Misconceptions about Team Rooms and Open Floor Plans

Posted on August 15, 2011 by efarr

I see this far too often. Well-meaning software organizations embracing agile software development tear down the walls in order to open up the space and allow easier collaboration. This sounds great, and it’s cheap. An easy win, right? Not if it’s done without some care and thought.

Premise 1: Irrelevant conversations are distractions.

Human beings are trained to pick other human beings’ voices out of the background noise and pay attention to them. There is little that is more distracting to concentration than hearing a conversation that has nothing to do with what you are working on.

Premise 2: A team is a group of people working toward a common goal.

If a team is really acting as a team, there is nothing that one subset of the team could be working on that is irrelevant to the rest of the team.

Imagine Team Green working in an open team room, paired at stations with one monitor and dual mice and keyboards…

Let’s say that pair number 1 is having a conversation…

That conversation is heard by all other members of the team. Because Team Green is a team, the fact that the whole team can hear it is a good thing. I cannot count how many times I have seen this…

Pair #1 overhears pair #2 getting stuck on some problem that sounds familiar. Pair #1 stops and gets involved in what pair #2 is doing. The four people discuss the problem and solve it, based largely on some previous experience that someone on pair #1 had. If one pair had not overheard the other pair struggling, they might have wasted a whole day (or at least until the next stand-up).

Now imagine Team Green is really busy and all working and talking…

I first heard this situations referred to as communication saturation by Jeff Sutherland, but I think he got it from Jim Coplien. Here we have everyone able to hear every other conversation. If a stranger were to come upon this team area, it would sound like noise. But to a high-performing agile software team, it is completely natural because every conversation is related to furthering the goal for this iteration.

Now imagine we have a collaborative, high-performing Team Blue…

Team Blue is enjoying the same open space benefit that Team Green is. Now imagine we take our open-spaces-are-good momentum and co-locate Team Green and Team Blue…

Now we have green conversations in the blue team area and green conversations in the blue area. This is not good. We now have noise distracting both teams.

If the blue conversations are as useful to the green team as green conversations, then you are not doing team based development.

There are two possible remedies: create more space between the teams, put up acoustically meaningful walls, or both.

The bottom line: open spaces and shared conversations are good only within a team, not between teams.

Domain Driven Design Anti-Patterns

Posted on August 11, 2011 by efarr

[Note: I was going to call this post How to Fail with Domain Driven Design, but that just sounded too pessimistic.]

I’ve been developing business applications on the Microsoft platform since the mid 1990s. The years since then have involved a continual process of learning to be more effective in architectural approach. Along the way, there have been key points where I made leaps forward. Two such examples include object-orientation in the 90s and my first Web service in 2000 (anyone remember SOAP Toolkit2?).

Each of these leaps forward also came with some initial stumbles as I grappled with the promising new approach. Pushing the envelope of productivity means trying new things. New things always create risk. Software is hard. The path of progress in software is never a straight line (unless you are creating commodity level software). However, stumbling when taking on new approaches can be minimized if you learn from other peoples mistakes instead if just your own.

Another big leap forward for me started with my reading of Domain Driven Design in 2005. Since that time, I have been putting DDD principles into practice. I have learned a lot-much of it by my own mistakes. What I offer here are some concrete examples of mistakes I made. I’ll show the mistake I made and how I later fixed it so you can compare and contrast the before and after. Sometimes I learn a pattern best by seeing examples of its anti-patterns. I hope these articles will help you create better software and add to the growing awareness of DDD.

The above list will serve as the table of contents for the series. I’ll enable the links as I write the articles. I’ll probably add an article or two to the list as I go.

Teamwork Is an Individual Skill

Posted on July 23, 2011 by efarr

I was intrigued by this interview with Christopher Avery about responsibility on agile teams at InfoQ. Intrigued enough to go download and read his book entitled Teamwork Is an Individual Skill: Getting Your Work Done When Sharing Responsibility.

