boston ruby meetup: the promise and peril of agile and lean practices
TRANSCRIPT
10/11/2016 Boston Ruby Meetup
The promise and peril of Agile and Lean practices @mtoppa Michael Toppa www.toppa.com
actbluetech.com @mtoppa
20 years of experience in web development, project management, and functional management* Previously: * Freelance * Director of Development, WebDevStudios * Director of Web Applications, U Penn School of Medicine * Web developer at: Georgetown University, Stanford University, E*Trade, Ask Jeeves, and the 7 person start-up, ElectNext
My challenge in this talk…
Teach you about Agile & Lean…
Without actually teaching you Agile & Lean
I want to teach you about why you may want to consider them, how they differ from each other, what benefits you can expect, and what obstacles you may face
Tell me your problems…
Features
Cost Schedule
1. The iron triangle
Client can pick two
Quality
I’ve explained the triangle to dozens of clients over the years.Programming is not magic. If the client tries to squeeze all 3 sides of the triangle, quality suffers.
Misalignment of authority and responsibility
Cartoon by Mike Lynch Used with permission
- Following this advise lets you cover yourself politically, and is a great way to make everyone who works for you miserable- I've found that misalignment of authority and responsibility can explain a lot of dysfunction that happens in organizations- When you have responsibility for your work but not enough authority over it, you will feel like a cog in machine
“If you go to the store with a huge shopping list and twenty dollars, you need the authority to go to the money machine for more cash, or the authority to make changes to the list.”
Ron Jeffries, Making the Date
What’s happening is that the client is trying to retain authority on the project while giving you the responsibility. But ultimately, for the project to be successful and for both you and the client to be happy, responsibility and authority need to be brought into alignment.
2. Multiple projects and multitasking
Source
Context switching between two projects eats about 20% of a full-time worker’s schedule. The sense of progress with multitasking is an illusion, compared to not multitasking
A consequence: too much work
SWAG chart9 developers, 2 product owners, and me supporting- 22 clients with 124 applications3 designers and 1 product owner supporting- about 200 static content web sitesTaking inventory itself was a huge undertaking
Source
To have any chance of success in the long run, you have to claim authority you may not have had previously. You may have to fight for it…
Source
…but you have to always be professional. Think of how doctors behave in an ER. When the pressure is on is when you want them to be at their most professional.
3. The cone of uncertainty
Source
Tell me what you want…
For yourself, and for your customers
What makes a job enjoyable?
✤ Autonomy
✤ Reward for effort
✤ Challenging/complex work
“Work that fulfills these three criteria is meaningful.”
– Malcolm Gladwell, “Outliers: The Story of Success”
“Novices believe that quality and velocity are inverse. They think that hacking is fast.
They haven’t yet recognized what professional developers know all to well:
…the higher the quality, the faster you go”
Bob Martin, Vehement Mediocrity
How do we get there?
Add more people?
Brooks’ law: ”Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”
- Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month
Add more pressure?
Source
Hold the developers’ feet to the fire. This is the death march. Analogy that software development is like a washing machine.
“The main thing that pushed Agile and Scrum was that the success rate on traditional projects
was terrible; it was 45%. If that was a car-manufacturing place, that would mean you’d
throw out every other car you built.”
Ken Schwaber, co-creator of Scrum, 6/21/2011
Source
What’s the alternative?
Agile solution: flip the triangle
Source
The traditional approach also does not take into account the “cone of uncertainty” - things will change
Agile: frequent feedback is key
Source
Rather than fight the “cone of uncertainty” we embrace it. We are always checking in to make sure what we’re delivering is what the client wants, and we’re ready to adjust priorities based on feedback. At some point we will run out of time or money, and when that time comes, we want to make sure we have delivered the most important features.
Lean solution: maximize “flow”
Agile, Lean: what’s the difference?
inspect & adapt
incremental & iterative;
roles & ritualslimit WIP;
eliminate waste
Agile Lean
Both originate from management ideas in Japan, but Agile was created in the US software industry in the late 1990s, and Lean comes specifically from Toyota in Japan
Agile and Lean are Principles
Scrum is the most popular Agile methodology
Scrum is the most popular Agile methodology
Kanban is the most popular Lean methodology
Scrum is a holistic project management system
Source
Scrum has clearly defined roles and responsibilities
Source
If you adopt Scrum, people’s jobs will change, at least to some extent
Kanban can be applied to any project management system
It’s about achieving the right amount of “work in progress.”
Kanban takes you from this…
Too much WIP can feel like a traffic jam. Covering every inch of a highway with cars is not how we achieve the capacity of the highway
…to this
We achieve capacity when the cars flow smoothly on the road. They get to go reasonably fast, operating their engines at a good fuel efficiency. They don’t need to slam on their brakes. They don’t need to change lanes often, and there’s a safe distance between them. This is what we want our work to feel like.
Adopting Scrum means going all-in: big change, all at once
The Scrum Promise
“In my Scrum classes I warn attendees of what I call the Scrum Promise: If you adopt Scrum, there will be a day you come into the office nearly in tears over how hard the change can be. This is because Scrum doesn’t solve problems, it uncovers them and puts them in our face. Then, through hard work we address them.”
– Mike Cohn, Agile Trainer
I didn’t know this when I led the scrum adoption at Penn, but it’s definitely true
Adopting Kanban leads to evolutionary change
Kanban foundational principles
✤ Start with what you do now
✤ Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change
✤ Respect the current process, roles, responsibilities & titles
All-in vs. evolutionary change
✤ All-in pros: ✤ Gets everyone working in the
same system quickly ✤ Get good at a complete system
with clear rules first, then learn where to make changes
✤ All-in cons: ✤ Near term productivity loss,
confusion, resistance ✤ Can surface too many pre-existing
problems at once
✤ Evolutionary pros: ✤ Minimal disruption ✤ Make changes only as needed
✤ Evolutionary cons: ✤ Easy for change process to stall
and not address deeper underlying issues
Common ways Agile and Lean adoptions go wrong
1. The top-down, lip-service approach
Scrum master hiring story
2. Misunderstood and/or misapplied
3. Consulting environment challenges
✤ Traditional contracts require detailed plans
✤ See my Agile Contracting WordCamp talk from last year!
✤ Who is the product owner?
✤ Clients aren’t good at it (but think they are) and probably don’t want to pay you to do it
✤ Hard to work in teams when you typically have projects that are small and simultaneous
Key to success: inspect and adapt
Source
Single loop learning is “how can we do better”?Double loop learning is “Why do we believe that?”Double loop learning means challenging fundamental assumptions
Additional references
✤ “Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum” and “Agile Estimating and Planning” by Mike Cohn
✤ “Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business” by David J. Anderson
✤ Angry Dinosaurs: Accelerating Change and Institutional Incompetence presentation by Cory Ondrejka, Wharton Web Conference, 2010
✤ “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries ✤ “The Nature of Software Development” by Ron Jeffries ✤ “Specification by Example” and “Impact Mapping” by Gojko Adzic
Any questions?
@mtoppa Michael Toppa www.toppa.com
10/11/2016 Boston Ruby Meetup