Answering “Are We on Track?” With a Burndown Chart

January 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Recently, on twitter, Tobias Mayer asked if anyone was still using burndown charts as described in the original scrum literature:
I personally enjoy using burndown charts and like exploring the different stories they can tell given the multitude of ways you can design them. I am currently working with a team that is using a commitment driven approach to planning who also uses a burndown chart of remaining task hours. I replied to Tobias with:
 

This seemed to spark a big discussion with a lot of people chiming in with their opinions and experiences. The discussion followed the usual Agile Twitter Debate Formula™ involving charges of not being agile, assuming mutual exclusivity with other practices, general misinterpretations of various points concluding with the usual series of just-do-what-you-want-and-lets-stop-arguing-about-this tweets.

Since twitter proves time and again to be a terrible place to expand on things, I figured it was worth explaining my original tweet in a little more detail here.

Value vs. Work

One of the first issues that came up in this discussion was that the sum of tasks for a particular user story don’t necessarily add up to any real meaningful value, so since tasks themselves don’t represent value, we shouldn’t be tracking them.
 

So, fair enough, tasks don’t represent value so let’s track story points instead. While I think that a burndown chart of story points can tell a story, I like to tell lots of stories so I usually use this in conjunction with other artifacts. I’ve also seen plenty of teams who have a burndown chart of story points that goes sideways for three days and then everyone realizes that they’re not going to get everything done by the end of the sprint. Whoops!

Do we have enough gas to get there?

Imagine that you and some friends are planning a road trip to an outdoor music festival. You all hop in the car and get going. Being a beautiful day, you suggest taking the scenic route and stopping on the way to take a group photo. As you’re driving, the GPS on your dashboard is squawking commands and you’re fairly confident that you’re heading in the right direction. After a few hours someone in the backseat asks “Hey, do we need to stop and get gas?”

At that moment you look down and realize that you’ve got a quarter tank left, with some quick math and a glance at the GPS you determine that you do not have quite enough gas to make it to the music festival and having passed the last gas station before your destination you can’t stop and get more. Your only choice is to break the bad news to your friends and negotiate taking the group photo on the way back from the music festival.

Are We on Track?

I view a burndown chart of hours remaining as a gas gauge. It doesn’t tell us anything about if we’re going in the right direction or if we’ll ultimately get to our destination, but it can be a useful way of making sure that you’ve got what it takes to make it there.

Most importantly, tracking hours remaining isn’t about tracking hours, or management making sure people are busy or any of the other treacherous things suggested during this twitter discussion. For me, tracking hours remaining is about all of the questions and things you uncover as a result of asking “Are we on track?” and the answer that follows.

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Building a Self-Sustaining Ecosystem through Agile Coaching

September 19, 2012 by Leave a Comment

I was recently fortunate enough to attend the Culture Conference in both Philadelphia and Boston. Even more so, I was able to enjoy the company, conversation and new relationships as a member of the party bus that traveled between the two conferences.

As we drove over the George Washington Bridge, I was having a conversation with Dan Mezick about the role of Agile Coaching in ethical billing and creating learning organizations. I’m a firm believer in the idea that as Agile Coaches, we should strive to foster an environment of organic learning and prescribe specific solutions only when absolutely necessary.

As Dan and I were talking, it occurred to me that an Agile Coach has a similar role to a planted aquarium hobbyist. One can think of a typical organization as a poorly maintained aquarium. There are frequent algae blooms, some of the fish have died, and the plants have discolored leaves and weak roots.

If handed over to an accomplished aquarium hobbyist, they would start by measuring chemical levels in the water to asses the environment. With continuous checking, day by day and week by week, our hobbyist would slowly adjust and improve the balance in the tank. They might add or remove certain plants, invertebrates or fish. Over time, as a result of their actions, the aquarium would achieve a state of balance and the inhabitants would enjoy a harmonious co-existence.

Similarly, an Agile Coach might enter a dysfunctional organization and begin measuring and improving the organizational environment. Again, like the hobbyist, they would help the organization adjust its culture such that it too could become a thriving, self-sustaining ecosystem where the inhabitants live in balance and harmony.

This isn’t to say that once this state is achieved, the coaches work is finished. Just as the hobbyist needs to maintain the aquarium by adding and removing plants or fish, an organization committed to continuous improvement needs the help of the coach to keep learning and improving.

As Agile Coaches, I hope that we strive to build self-sustaining learning organizations rather than insert ourselves as linchpins in the ecosystem. I strive for the self-awareness to ask of myself “Am I just adding chemicals or am I helping the roots grow deeper and fish prosper?”

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Retrospectives: Best Practices, Common Problems and New Ideas

May 2, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Here are the slides for my presentation at the May 2012 Phoenix Scrum User’s Group meeting. If you attended the meeting and have any further questions, please contact me, clayton@integrumtech.com.