The premise of the book is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, not only is there an “I” in team, but teams are constituted by nothing more than a bunch of “I”s. If none of those individuals takes responsibility for the team’s success, then no one is taking responsibility.

Whether it be the development team at work, the elder council at my church, or even my family, it seems there is virtually no area of life where my personal success is not dependent on the success of a team. Learning to take more responsibility for the success of those teams seemed like a good idea.

I found that the book could have used a good editor to tighten up some of the writing, and the formatting (at least on the Kindle version) was confusing at times; however, there was enough food for thought in there to make it worth the read.

Here are a few highlights to give you some flavor of the book…

Avery coins the term TeamWisdom, which he defines as follows.

TeamWisdom refers to all the individual mental skills and behaviors that lead to highly responsible and productive relationships at work. The idea is based on my definition of “team”: A team is a group of individuals responding successfully to the opportunity presented by shared responsibility. Thus someone with TeamWisdom takes responsibility for ensuring that the group rises to the occasion, and in the process, makes sure his own work gets done and done well.

Avery makes an important distinction between accountability and responsibility

…accountability can be assigned, but responsibility can only be taken.

Accountability and responsibility are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are extremely complimentary. It is time for each of us in the workplace to take responsibility for relationships as well as accountability for deliverables, and to engage in the conversations that build productive relationships at work.

Avery makes the astute observation that if each team member acts in his own self-interest, then it is important to learn what motivates the other team members and assure that their interests are aligned with those of the team and with your interests. If your interests cannot be aligned, then you should withdraw from that team.

Once you understand your team members interests, it is in your interest to see that your teammates reach their goals.

The great philosopher/inventor, Buckminster Fuller, taught that the best way for one person to win is not by making others lose, but by making others win too. He taught from the 1940’s until his death that the more people a person helps to win, the more people that person can expect will help her win. Fuller’s teaching was in the forefront of a growing body of literature about the power and humanity of “servant leadership.” Being a servant leader means helping one’s followers become successful, instead of expecting followers to serve one’s personal success.

He then gives the following challenge in the Personal Challenge section that is included in with each TeamWisdom principle.

Do your partners and teammates provide you with access to their thoughts because they experience you as a person who helps them achieve their goals? Listen carefully to your associates to learn what is truly important to them. Check in with yourself to determine your level of commitment to them. If this level of commitment is low, ask yourself why. If it is high, ask yourself how you are willing to help. Then offer that help.

Avery talks about collaboration and includes valuable insights like this:

Most people find it much easier to grant a favor than to ask for one. However, people with TeamWisdom know that asking for a favor actually grants the other person a favor. Asking for a favor communicates to the other person that they are important to us, that we depend on them, and that we are even willing to owe them one. People with TeamWisdom understand that the person who asks for the first favor sets the tone for the collaboration.

Here is an example of Avery’s insight on the effect unmotivated team members:

Is the team leader the most powerful member of your team? Is the most inspired member the most powerful? The smartest member? Nope. None of the above. Like it or not, the most powerful member of your team is the one who cares the least about your team’s task. Sorry, but that’s the truth. The least-committed member of your team is the most powerful because his lack of commitment establishes a low baseline to which other
team members may fall. The success—or mediocrity—of your team likely will be determined by him.

Read the book. Take responsibility for the success of your teams, whether you are the leader or simply a contributor.

Shifting from Scrum to Kanban

Posted on July 6, 2011 by efarr

My team had been following (more or less) the Scrum process for two years. The Scrum rhythm of biweekly planning, demo, and retrospective with daily stand-ups served us well most of the time. However, we have since shifted to a process that looks more like Kanban.

The Transition

We had the most friction with the Scrum process after initial releases when our focus turned more toward support and training of our customers. The two-week planning cycle does not accommodate this kind of reactive, responsive work. The dissonance between our stated process and the reality of the work day felt like a process breakdown even though what we were doing was clearly the most important thing for out team. It tended to make everyone a little cranky. Since agile is all about inspect and adapt and choosing a path that gets results, it was time for some adapting.

