The Thumbtack and Hole Metrics...

Sometimes metrics can just appear in front of you very simplistically without any effort. I've discovered two new ones which I call the Thumbtack Metric and the Hole Metric.

The back story is that we use a corkboard to track our work. This is a high level view of the biggest priorities in VersionOne, our legacy ticket system, and any other queues of work we have. Because our one team supports all company operations AND does new product development, we have a hybrid balance of many different approaches. The board is our central view.

I attempted to force WIP limits onto the board so that it was a true Kanban board, but this simply didn't work in our environment for multiple reasons (nature of our work along with company culture). BUT, it has been very interesting for the team to start realizing when they are attempting to do too much. As the coach, this was something I used to pro-actively point out, but I'm learning that it is better for me to be reactive so that the team themselves can learn from experience. (Unfortunately, a child understands "hot" much better after being burned.)

This maturity and growth has led to many great conversations on the team. They start as individual discussions of philosophy between me and someone on the team, and then they become team discussions where we improve something in our process.

Through all of this, I've noticed a few things that the team now sees after it has been pointed out:

1. A problem item typically has many thumbtack holes in it (The Hole Metric). The "holier" the item, the more of a problem it is. What is the causation behind this correlation? Well, every week we scrub the board. Every few days rows get re-aligned. If an item is picked up on one day and finished the next... it has one or two holes in it. But if the item gets pushed around for days and lost under other stickies... then it get punched A LOT! So... we now have a metric that can be used to identify areas of improvement. When a "holy" item reaches DONE, it is a good topic for a quick review/mini-retrospective.
2. Every item on the board needs a thumbtack. We thumbtack stickies so that they don't get blown off while moving the board around (our board sits in a central visible area of the company and is carried into our dedicated standup meeting room every morning). Sometimes we group things with one thumbtack, but in general, there is a correlation between the amount of work on the board and the number of thumbtacks used. I haven't been successful at imposing WIP, but I have been successful in showing that when we run out of thumbtacks, we are in for trouble. This is the Thumbtack Metric. If you need more thumbtacks to stick things onto the board, you have a problem coming (or are already knee deep in it). Conversely, the CEO notices that too many unused thumbtacks might be a sign of available capacity (so I take thumbtacks off the board at times if needed ).
   

See... all those documents, white papers, conference sessions, etc you've read about metrics... they were overkill. There are simple metrics right in front of your team every day. AND, they are much easier to sell, explain, and use as an indicator moving forward.

So... what's your thumbtack metric?

Agile vs. Traditional Projects... which costs more?

Another great debate in the LinkedIn Agile Alliance forum... quite a few responses and viewpoints!

The original poster asked the following:

Should Agile Projects cost more/less than waterfall projects?

and the answers varied greatly!

The following focused on whether this was a valid question:

Proving an Agile project is less costly is not easy because your attempting to compare an alternative history -- Clay Nelson

...if we ever start to sell Agile as a way to lower costs then we just invite a a backlash against Agile -- David Nessl

And others attempted to answer it:

Agile does not aim to be a low-cost alternative. Some seem to believe so, but the aim is agility: Speed and flexibility. We become agile to shorten time to market, to increase adaptability and reap greater ROI over the lifetime of a product, to name a few reasons. -- Marcus Widerberg

Agile should cost less for several reasons, among which are: Your mistakes cost less... Earlier opportunities to start getting ROI... Failing early vs Failing late... -- Chuck van der Linden

And of course... my answer:

Most companies do a horrible job of measuring the quality and defect costs that start during the integration/testing/stabilization phases running all the way through support. All companies do a horrible job of measuring technical debt.

If agile reduces these up front, then overall Agile is cheaper from an end-to-end perspective.

But since nobody knows or tracks the cost of these things, Agile (which takes more effort/work to be successful at) will look more expensive on paper.

Tech Example: I can write code without automated tests in half the time, but what will it cost later?

Business Example: I can plan and design everything now, but what will be the cost of unknowns and market changes later when I can't handle it?

Oh, by the way, Forrester Research did a partner study with Thoughtworks... "Forrester TEI concluded our Agile delivery is 40% less expensive overall". - from a Ross Pettit presentation @ Agile East 2009

What if Congress used Agile?

