Number Lust

I am an amateur photographer while I am not not hacking project teams and building custom software at ThoughtWorks. Photographers are known to have bouts of lens lust* time and again, especially at the beginning. I realize that some managers seem to have similar urges when it comes to numbers, metrics. They suffer from acute number lust.

In ThoughtWorks, we believe in and encourage self organizing teams. BAs gather requirements, developers write code, QAs test and automate and the customer signs stories off in a flow. The Project Manager role is therefore reduced to making sure that nothing obstructs this flow.

The way this would be done is to gather and analyze the right data and take actions based on this analysis. Examples being:

• Finding bottlenecks from the wall or a CFD and taking actions to fix the problems.
• Looking critically at retrospective action items and seeing that all those issues are fixed (especially if they are issues outside the teams control, like infrastructure).
• Making sure that the right capabilities exist in the team at the right time. If not, get people from outside, arrange training, etc.

Some PMs are content in gathering just enough data to spot problems. But then there are some who can't get enough data ever.

They want to organise the whole world into neat boxes and label them and track anything and everything possible. The walls soon fill up with useless charts with graphs and numbers that the team can't use in any way. The worst part is, there is no analysis done around the data even by the people who gather it. Having people in a 15 member team draw emotional seismographs every iteration and sticking them on the wall is of no use if you are not going to make any decisions based on them.

Now I agree that gathering all possible information can enlighten us to some extent. But its a matter of marginal utility. If I have to do 5 extra things to do my job, just because we want to gather data, I am not doing it.

So guys, here's a humble request. Figure out with your client what kind of data he would like to see. Figure out as a team what you would like to improve and what data needs to be gathered to help you get there. Don't burden your team with things that obstruct OR slow down the flow. Keep it simple and keep it lean.

Our job is to provide quality software not elaborate reports.

* lens lust - the dangerous urge to keep buying new, expensive lenses not realizing that its practice that will improve your photography, not lenses!!

Onsite Business Analyst

This has come up in various discussions recently and I want to put down my thoughts about the role and responsibilities.

For a ThoughtWorks team in India (or China) most of the work is offshore agile development. Clients are usually in the UK or the USA. The team is structured as follows:

1. Offshore PM
2. Offshore Devs
3. Offshore QA(s)
4. Offshore BA(s)
5. Onsite BA(s)

This is how the communication works.

Of course there are other exchanges that take place but the Business Q & A and the Technical Q & A are the most important pieces of concrete information exchanged.

Other companies, even traditional development outfits, have a role called the Onsite co-ordinator. I believe this role facilitates similar discussions (although I hear that they are more technical than business related)

The onsite business analyst's main role is to facilitate business and technical discussions between the team sitting offshore and the client. She is not restricted to be just an onsite co-ordinator. She can take up a new stream to analyze by herself. Even feed it to an onsite development team, if there is one. But all this keeping in mind that the main purpose is bridging the communication gap between the client and the development team.

At the same time the onsite business analyst shouldn't go overboard with this and become a single point of failure. The direct communication lines between the offshore team and client should always be open.

Metrics

I have recently come out of a consulting assignment which has given me loads of time to read and think about processes, improvements and effectiveness. (People who follow me on google reader must have noticed). It also had me thinking about introduction of agile into a traditional IT outfit and what would make it more effective.

Top -> Down

The Top -> Down approach is where someone in the top management realizes (or is convinced) that agile is the solution to all their problems and goes on to "mandate" agile. This is not necessarily bad. If the organization hires the right consultants to bring agility into the project teams at the ground level.

Bottom -> Up

The Bottom -> Up is not really an approach. Its just a team realizing that they can do their stuff better and try to bring in improvements in their team without affecting the organization. This is later, agility may spread into other teams virally and this might trigger an organizational transformation with eventual buy-in from the management.

Here's what I think works best. Like any win-win solution, its a mix of the two extreme approaches described above.

Top -> Down buy-in, Bottom-Up implementation

The management decides, that they require to be agile to meet the market conditions but instead of pushing "agile" down the throats of people below, they let the people on the ground level realize what agile means and how it changes the way the team works. Agile Coaches are useful in this transition.

Sounds simple enough? Well here's the catch. How does the management know that the new process is effective?

The sad part is in a traditional organization's hierarchy, the only interface between the management and the teams is "Reports". Reports on various parameters (metrics) that the management believe should be monitored to see how stuff is going on. Whether the teams embrace agile themselves OR whether management asks teams to be agile, the teams will need to report the right metrics to the management to gain their confidence. If the teams don't do this, the management might start tracking the wrong metrics and hence encourage wrong practices. What you measure is what you get.

I opened this topic to a bunch of people from the client organization and we came up with a bunch of metrics based on the principle that we should report consistency rather than hard numbers. Consistency gives a measure of effectiveness and also encourages the right activities.

Here's the list that we came up with (There can be many more. The basic principle is to use proportions / percentages instead of hard numbers):

1. Velocity Barometer without numbers (we mark completed stories in red on a barometer, but we take out the numbers. Consistent color means good, ups and downs means trouble)
2. Cumulative Flow Diagram (consistent thickness of bands v/s actual numbers)
3. Ratio of open V/s closed bugs (Percentage. Instead of bugs found and bugs fixed)
4. Test Coverage (Percentage)
5. Automated V/s Manual tests (Percentage)

Really speaking it all boils down to using just Control Charts for project reporting and management. What do you think?

Testing considered wasteful??

@silvercatalyst posted on twitter a few days back that one of the trainees in his session counted testing as waste. I retweeted with a #funny but @silvercatalyst said he actually agreed with it. So we twiscussed it for a while. (By the way twitter is just the wrong tool for discussing interesting things). Back to the story.