Retrospectives: Best Practices, Common Problems and New Ideas
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Agile Principles: Tear Down These Cubes

March 5, 2012 by Leave a Comment
The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
– Agile Principles

Manager, Tear Down These Walls

If you were tasked with designing a system that made spontaneous collaboration difficult, you couldn’t go wrong with the modern cube farm. Members of a “team” dispersed over an area of the office, isolated in their drab tchotchke ridden cubicles. Instant message, e-mail and chat might be great for passive communication, but when it comes to real collaboration, being physically present is essential.

But We’re Distributed!

Co-located teams are better than distributed teams. However, sometimes we cannot be co-located. That does not mean we resort to passive forms of communication and digital tools to convey our progress and ask questions. Skype is better than a phone call which is better than e-mail. Don’t underestimate your brain’s ability to gather important insight from the facial and body language of the person on the other end of that video chat.

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Agile Principles: Self-Organizing Teams are Motivated Teams

February 29, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
– Agile Principles

Self-Organizing

Allow the people doing the work to self-organize and discover the best implementation they can given what they know right now. Protect them from organizational politics and outside distractions, enable them to focus on the work at hand.

Self-Directing

While we encourage self-organization, we remember the need for direction. While the team does not self-direct, they need a clear vision and an understanding of success in order to attain the autonomy and purpose required to feel motivated.

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Agile Principles: Collaborate Everyday

February 28, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. – Agile Principles

Email is not Enough

Working together involves more than exchanging e-mails about the software. It’s more than passive instant messenger conversations. It’s not reviewing a digital agile tool in isolation. Working together means collaborating, negotiating and exploring the software that is being built.

Too Busy for Success?

If you’re too busy to interact, fairly frequently, on a daily basis with the rest of the team, you’re too busy to enable product success. High performance teams don’t allow their schedules to be overrun by meetings. They don’t let anything get in the way of daily collaboration, negotiating and exploration.

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Agile Principles: Frequently Deliver Working Software

February 27, 2012 by 1 Comment
Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
– Agile Principles

Quick Feedback

A short feedback cycle is incredibly valuable. A short feedback cycle helps ensure you’re building the correct thing. A short feedback cycle helps you decide if you should keep going. A short feedback cycle helps you know if you should stop.

Product vs. Project

Shift your mindset from working on a project to working on a product. Products don’t have end dates, they continue to exist and the organization realizes their benefits over and with time. As time goes on, incrementally release working features for the product so that you can harness the power of short feedback cycles.

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Probability, Velocity and Re-Estimating User Stories

July 6, 2011 by 2 Comments

When working with user stories, story points and SCRUM, it is not uncommon to come to the end of a sprint and realize that a smaller story took longer to complete than a larger story. While this is an excellent reminder that story points reflect complexity, not effort, it is often misinterpreted as an indication that remaining stories need to be re-estimated. Basic probability distribution shows us that over a large enough sample, all three point stories in the product backlog will take about the same time to complete. A team’s desire to re-estimate stories in the product backlog based on a few stories deviating from the norm is a mistake.

Not All Stories are Created Equal

If you were to roll a pair of dice a million times, you would see the majority rolls sum up to seven. If you graphed the data, you would see a bell curve shape. User stories are no different.

Over a large enough sample, you will start to see the same bell curve shape in the time it took to complete those stories. Some three point stories might take two hours to complete while others take twelve; but most take seven. At the same time, some of your five point stories will take ten hours to complete and some twenty four; but most take eighteen. Consider the overlap in the following diagram:

The overlap between the time to complete some of the three point stories and some of the five point stories should not be mistaken for a need to re-estimate any stories. Sometimes a three point story will take as long to complete as a five point story.

Commitment Driven Planning

One technique from which all SCRUM teams could benefit is that of Commitment Driven Planning. From Cohn’s Agile Estimating and Planning

A commitment-driven approach is an alternative way to plan an iteration. Commitment-driven iteration planning involves many of the same steps as velocity-driven iteration planning. However, rather than creating an iteration plan that uses the yesterday’s weather idea to determine how many story points or ideal days should be planned into the current iteration, the team is asked to add stories to the iteration one by one until they can commit to completing no more.

So what happens when a three point story is tasked out and comes to ten hours, and a five point story is tasked out and comes to nine? Often times the first inclination of the team is to inflate the three point story. Especially interesting is that almost no one suggests to shrink the estimate of the five point story. Again, we should expect that some three point stories will take the same amount of time to complete as some five point stories, but in the end this will even out.