Eric Camulli posted this interesting question in the Agile Alliance LinkedIn group:

Could Agile help Congress with healthcare reform? I'd like to see someone take a stab at applying scrum principles to the "great development project" of our day...

Our country's healthcare "project" could end up looking like many Waterfall projects...not on time, over budget and not meeting customer's needs in the end.

Unfortunately the conversation quickly started to veer off into moral, ethical, and political opinions/viewpoints/jokes unrelated to agile...

But I thought about this a little bit and I did find some comparisons between our legislative system and large companies that aren't agile. Here is what I ended up writing:

I think the real problem with anything going through Congress is that they don't "go to the gemba". They rely too much on research and lobbyists to translate the needs of the "customer" for them.

Congressman act as if they are Product Owners, but they don't have the domain knowledge or "end user" interaction to truly own that role.

So... I guess my solution is that we need to find a way to decrease the feedback loop distance between those affected by policy and those creating it.

Does anyone else have any ideas or insight into this one?

Individual Recognition on a Scrum team

Hmmm... another conversation in the Agile Alliance LinkedIn group. Here was the question:

Should we have an individual recognition award in a SCRUM team? Lots of people says that individual award is against an Agile methodology. Award should be given to a team not to a individual team member.

I tried to play a passive role and stated the following:

I have seen these conversations occur many times in many forums and the end of the conversation always results in a "NO" with a very good list of reasons. The risks outweigh the rewards no matter how you set it up.

There is a gray area of disagreement on whether the team can spontaneously award a peer or not. But the minute you make it a regular event, it wanders back into the problem area.

The best reward is taking a respected peer out for coffee/beer and telling them you appreciate their contributions, or saying in front of the team what good they've done. This doesn't need to be organized.

And the first few responses before mine were in line with this:

If you want to have a well jelled team - absolutely not.
The only exception I can think of is if the team requests it.
But that sets up a conflict of interest. - Jay Conne

The only time an individual award is appropriate is if the team wants to acknowledge an individual who has made a significant contribution that made a big difference TO and FOR THE TEAM. - Shane Hastie

But then we got the extremist viewpoint thrown in:

The Communists tried the concept of Co-Operative farming. Under that framework, no individual was supposed to be better than the rest. Needless to say, the concept didn't work out.

So I found myself having to take a stance and state the following:

Here's the best way to summarize what I'm insinuating/feel:

If an award is financially valuable... and it is regular (creating a sense of expectation), then it has a higher probability of creating individual behaviors over team behaviors unless your team remains constantly aligned to itself (resources typically fluctuate too much for this to be assumed).

If a reward is simply a show of appreciation and a call to what behaviors or achievements the team should continue to grow and repeat, then this has a higher probability of creating a collective and positive team behavior, especially if it is unexpected (not scheduled), and driven by the team.

Feel free to include your own thoughts in the comments, but I have to say that I'm not very open to debate on this one.

What is Iteration Zero?

Someone asked a very interesting question in the Agile Alliance LinkedIn group. Discussions about iteration zero have come up before, but this one was specifically focused on the situation where the architecture was not well understood.

In case you are new to Agile or Scrum, iteration zero is the term for that first sprint where you know you won't be delivering software that is adding value for the customer. It's the "let's-get-our-ducks-in-a-row-so-we-don't-bomb-the-first-sprint" sprint.

Many people use sprint zero when they transition to agile for converting their project plan into a backlog and seting up the environments needed for CI and other XP practices. Some use it to kick off a project and understand the underlying system being built on top of.

In this discussion though, it got me to thinking about a past project where we were starting from scratch. We had nothing, and we had never developed in this technology before. So, what to do?

Remember, a sprint should always have an outcome or goal. And, it should always be demonstrable! The original poster asked about unknown architecture, common impediments, and differences to non-agile projects. Here's what I contributed to the forum:

Iteration 0 should result in a compiled installable "Hello World!" system (example: user shall be able to login and logout). Common impediments are purchase, license, hardware, network, and system related.

