Agilesparks

Berteig Consulting can update the Certified ScrumMaster course content so that all CSM course participants receive the best value in the market.” As soon as I made the direction clear, the team self-organized and generated tasks required to achieve each goal.

As the Process Facilitator goes about helping the team overcome obstacles, it can become clear that the team needs to address a systemic challenge during one of the upcoming Cycles. The Growth Facilitator then states the need as a Cycle goal in a S.M.A.R.T. format, allows the team time to give feedback, and prioritizes the goal in the New Work list. When the goal is brought to a future Cycle Commitment Meeting, the team breaks the goal into tasks and solves the systemic obstacle that the Process Facilitator identified.

an additional day or so of training for specialized roles of Product Owner, Project/Release Manager, and Agile/Scrum Master

All other executives and managers are invited to attend an overview course on scaling software agility

Agile for Teams –Essential, team-based training in a two day workshop

philosophy, principles, and benefits of agility, agile methods, iterative and release framework, roles, agile technical practices, and agile management practices (Scrum)

Agile Release and Project Management at Enterprise Scale – For Project Managers, Release Managers, Program and Portfolio Managers who have responsibility for helping deliver the product(s) to the marketplace. Topics include differences between traditional and agile product management, iteration framework, multi-level release planning and tracking, the agile release train, planning and executing the release planning event, and measuring enterprise progress.

Agile Product Owner in the Enterprise – For team-based product owners/candidates who will become responsible for backlog management, story writing, and iteration and release planning, and who will also be involved in the planning and coordination of larger scale software systems of systems built by teams of teams.

The Agile Master In The Enterprise – For potential agile team leads/future Scrum Masters who will be coaching agile teams and who will interact with other teams as well. Topics include: process facilitation, enterprise agility, mastering the iteration, team roles, release planning and tracking, agile leadership, empowerment and conflict management, and integration Scrums.

Agile Product Manager in the Enterprise – For enterprise product managers with product, product line, portfolio and business unit responsibilities. Topics include: what’s so different about agile, backlog and prioritization, relationship to product owners, PM’s role in release planning and management, visioning and the product roadmap.

Scaling Software Agility – Best Practices for Large Enterprises – For executives and key stakeholders in support, distribution, quality, internal IT, HR and all others whose roles will be impacted by the substantive changes that enterprise agile engenders. Part I – overview of agility highlighting lessons learned from the most common and effective agile methods Part II – seven team best practices of agility that natively scale to the enterprise level Part III – seven organizational capabilities that companies can master to achieve the full benefits of enterprise scale agility

The team member doesn’t need a CSM course, but he does need to know how to work in an agile environment.

what are the engineering practices need to support agile development? I’ve found that if developers only have their existing tools and practices, then they will continue to specify and develop waterfall-style within the sprints.

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.

Anyone who’s attended an Agile planning meeting knows they can often last about an hour longer than you can stand it

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.

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.

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

“Kan” means visual, and “ban” means card or board.

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.)

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 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.

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.

You might have a column where business analysts spend time tracking down technical details that developers need to understand to write code.

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.”

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.

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.

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?”

The only difference is the cycles aren’t used to plan and commit to stories any longer.

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

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.

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.

existing solution to this problem was to lower the expected velocity each sprint, so the next sprint would be on-time. But at the end of next sprint, the same problem occurred, so the velocity was going down sprint after sprint.

pressure of the rest of the organisation for the team to keep up their tempo. This pressure from both sides was crushing morale.

The way this team reacted to pressure was to work harder. Most people would have 2 or 3 tasks in progress at the same time. When a developer would finish a task, the testers were too busy testing something else, so they could give the developer direct feedback. When the tester found an issue with a new feature, the developers were already working on something else, so the tester had to wait. Simply put, there was too much focus on working long and hard, not on cooperation and the stuff that actually matters: features.

most dysfunctional behaviour comes from the system people are in

biggest struggle of this team: pressure & predictability.

Most Scrum masters challenge the team to reach the same (or higher) velocity each sprint. This pressure should give a team focus to perform at its best. However, it can also go haywire if the team doesn't deliver. No focus, no pride, no happy customer

retrospectives were dismal and planning meetings were a huge burden. The teams' productivity dropped in the days after the sprint, finding new courage to start the next one. Because they had an ineffective work-process, the only outcome of each sprint was to lower the expected velocity, to make sure we would be predictable. Estimation and predictability are only a means to an end and since they were getting in the way of fixing the root cause (and were bringing down the team's spirit) I opted to cut out the planning sessions and sprint deadlines.

first change we made was to set a limit of 8 tasks on the 'in progress' column

We spent 3 weeks bringing the numbers of open tasks from 21 to 8, without picking up any new work. Of course the team struggled with this new limit. They were used to pick up new work whenever they were blocked somehow, this wasn't allowed any more

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

Facilitate the Product Owner's role (backlog maintenance and meetings)

Tracking costs, especially for production

Tracking project risk

The Project Manager on a Scrum project has to be a Scrum expert and evangelist.

As each Scrum team on the project evolves their practices, the Project Manager will insure that they are continuing to work effectively with the other teams

One example of this would be the application of Test Driven Development and similar practices to build stability. It doesn't make sense for some teams to use TDD while others don't. The PM would have to step in and work with all the teams to insure that practices won't interfere or cancel each other out.

- (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

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.

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.

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.

Jens Ostergaard