Velocity is The Great Equalizer

Again from Mike Cohn’s Agile Estimating and Planning

What’s happened here is that velocity is the great equalizer. Because the estimate for each feature is made relative to the estimates for other features, it does not matter if our estimates are correct, a little incorrect, or a lot incorrect. What matters is that they are consistent. We cannot simply roll a die and assign that number as the estimate to a feature. However, as long as we are consistent with our estimates, measuring velocity over the first few iterations will allow us to hone in on a reliable schedule.

As the team complete more and more sprints, developers will come across three point stories that are a little larger than average and five point stories that are a little smaller than average. Between our bell curve distributions and velocity acting as the great equalizer, over time, the bumps in the estimations will smooth out and the desire to re-estimate stories will fade.

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Agile Principles: Deliver Early and Often, but Always Deliver Value

June 17, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The Agile Manifesto describes twelve principles of agile software. In a series of twelve blog posts, I will explore each principle.

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
through early and continuous delivery
of valuable software.

This principle can be broken down into two separate thoughts. Continuously delivering early, and always delivering value.

Delivering Early and Often

Delivering early is more than just delivering something before the competition. Delivering early is more than just delivering before you would have had you not been being Agile™. Delivering early means specifically delivering less than you could have otherwise. Continuous delivery and iterative development are synonymous, it is not enough to just deliver early, you need to frequently do so.

Always Deliver Value

Delivering value is difficult. At a high level, it is difficult to know what is and is not valuable. Following the process and being disciplined can get you to a point where you are delivering early and often, but without a unified vision of what you are creating, it is very difficult to deliver real value.

Delivery early and often, but always deliver something of value.

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Let Conversations Write Your Tests

May 10, 2011 by 2 Comments

I consider myself an early adopter of Cucumber and have spent a lot of time using, thinking about, writing about and discussing cucumber and, at a higher level, behavioral driven development. Lately however, I’ve really been rethinking how I use Cucumber and why. Am I getting enough benefit from the overhead and abstraction of plain text features? Could I do the same thing with RSpec if I just approached RSpec differently? Am I cuking it wrong?

This shift in thinking is due in part to Liz Keogh’s Step Away from the Tools and Dan North’s Who’s domain is it anyway?. Both of these got me thinking about how I’m using the term BDD (rather loosely) and how much of an investment I’m making in a specific tool (Cucumber).

More Meaningful Planning

Having meaningful planning meetings with their customer/product owner is one thing with which many teams struggle. Too often, we go too fast, don’t uncover enough detail, use the wrong language, don’t understand “done” and leave too many loose ends.

To combat this we draw screens, discuss workflows, ask leading questions and a variety of other techniques. I felt that while I was doing these things, I was still frustrated with the other part of the planning process. I’ve never liked traditional tasking and I’ve never like the idea of having to translate all of the data gathered with the customer into some other form only to express it later in a test in yet another form.

What if I wrote my tests during the planning meeting?

I decided that changing the way I gathered conditions of satisfaction, defined “done” and discussed workflows with my product owner would give me the biggest boost in value delivered, so one day I did just that.

For the following examples, assume that we’re adding a feature to an e-commerce website.

As a user I should be able to manage addresses so that I don’t have to enter my information more than once

As I’m discussing the feature with my product owner, I will discuss with them the possible scenarios, including workflows, required to use the feature. Some scenarios for this feature might include:

  • When I am on my account page
  • When I am creating a new address
  • When I am deleting an address

These scenarios might have scenarios of their own:

  • When I am editing an address
    • When I successfully edit my address
    • When editing my address fails

So far I’ve been able to ask the product owner something like “So when I’m editing my address, and I miss some required fields, what happens? What do I see? Where do I go? What are the required fields?”. I can also draw pictures to explain the workflows and ask more questions “What’s on this page? Where is the error message displayed? Do I see error messages for the fields that are missing?”.

For each scenario, I can capture assertions that come from answers to the questions I’m asking:

  • When I am on my account page
    • I should see a link to “My Addresses”
  • When I click on the “My Addresses” link from my account page
    • I should be on my addresses page
    • I should see “My Addresses” in the page heading
  • When I am on my addresses page
    • When I have existing addresses
      • I should see each address listed in format xyz
      • I should see an “edit” link for each address listed
    • When I don’t have existing addresses
      • I should see help text explaining how to add an address

If you’re an RSpec user, you might be thinking, “Hey this looks like RSpec!” and it does. During the planning meeting I can capture these scenarios and outcomes and then use them nearly verbatim for my RSpec acceptance tests. Even better, when I run my tests, I can use the “documentation” format that RSpec gives you to output that’s almost identical to the scenarios above.

The conversation required to really define these scenarios and outcomes is challenging, but at the same time, very rewarding. I have also found that it’s pretty powerful to be able to sit with the product owner and view two nearly identical documents side-by-side knowing that one is automated test output.

Filed Under: Ideas, Ruby On Rails, Testing Tagged With: , , , ,
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