In an ad hoc PM practice (or traditional), there would be a huge "balloon payment" (to borrow from technical debt metaphors) at the end of the project to take this built system and install it in the real world. Iteration 0 is a way of beating this problem up front and then refactoring along the way as you learn instead of having to rebuild based on the mistakes uncovered at the end during "stabilization".

What do you think?

The "decline" of Agile is our own fault...

I've been thinking about this for weeks. I'm still struggling to verbalize it. I could probably white-board it easily face to face; but I'm forcing myself to blog about it to see if anyone in the community reacts.

I'll start with the triggering thoughts first...

1. Martin Fowler gave me a new term at Agile East 2009 last week. The term is "Semantic Diffusion". He described this as the current trend of terminology diversity, dilution, and mis-use as agile has grown. He implied that it is the cost of growth and success of the movement.
2. I had a great conversation with J.B. Rainsberger while he was in Philly that same week. We discussed my thoughts and they intrigued him enough for me to continue pondering.
3. In the last year, I've had many a peer either complain about random factions in our community, or express a "loss of faith" in the movement at large. Frequently this is triggered by some new certification group or consulting firm charging high rates to "help" a group go agile with the wrong intentions.
   

I've come to the conclusion that Agile has NOT outlived its worth, its terms, or its time as seem people have started to imply (I refuse to allow Agile to be a dirty word)... instead, we are doing a bad job in the community at sustaining its applied success.

Now to the core of my point... I summarize it all right now!

By raising the issue of Semantic Diffusion, are we calling out an issue that needs to be guided more pro-actively? Or are we using this as an excuse to accept "the inevitable"? Are we doing anything to cause this problem to grow?

I'm going to state right now that I think we are. We need to stop looking outward for the cause and instead reflect inward.

When I started in the agile community, I worked with several great coaches. These were individuals who had proven experience in Scrum, XP, and other practices. They were "journeymen" with an interest in showing others how to do it. They insured that I learned how to do it correctly. I wasn't on the internet reading and learning about it, I had hands on coaching. Thus, I came up to speed quickly and I had a very positive, thorough, successful experience.

When I think of anyone entering our community, I hope they might learn through this same type of experience. Unfortunately, I believe the opposite is happening more often than not. Why?

Well, where are those agile innovators and early adopters now? Many of those folks have worked in agile for so long that it is easy for them to take these practices for granted. Their Ri level experiences have allowed them to forget the Shu level needs. They've moved on to much bigger problems like Enterprise, Off-Shore, and whole system optimization. These are good problems to solve, but you have to teach several coaches to replace you!

I also hypothesize that every new "generation" in the community learns at a quicker rate. There are more resources available, more lessons documented, more case studies published. If you take the right path, it is easier to get up to speed than in the early days. With this, people more quickly become successful (or not) and the gap between the Shu and Ri level groups becomes wider. When I entered the community, I could work with the Ha level group; but this group is a smaller percentage of the whole now.

When I went to the Agile 2007 conference in Washington D.C. (my first), I quickly learned that I was a Ha level user. As many people were asking me for insight into my experiences as I could find people to ask about theirs. It seemed that there were a small group of people that were innovating, and the rest were split evenly between learning and using. Now I feel as though (based on the community at large), the Shu level group greatly outnumbers the Ri level group due to market hype. The Ri level group is looking forward to innovate and there is not enough Ha level people to support the Shu group. I commonly find myself talking to a Shu level person asking about agile that doesn't know about the manifesto and haven't heard of the many important names or bodies of work in our community. Whoever planted Agile in this person's head didn't do a very good job in my mind.

And here is where the bottom feeders step in! Want to know about agile? Let me re-purpose my old pitches with these new buzzwords and charge you money to learn about something the wrong way. Everybody is talking about it, and you can't find anyone to help... so I'm the best you've got. Slap a few acronyms on your resume and hand you a certificate on the way out and you'll be dying to hand me $1500 to keep up with your peers.

So... if you've been doing agile for over 3 years and you've been successful at it, what are you doing to help the community? Are you bringing your experiences to folks and sharing them? Do you venture into communities where there are people at a different level than you? Do you explain what worked for you, or do you tell them how their approach is wrong? Do you throw the book at people and shake your head, or do you wrap your arm around them and bring them into the circle? Are you too focused on innovating to see who we are leaving behind? Do you focus on everything a person is doing wrong, or do you help them find something to do right? Do they see the benefits after they've tried it, or do they just follow this new set of procedures you've described?

