Scrum what he or she will work on and not need further interaction with the task board until selecting the next task. Here, the remote person doesn’t really interact with the task board at all and interacts only with the team. Not ideal as I’d like the person to see the tasks, but this can work in some situations.
  • more common is for the ScrumMaster to take on the responsibility of updating an electronic version that mirrors the physical task board
  • One good way of minimizing the time the ScrumMaster spends doing this is to mark the cards on the physical task board. The mark indicates “I’ve updated this task. Please update it in the online task board.” I like to use Post-It flags for this
Yuval Yeret

tips on reviving retrospectives from the retrospectives yahoo group - 0 views

finance.groups.yahoo.com/...1575

agile retrospectives agilesparksblog

shared by Yuval Yeret on 08 Jul 09 - No Cached
  • Has the team made changes that make a difference to them as a result of the retrospective?
  • Has the team explored a variety of different topics/areas, or do they stick to pretty much the same agenda around continuous improvement? What is the balance of change/improvement work vs. working on the product?
  • For example, try looking at technical practices, teamwork, or customer relationships... choose what ever seems most relevant to bound the discussion. That might help the team dig deeper and find issues that have more significance for them (now...I'm sure the other changes were significant at the time).
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Try a 'speed retrospective'. How quickly can the team get together and find one good, solid improvement to make? Make it exciting and use a stopwatch. I wouldn't do this all the time, but again, what harm to try it once?
  • How about one retrospective where you set yourselves the challenge of generating actions from the "What did we do well" column? In other words, find an action designed to magnify an existing positive rather than remedy an existing negative.
  • How about a 'Show and Tell' retrospective where every team member comes to the meeting with an action item and its explanation already prepared? The retrospective would really be each person presenting their idea in turn.
  • How about a retrospective wherein you challenge yourselves to come with a new approach to retrospectives that is so exciting that people would skip other work activities to attend?
  • I find it very important to revisit the outcome of the past retrospective and celebrate the things the team had been able to do differently.
  • The major thing is to make the changes visible and memorizable for everyone and not assuming that people remember what they decided on in the last retro.
  • Another thing is that I would invite team members to take turns in facilitating the retro. So not always the same person runs the retro (this typically also changes the format and techniques a bit).
  • - Heartbeat Retrospective (google for Boris Gloger)
  • - Temperature Reading
  • - Team Radar Chart
  • - Our project / team / product ship - draw a ship on a flip chart, ask the team what moved the ship forward, what blocked it
  • Just to add a totally different direction: I've made good experiences with having a *long* retrospective every few months. The short retrospectives are great to see the trees and optimize the daily work. A two or even three day retrospective helps the team to step back and watch the forrest instead.
  • It is important to get at least one item done every sprint. If you do the retro, but don't implement any of the actions, this is a tremendous demotivator. Better one thing finished that you can celebrate than 5 unfinished things in the queue.
  • Variety is the spice of life, so some variation is essential to keep the freshnees. Change the moderator, do technical focus once, then organisational, then "improving the fun factor", then go back to a general retro.
Yuval Yeret

86Understand the Principles | gapingvoid art - 0 views

www.gapingvoidart.com/...understand-the-principles

twitterfavs

shared by Yuval Yeret on 23 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Yuval Yeret on 23 Mar 14
     
    One of the best @gapingvoidart cartoons ever, have had to buy one to add to the collection http://t.co/kZ7h0guHug
Yuval Yeret

Scrum Log Jeff Sutherland: The Managers Role in Scrum - 1 views

jeffsutherland.com/...managers-role-in-scrum.html

agileblog agile management managers

shared by Yuval Yeret on 01 Jun 09 - Cached
  • managers handle 'external stuff' to the team
  • ontract negotiations and procurement.
  • he role that a line manager plays in an employee's personal and professional development, often in the form of coaching or assisting in HR-related issues
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • - (1) Provides organizational vision- (2) Removes impediments- (3) Assists with individual development- (4) Challenges team beyond mediocrity while respecting team boundaries- Helps individuals without sucking the responsibility out of the team- Balances observer and contributor roles- Gives individuals tools to be a great team member- Coaches teams through conflict resolution- Advocates for continuous improvement for teams and the organization at large- Buys things for the team (manages budget)- Provides the right environment- Manages portfolio of projects
  • 1. Providing organizational vision: Often teams flail because there is no vision 'from on high'. Having this vision is important for team members to be able to relate their daily actions.
  • manager's role in this process to remove escalated impediments from the team(s).
  • provide strategic vision, business strategy, and resources
  • 3. Assists with individual development: We all have managers who mentor us in professional and sometimes personal growth. We felt that this is an important role for the manager to continue to play. Not all scrummasters have the authority or expertise to help in this regard.
  • a manager role would be like a 'ScrumMaster on steriods'- a person whose job it is to remove all escalated impediments for the team, take care of external stuff to the team, lead the team by challenging it, and assists direct reports with individual development and other HR-related challenges.
  • CMMI Level 5 Requirement 2.4.10 Review the activities, status, and results of the Agile Methods with higher level management and resolve issues (GP2.10)
  • ensure that higher level management has appropriate visibility into the project activities.
  • The principle of self-managed teams would say "let them be; let them find their own way." A principle of leadership, however, is to challenge teams. We discussed the fine line between challenging teams and taking away their ability to self-manage.
  • Jens Ostergaard
    • Yuval Yeret
      Yuval Yeret on 01 Jun 09
       