Here's what we ended with after a few emails had been exchanged:

• Testing is not wasteful. But testing as an activity after development (especially after a time gap) is wasteful
• Some types of testing can be done upfront but other types still have to be done after the story is complete
• There are ways to prevent bugs (rather than catch them) by Dev + QA and BA + QA pairing

Mixing this conversation with Feature Injection technique and Mike Cohn's post on removing Finish to Start activities, I think that BA(or Customer), Dev and QA pairing on a story will provide tremendous boost to cycle time and significant reduction in bugs. But to achieve this, you need certain pre-conditions to be true.

1. Co-location with customer. Else a great BA who is an excellent customer proxy
2. Poly-skilled team members (not just smart)
3. Team members (including the Customer) open to work towards a moving target (with negotiable stories)

My next project will hopefully see this implemented, at least in small steps. Something a step ahead of the Ménage à trois that's already been tried out successfully.

Thanks @silvercatalyst for an interesting discussion and helping me put my thoughts together on a bunch of stuff I had read recently.

Back to the Basics - 1 - The problem

Reading Martin's ConversationalStories renewed my confidence in this draft post from about an year ago. I just couldn't put it in the right words and gave up on it. I keep talking about deterministic universes over randomness and stuff like that but the gist of the matter is simple.

Writing stories is not the JOB of a Business Analyst in agile development. Writing stories is a collaborative effort in which Customer, BA, Dev, QA should all take part. This is the N in the INVEST principle.

And here's the post

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I have been talking about tracking and trends and smells and quantum physics for sometime but here's a post that takes us back to the basics. This is about the very problems (with waterfall) that we are trying to solve using alternative approaches (agile, lean, hybrid, etc).

As everything in life should start, we start by defining the problem. Waterfall is an approach that borrows heavily from Einstein's idea of a deterministic universe. The idea is that

If you know the position and velocity of each atom in the universe, you can accurately determine the state of the universe at a given point in future or the past.

The point is that this is just a theory. I am not contradicting the theory but I am just pointing to the simple fact that gathering knowledge about the position and velocity of each atom takes too much time to be of any use.

Waterfall tries to do the same thing at a very small scale; at a project level. And the argument remains the same. It'll take you too much time to understand every aspect of a problem for you to be able to successfully solve it while it's worth solving.

Agile is about improvisation. You accept the inherent randomness of the universe. This might be genuine randomness OR it might just feel random because we are not able to understand it, but at any rate the universe is random to Human Beings.

So we say, given that things are going to change in ways that cannot be determined, let's do our best to adapt to those changes as quickly as possible. To adapt is to understand what has changed, how it affects us and what can we do to "maximize our happiness" in the given situation.

This is where you require the key component of anything worth calling a success. Collaboration.

In the deterministic world of waterfall, the Business Analyst is supposed to be this wizard, who understands the whole problem, whose affected and how and formulates a solution to it all by herself. Few have succeeded at meeting this unrealistic expectation.

Agile says let us all work together towards solving this problem and I think that's a more realistic way of getting an optimum solution. Now what this means is that nobody's word is final on any solution unless everyone is happy. Neither the client, nor the Business Analyst and nor the Developers. That is what it means when we say that a user story is Negotiable (i-N-v-e-s-t).

* Increasing happiness as in the sole purpose of life.

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The Revolution

Software Development - Art OR Science?

A seemingly clichéd question. Never passed my mind all these years. But let me tell you how I got thinking about this and maybe it'll interest you a bit.

Like I said earlier, I have been following a lot of Lean-Kanban discussions, articles, etc lately. Some such material is Little's Law & WIP limits. Now the moment I saw an equation, I couldn't resist the temptation of trying out some math to see if the size and composition of my current team is optimal. Furthermore, I thought, given a few specifications of the project like domain complexity and technology, could I find the optimum team size and composition?

I hit two forums with this idea and most of the feedback was that there are too many things to consider and difficult things as well like the skills and experience of the people on the team. And I agree that people make most if not all the difference. But that's the problem isn't it?

What's so special about our people? Skills. Experience. Talent even. It's a sign. It's a sign of our industry being immature. I think its in around the occupation stage on this scale.



Enough demand can trigger the Art - Occupation - Industry - Science transitions for any activity. Note that the transition is never 100%. There's Art and Science in everything. The question is whether something is "more of" art OR science.

People keep arguing that Software Development is different. We are not like construction, we are not like assembly line manufacturing, we are not like Product Development either. I used to believe it till a few days back. But the more I think about it the more I feel that these are arguments of a losing population of craftsmen who are finding it increasingly difficult to meet the demand for their craft (which has BTW risen at unusual rates).

Think about the guy somewhere around current Pakistan who created the first piece of leather clothing many hundred years ago. Think about the leather industry right now. Think about the transition. At some point he must be saying "This is different. This needs skills. This needs experience". It took centuries for the transition but it happened. I am sure it can be co-related to the rise in demand for leather products.

The funny thing is, if you look at the list of general characteristics of the Art and Science sides, the first three points on each side don't really fit in with the IT occupation do they? We have loads of unskilled people sitting around producing amazing amounts of useless code all over the world.

So I think the revolution is inevitable. At some point the people who pays us boatloads of money for bad software are going to revolt. We either have to change OR die.

Here's another article roughly talking about similar things. The author anticipated a code market to emerge where reusable components would be bought and sold (which didn't happen OR hasn't happened yet). But the rest of the content is around the same theme as this post.

Kanban

Although I am not in the thick of things right now (because I am onsite, alone, so far away from my team) I follow the very active kanbandev yahoo group. It's a great resource for thoughts and questions on lean and kanban software engineering.

David Joyce, a group member, posted about a presentation he gave and I found it really good. So here's the presentation for anyone else interested.

It's definitely a long one but take some time to go through it.

Good stuff David.