Why does this matter? Because unless you are going to spend the rest of your career working with the same people, you may someday be working with one of these poor lost souls who has been taught everything wrong. You may take a job with a great agile company to only find out that the leadership has it all wrong and make your life one living hell. If you don't want to argue about what agile really means in five years, or have to invent a whole new set of words for the same things that we lost to "semantic diffusion"... then we have to start working on that now. I'm not talking about holding down our turf and fighting every idiot that says stupid things. I'm talking about leading by example, sharing information, proving success, and helping others. These are the same ideals that started the agile movement in the first place.

If everyone is learning faster and the gap between Shu and Ri is getting larger, then we can't expect the people behind us to train everyone that is entering the community. We have to still spend some small amount of time continuing to mentor the people catching up to us. Somewhere in that talent pool is the next Gordon Pask Award winner.

And this is why I started blogging; I wanted to pass along the knowledge that people have passed me. I have now spent a year learning by blogging and sharing by tweeting. I continue to share through Twitter and LinkedIn conversations, but I've been forced to cut back on the blogging due to the recent addition in my family. I'm asking all of you to consider these points and not forget that not long ago, you were also new to agile. People need guidance on how to start with agile, and we shouldn't allow them to be led astray by the snake charmers and other bottom feeders latching on to our community. It is in our best interest to reach back and pull people up with us as we continue to grow. That's my challenge to you!

Semantic Diffusion is a disease that should be fought during the normal lifecycle of a movement. It is a rallying cry for continued guidance and debate with the newest members of our community to insure the tribe moves in a common direction. Do not try to control the community and define it, just get involved enough to make sure you provide opportunities for people to learn from your experiences.

Note: just to be clear, I am not stating that certain people have left their posts. Everyone still hears the voices Fowler, Martin, Poppendieck, etc. I'm saying that as the numbers grow, many more voices need to be added to this core set.

Agile East 2009 by Thoughtworks

I attended this conference Thursday October 29th in Philadelphia. There were two tracks on the agenda; I attended the business track and I brought a developer with me to attend the technical track. In summary, I was not invigorated at the end of the day like the Agile 2009 conference, but this is the cost of fewer sessions to pick from. The content was relevant, but not much was new for the folks like me who have been following agile for over 5 years. That being said, it was a networking opportunity with other agilists in the area. The following are the notes I took, there’s a few good nuggets in here-

Martin Fowler – The Essence of Agile

• Very good job of explaining the “why consider agile” pitch without using the word waterfall or calling out PMI/PMBOK. This made it less combative than other things I’ve heard and was a note I hope I can carry with me during my own conversations.
• Called out the concept of “semantic diffusion”… the current trend of terminology diversity, dilution, and mis-use as agile has grown. He said it is the cost of growth and success of the movement. I like this phrase and will use it moving forward.
• Stated that Scrum = adaptive planning without forcing evolutionary design ... thus Scrum is not good enough by itself. Agile requires adaptive planning AND adaptive technology (evolutionary design) to succeed. I counted that as another vote for hybrid agile, be it Scrum/XP or other.
  

Martin Fowler – The Value of Software Design

Great overview of Technical Debt. I’ve never seen it to this level of detail and I found this to be the most valuable talk of the day. His mention of recent debates with Uncle Bob Martin on this topic was civil and talked of their similarities instead of their differences. His short impersonation of Uncle Bob was hilarious (“Thou shalt not name your variables improperly…”)

Discussed the concept of tradable quality

• lower quality = faster = more features sooner
• UI & defects - visible to user
• good modular design - not visible to user
  

Proposed the “Design Stamina Hypothesis”

• no design - over time, more effort to get more done
• good design - over time, less effort to get more done
• each start out the opposite of this, but cross and become true within weeks (much sooner than most assume)
  

Discussed accidental vs. essential complexity

• Accidental - caused by sub-optimal design
• Essential - chosen, prudent
• Both are technical debt in his mind
  

Likened technical debt to a mortgage metaphor

• the creation of technical debt is the principal
• the interest is paid every time a new feature added
• with every new feature you should decide to pay interest (build on top), or pay principal (go back and fix core)
  

Explained the cost/value of technical debt

• interest payment cost = story estimate - story estimate if debt was fixed first
• principal cost = estimate cost to fix principal/issue
  

Causes of Technical Debt

• You don't know how to do good design = reckless, inadvertent debt
• Ship now, fix later = prudent, deliberate debt
  

Debt is not right or wrong, it exists; the question is how do you deal with it?