      my CST...
Yuval Yeret

James Shore: The Art of Agile Development: Incremental Design and Architecture - 1 views

www.jamesshore.com/...incremental_design.html

eng-practices-list james shore evolutionary design agilearchitecture

shared by Yuval Yeret on 10 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • when you first create a design element—whether it's a new method, a new class, or a new architecture—be completely specific. Create a simple design that solves only the problem you face at the moment, no matter how easy it may seem to solve more general problems
  • Waiting to create abstractions will enable you to create designs that are simple and powerful.
  • The second time you work with a design element, modify the design to make it more general—but only general enough to solve the two problems it needs to solve. Next, review the design and make improvements. Simplify and clarify the code. The third time you work with a design element, generalize it further—but again, just enough to solve the three problems at hand. A small tweak to the design is usually enough. It will be pretty general at this point. Again, review the design, simplify, and clarify. Continue this pattern. By the fourth or fifth time you work with a design element—be it a method, a class, or something bigger—you'll typically find that its abstraction is perfect for your needs. Best of all, because you allowed practical needs to drive your design, it will be simple yet powerful.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • This is difficult! Experienced programmers think in abstractions. In fact, the ability to think in abstractions is often a sign of a good programmer. Coding for one specific scenario will seem strange, even unprofessional.
  • Continuous Design Incremental design initially creates every design element—method, class, namespace, or even architecture—to solve a specific problem. Additional customer requests guide the incremental evolution of the design. This requires continuous attention to the design, albeit at different time-scales. Methods evolve in minutes; architectures evolve over months. No matter what level of design you're looking at, the design tends to improve in bursts. Typically, you'll implement code into the existing design for several cycles, making minor changes as you go. Then something will give you an idea for a new design approach, requiring a series of refactorings to support it. [Evans] calls this a breakthrough (see Figure). Breakthroughs happen at all levels of the design, from methods to architectures.
  • Don't let design discussions turn into long, drawn-out disagreements. Follow the ten-minute rule: if you disagree on a design direction for ten minutes, try one and see how it works in practice. If you have a particularly strong disagreement, split up and try both as spike solutions. Nothing clarifies a design issue like working code.
  • Risk-Driven Architecture Architecture may seem too essential not to design up front. Some problems do seem too expensive to solve incrementally, but I've found that nearly everything is easy to change if you eliminate duplication and embrace simplicity. Common thought is that distributed processing, persistence, internationalization, security, and transaction structure are so complex that you must consider them from the start of your project. I disagree; I've dealt with all of them incrementally [Shore 2004a]. Two issues that remain difficult to change are choice of programming language and platform. I wouldn't want to make those decisions incrementally!
    • Yuval Yeret
      Yuval Yeret on 12 Jan 15
       
      Possible exercise - Try to come up with various things that are risky to YAGNI. And then order them according to level of risk. Use the examples here to seed the list
  • Limit your efforts to improving your existing design
  • To apply risk-driven architecture, consider what it is about your design that concerns you and eliminate duplication around those concepts
  • Your power lies in your ability to chooose which refactorings to work on. Although it would be inappropriate to implement features your customers haven't asked for, you can direct your refactoring efforts towards reducing risk. Anything that improves the current design is okay—so choose improvements that also reduce future risk.
  • design is so important in XP that we do it all the time
  • Don't try to use incremental design without a commitment to continuous daily improvement (in XP terms, merciless refactoring.) This requires self-discipline and a strong desire for high-quality code from at least one team member. Because nobody can do that all the time, pair programming, collective code ownership, energized work, and slack are important support mechanisms.
  • Test-driven development is also important for incremental design. Its explicit refactoring step, repeated every few minutes, gives pairs continual opportunities to stop and make design improvements. Pair programming helps in this area, too, by making sure that half of the team's programmers—as navigators—always have an opportunity to consider design improvements.
  • Alternatives If you are uncomfortable with XP's approach to incremental design, you can hedge your bets by combining it with up-front design. Start with an up-front design stage and then commit completely to XP-style incremental design. Although it will delay the start of your first iteration (and may require some up-front requirements work, too), this approach has the advantage of providing a safety net without incurring too much risk.
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