Our Flavor of Kanban

Unlike Scrum, which has identified creators and a set of doctrines that define orthodoxy, Kanban is more loosely defined. Our idea of Kanban starts with Scrum and and makes a few modifications.

We no longer plan a sprint. We simply pull stories from the backlog as we need more work to do. The VersionOne storyboard gives us a visual of how many items are in each status, and we only pull in a new story if the inventory level are low across the board.

Instead of planning for an entire day before a sprint, we now plan stories whenever the backlog of planned stories is low (less than a few days worth). We still demo the product and hold retrospectives every two weeks.

Since we no longer have sprint boundaries, we needed to make some changes to the way we integrate stories so that we always have a potentially shippable product. We now do all story or defect development on an activity branch in the repository and only merge back to the trunk after it has been thoroughly tested. This creates a bit of new overhead, but we’ve found it worth the effort.

Result

Now we are able to be responsive to new items that come in. The development team feels less jerked around when support issues come in and priorities change. We’d all like to get back to pure product development, but better to face reality as it is than to pretend it is something it is not.

Peopleware: An Aging Classic

Posted on July 3, 2011 by efarr

Some months ago I was telling a friend at work how everyone in the software industry should read Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister

I have always said that Peopleware should be required reading for anyone who manages software developers. I’ve also said that if you want to know my philosophy as a manager, just read Peopleware.

However, the first edition was written in 1987 and the second edition, which I had read, was written in 1999. I decided to read it again. I was curious to see how it holds up more than ten years later.

On second read, it is clear that Peopleware was written prior to the agile wave in software development. However, Peopleware was such a prescient work that in 2011 I still found it to be insightful and compelling. Much of what they call for has become more commonplace since 1999.

As DeMarko and Lister railed against public address systems in the office, I felt like I had taken a trip back in time. However, the principle that management too often optimizes the wrong factors in the workplace is as relevant as ever. I’ve seen too many situations where more care was put into color schemes and aesthetics than the mechanics of how the software team would work together (acoustics, workstation configuration, etc.).

The insights and anecdotes on management of software people made the second reading worth the investment. The chapters on building a high performing, jelled team were especially valuable.

Bottom line… I still believe that everyone in software should read Peopleware and that managers must read it.

Raising The Bar: Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship

Posted on July 20, 2010 by Eric Farr

I’ve long been a fan of agile software development as crystallized in the Agile Manifesto. However, I’ve also felt like the core tenants laid out there are too vague to help software organizations actually be successful. I’ve recently learned of (and signed) the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship. It is still short on details of how to do it (as I guess any document of this nature must be), but I think it is a nice raising of the bar of the original manifesto:

As aspiring Software Craftsmen we are raising the bar of professional software development by practicing it and helping others learn the craft. Through this work we have come to value:

Not only working software, but also well-crafted software

Not only responding to change, but also steadily adding value

Not only individuals and interactions, but also a community of professionals

Not only customer collaboration, but also productive partnerships

That is, in pursuit of the items on the left we have found the items on the right to be indispensable.

© 2009, the undersigned. this statement may be freely copied in any form, but only in its entirety through this notice.

Bob Martin does a great job expanding on it in this Software Engineering Radio interview.

Unit Tests Just a Happy Side Effect of Test-Driven Development

Posted on January 17, 2009 by Eric Farr

Interviewing developers has given me an interesting, although not scientific, sampling of the thinking and mindset of software developers in the Atlanta area. While there have been a few bright spots, most of what I’ve learned has been disheartening.

I have found that TDD is still only an idea that most developers have heard about but never practiced. Of the ones who have practiced it, almost none of them understand what TDD was meant to achieve and only view it as automated unit testing. I believe this is due to two factors working together derail the original intent of TDD. First, TDD was named poorly. “Test” has specific meaning and has for a long time. It naturally biases us toward a certain type of thinking (strangely enough… testing and quality assurance). Second, most developers and development organizations would rather apply a formula or recipe to what they do than to take the time and effort to deeply understand what makes software development success or failure (and all of the degrees in between).