• Being reckless with your debt is like maxing out your credit cards

Martin Fowler – The Controversial Topic of Diversity in our Industry

There is a lack of diversity in profession (Women, African Americans)

They under represented compared to population… Why?

We have a problem, especially when you bring in badly treated history for these people

This is a power issue, what do we do about?

• Don't shift imbalance of power in wrong direction with inappropriate actions
• Humor only works for lower power people towards greater power people
  

It is important for our profession that we care about the professionals in our space (both peers and customers)

• Software development is a leading role in the world!
• If we block access to these minority, then we lose access to potential talent
  

Carl Ververs – Change Leadership

If you have followed Linda Rising, Esther Derby, Diana Larsen, Dale Emery, or some of Alistair Cockburn’s work on teams, people, trust, communication, psychology, etc… then this session was a repeat of pieces of their work I’ve seen in Agile 2007 and Agile 2008 or their books or blogs.

That being said, many people in attendance that day were new to agile, and this was a great session for them!

Joseph Zenevith – Agile Estimation Patterns and Pitfalls

If you have heard about agile estimation (as a process), but are new to agile and trying to implement it… this was a good session to help you get started and avoid the pitfalls. Discussions around sprint zero, sizing, etc.

Ross Pettit – The Financial Implications of Agile

This session was over my head (and most of the other attendees based on the body language). Thank goodness they did this over lunch. That being said, it was perfect for a CFO or anyone focused on how projects affect the profit margin of the company. I took a few notes-

Capitalization - Agile projects have a higher % of potential capitalization than traditional PM

• capitalization = good = helps profitability
• Forrester claims that agile projects are 40% cheaper
  

Cash Flow – agile projects don’t mortgage the future by deferring integration, testing, NFR’s

• Less “balloon payment” surprises at the end of the project
• Story/Backlog Item = $ turned into a result (not $ turned into a % effort complete)
  

Yield - a story is a focus on maximizing yield vs. containing cost (invest in the right stuff)

Volatility – investors hate since agile since it isn’t predictive/deterministic

• old belief system is false though, so it is about education
• agile projects will fail faster, this is a risk mitigation
  

New Exposures – failed projects and lost people can’t be capitalized

• can cause a liquidity problem
• solvency is a problem if people are lost (lost investment)
• mitigate by aligning finance planning to iteration delivery and diversify investments
  

Greg Reiser – Redefining App. Dev. w/ Offshore Agile

Because I have experience in this area, I didn’t take any notes. My personal experiences were on par with their discussion. The main message- Make sure you are conscious about going down this path. It will not save the amount of money you believe up front, it can provide access to talent you don’t have, and it can be done (but not easily).

One thought that popped into my head as they were talking: How do you minimize / mitigate causes of technical debt in the offshoring model? Do you review the all code? Woah… someone should tackle that problem!

Tiffany Lentz & Manu Tandon - Applying Agile in a Non-Technical Area of the Org

This was one of the main reasons I wanted to go to this conference. Unfortunately it was a disappointment. It was a case study (I never find these as helpful as other sessions) and I missed that it said “applying” in the title instead of “convincing”. I need ways of pitching Agile to non-tech people. The session was about Scrum and a PMO setup for two teams that included non-software people (but many of the same roles you’d find on a scrum team).

One quote I liked: think of work completed as consumables downstream, not deliverables! (Interpretation- make sure people are supporting something, not just checking work off!)

The PMO had an interesting approach; instead of mandating process, they mandated required practices with multiple ways of achieving them. Examples included: estimation by the worker (not manager), work must have acceptance/done criteria, prioritization by the customer (not mgr). Because of this approach, “business value delivered” became an important discussion point within teams, unprompted and on its own.