Scott Bellware is the guy who first got me thinking about a new way to approach TDD. It started with a new name: Behavior Driven Development (BDD). I actually think the “D” should be changed to Design to complete the mind shift. In a nutshell, BDD attempts to get back to the XP view of the tests being documentation of what the code should do. In this way of thinking, the set-up code is referred to as context and the assertions are referred to as specification. It has helped reform my thinking about TDD for the better.

You can catch Scott pontificating on the subject on the latest Hanselminutes podcast. Scott doesn’t get as specific as I would have liked, but this interview shows the side of Scott that I like so much. He’s passionately advocating a valuable practice and philosophy without the insults and vitriol that he is prone to fall into. I highly recommend it.

[Update: My reference to “Scott” in the above paragraph is to Bellware–not Hanselman, who is always pleasant and rarely vitriolic.]

SOLID: What is Old is New Again

Posted on January 1, 2009 by Eric Farr

SOLID

Sometime around 2001, I came across a series of articles by Robert C. Martin. At that time they were already a little old—from The C++ Report in 1996. I didn’t really care. This guy (who I now know as everyone else does as “Uncle Bob”) had captured and expressed core principles that I knew from experience were the key to creating maintainable software. I mostly knew it mostly from having violated them and paying the price.

The principles put forth in those articles express fundamentals truths that are in play in any Object-Oriented software project.

In the fifth article in the series, Martin sums up the first four…

1. The Open Closed Principle. (OPC) January, 1996. This article discussed the notion that a software module that is designed to be reusable, maintainable and robust must be extensible without requiring change. Such modules can be created in C++ by using abstract classes. The algorithms embedded in those classes make use of pure virtual functions and can therefore be extended by deriving concrete classes that implement those pure virtual function in different ways. The net result is a set of functions written in abstract classes that can be reused in different detailed contexts and are not affected by changes to those contexts.

2. The Liskov Substitution Principle. (LSP) March, 1996. Sometimes known as “Design by Contract”. This principle describes a system of constraints for the use of public inheritance in C++. The principle says that any function which uses a base class must not be confused when a derived class is substituted for the base class. This article showed how difficult this principle is to conform to, and described some of the subtle traps that the software designer can get into that affect reusability and maintainability.

3. The Dependency Inversion Principle. (DIP) May, 1996. This principle describes the overall structure of a well designed object-oriented application. The principle states that the modules that implement high level policy should not depend upon the modules that implement low level details. Rather both high level policy and low level details should depend upon abstractions. When this principle is adhered to, both the high level policy modules, and the low level detail modules will be reusable and maintainable.

4. The Interface Segregation Principle. (ISP) Aug, 1996. This principle deals with the disadvantages of “fat” interfaces. Classes that have “fat” interfaces are classes whose interfaces are not cohesive. In other words, the interfaces of the class can be broken up into groups of member functions. Each group serves a different set of clients. Thus some clients use one group of member functions, and other clients use the other groups.

The ISP acknowledges that there are objects that require non-cohesive interfaces; however it suggests that clients should not know about them as a single class. Instead, clients should know about abstract base classes that have cohesive interfaces; and which are multiply inherited into the concrete class that describes the non-cohesive object.

Martin later published The Single Responsibility Principle, which says that there should never be more than one reason for a class to change.

There were several aspects of these short articles that helped me so much…

The articles were short but clear.
The articles were available on-line for anyone to download and read.
Martin gave these principles names.

All of these aspects made these principles easy to promote—and I did! I preached all of these principles, whether in C++ or later C#. So, I am particularly pleased to see the recent resurgence in these principles as the ALT.NET crowd has arranged them into a nice acronym (SOLID) and made back-to-basics cool again. We see the SOLID principles all over blogs and articles in the agile community. It reaffirms my belief that the fundamentals may go in and out of style, but they are always what matters most in good software development.

Craftsmanship over Compromise

Posted on December 17, 2008 by Eric Farr

(Uncle) Bob Martin made a keynote address at Agile 2008 where he spoke about many of the concepts in his book Clean Code. In that talk, he proposed amending the Agile Manifesto to add the value of “Craftsmanship over Crap.” He later realized that this wouldn’t work because no one actually values crap. He later changed his proposal in a blog post where he suggested “Craftsmanship over Execution”. In that post he offered up a challenge to find a better word than Execution.

I hereby offer my entry as Craftsmanship over Compromise. I like it because we all value compromise, just like we value processes and tools, comprehensive documentation, contract negotiation, and following a plan. Compromise is a necessary part of the software business. However, we should value the ethic of creating an effective, lasting solution over shortcuts that are instantly gratifying, but are more costly in the long-run.

Looking for a ScrumMaster

Posted on December 2, 2008 by Eric Farr

[Update 1/29/2009: I’m happy to report that we are no longer looking!]

We (Agentek) are looking for an experienced ScrumMaster. If you know of someone in the Atlanta area that is looking for a position with a growing company that is early in its transition to agile software development and is committed to the Scrum process, please send him or her our way.

Here is the job description…

Agentek is a leading provider of mobile field force automation and communications solutions that enable businesses to achieve a predictable, reliable and repeatable customer experience from commitment to service fulfillment in real-time. From customized and pre-packaged applications to backend enterprise integration, Agentek delivers best-in-class mobile computing solutions that address the challenges companies face in areas such as field service, transportation and logistics automation. For additional information visit www.agentek.com.

We currently seek a Software Development Manager/ScrumMaster to join our expanding technical team.

Description:

Reporting to Agentek’s Vice President of Products and Engineering, our Software Development Manager/ScrumMaster will be working in an environment specifically designed for rapid application development of wireless applications for the Field Service Automation and Logistics market. The ideal candidate will have experience managing a team of 8-10 developers AND have experience as a ScrumMaster in a highly Agile development environment. Will be ScrumMaster for 2 teams and provide guidance to developers as a manager and Scrum coach.

Responsibilities:

As ScrumMaster, coordinate and facilitate daily stand-up meetings, Sprint planning sessions, Sprint reviews, and Sprint retrospectives

Work closely with the Product Owners, ensuring that product backlogs are updated and ready for the teams

Facilitate discussion and conflict resolution

Help team members to understand roles in the Scrum process (planning, review, estimating, etc.)

Work with team to estimate story points

Help team to choose stories and tasks in a Sprint, decompose stories into appropriate size tasks, and ensure that team does not over commit

Work with team to define what “done” means

Ensure that Sprint burndowns are updated daily and are visible to the team

Encourage team to adopt Agile engineering practices

Ensure accuracy of information tracked during Sprints

Manage departmental resources and staffing – enhancing and maintaining a best-of-class engineering team, hiring and terminating as appropriate to ensure a solid team

Conduct performance reviews of team members, coaching team members in how to be most effective in the Agile/Scrum environment

Required Qualifications:

Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Certified ScrumMaster

Deep understanding of Agile principles including eXtreme Programming and Scrum

5-10 years experience in software development and 2-5 years as development Manager or Director managing teams of at least 6 engineers.

Previous development experience with Visual Basic, C#, ASP.NET, and MySQL

History of managing projects, both successfully and unsuccessfully

Ability to balance the servant/leader role

Strong business and technical vision

Excellent verbal and written communication skills

Strong presentation, leadership, and mentoring skills as a motivated person who encourages others

Strong team work and interpersonal skills – ability to communicate and work well with people at all levels

Ability to field and manage multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced environment

Experience working in a early-stage or venture-funded company

Ability positively to engage conflict and constructively resolve problems

Mobile application experience a big plus, but not required

To learn more about this exciting opportunity with a leading provider of mobile computing solutions, please send an email to greg.schillo@agentek.com, including a cover letter describing your experience of required skills in the body of the letter, and include or attach a Word, HTML, or PDF version resume.

The Farr Side

Eric Farr – Technical Leadership in SaaS, Mobile, and Predictive Analytics

Category Archives: Agile