Tag Archives: scrum

Looking for Agile Software Developer in Central NJ

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Are you a software craftsman? Do you value growing your skills as you simultaneously learn from and teach the other members of your team? Want to help us build the world’s best cross-platform mobile solutions for field service workers?

The folks that fix your A/C when it’s 100 degrees and keep your toilet from backing up into your living room deserve the best software technology can provide, and we need your help. We are looking for a key addition to our Agile/Scrum/XP team that is building a highly scalable, event-driven, mobile-enabled platform. This person will be test-driven and team-focused. He or she will be a mentor to team members new to TDD and some of the other XP practices.

Must haves:

  • At least two years of test-driven development experience with the .NET platform (C#) on a collaborative team (Scrum, CI, TDD/BDD, Paired-Programming, Collective Code Ownership, Refactoring, Iterative & Incremental Development)
  • Strong foundation in Object-Oriented Design and Programming (Design Patterns, SOLID principles, etc.)
  • Strong desire to learn and teach others

Highly valued:

  • Domain-Driven Design experience
    SOA and/or SaaS experience (especially with NServiceBus or any ESB)
  • Entity Framework Code-first or other ORM experience (especially with RavenDB, MongoDB, or other document databases)
  • Significant JavaScript experience (especially with Sencha Touch, CoffeeScript, or any JavaScript TDD/BDD framework)
  • Mobility experience (iOS, Android, or Web)

Voted as one of the Top 30 Places to Work in NJ, Marathon develops supports and sells SaaS software and marketing solutions to the SMBs in pest control, landscaping, HVAC and other service verticals. Comprehensive benefits package including vacation, insurance, and company sponsored profit sharing plan. Contact me at efarr@marathondata.com or @efarr.

Sprint Planning and Decision Fatigue

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This article explores the physiological and psychological effects of fatigue brought on by making decisions. The fatigue that comes from making decision after decision immediately reminded me of my team’s Scrum sprint planning days.

The Scrum method breaks software development into iterative cycles called sprints. Our sprints were the highly typical two weeks in length. The idea is that two weeks is a short enough planning horizon that we can pull in enough work from the backlog to fill that time period. Then we demo what we’ve done to the various stakeholders in the company, adjust existing backlog priorities, plan another sprint, and on it goes.

Sprint planning day looked something like this…

9:00 Demos (any stories that haven’t been shown yet)

9:30 Close out the Previous Sprint (closing stories in VersionOne, splitting any unfinished stories, etc.)

10:00 Retrospective (look back over the prior sprint and identify things that worked well that we want to do more of, what didn’t work so well, and identify any impediments to progress)

10:45 Start Sprint Planning (Story Breakdown)

1:30 Finish Sprint Planning (Story Breakdown)

We often wouldn’t finish sprint planning until after 4:30. 

Story Breakdown

Sprint planning is the process of taking the high-level stories and breaking them down into tasks. We did this as a team; so, we had everyone’s input and everyone knew how we were going to go about implementing each story. This is vital to maintaining a team approach to building the product.

This story breakdown, however, is the hardest part of the whole sprint. We have to make decision after decision about how we are going to implement a feature…

Will there be a new database table? Will it be a variant of some existing feature or something new? Is there some new UI element that we haven’t tackled before? and so on.

Then for every decision, we have one more decision: how long do we think it will take.

I believe the hardest part is that we move from one decision to the next without actually doing anything. We are simply adding our decisions to the inventory to be acted on over the next two week. This makes the decision fatigue factor even greater.

By the time we got to 3:00 or 3:30 the team would often be so fatigued that we would start placing two tasks on each story: Plan it and Do it. During the sprint, if we came across a story with a “Do it” task, it was a safe bet that it was planned late in the day.

Remedy

I can see two ways to reduce the decision fatigue that comes with Scrum planning day: 1) reduce the Sprint length, or 2) don’t do Scrum.

For most teams doing Scrum, I think shrinking the Sprint length to one week will reduce the planning day fatigue. Our team, for other reasons, switched to a Kanban continuous flow model. Under that model, we did the story breakdown as the queue of planned stories got low. It was never two weeks worth at one time, and we had fewer “Do it” tasks.

Split the Team or Split the Backlog?

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Small software companies often find themselves trying to do too much with too little. This was certainly the case at Agentek. At one point earlier this year, we had a problem… We were not finished with the current release (call it release A), but we could not wait until it was finished to get a start on our next release (call it release B). There was too much unknown involved in release B. We had to get started on it. At the same time, we had just committed to ourselves that we would not leave our customers with anymore half-finished releases. What to do?

Our team had four fully dedicated developers, a tester, and me. We needed to dedicate 25% of our time to release B. The first option was to simply intersperse the backlog with stories from release A and release B…

Interspersed Backlog

Interspersed Backlog

There were two problems with the interspersed backlog. First, release A has a good bit of reactive work; so, the backlog is unpredictable and tends to consume the entire team’s attention. Second, since stories vary in actual effort to complete, we cannot really gauge or control what percentage of our capacity is applied to each effort.

The next idea, was to split the team and apply 25% of the people to release B….

Split the Team

Split the Team

This is the mathematically cleanest solution and the option that traditional software managers would probably pick every time. However, this option has major disadvantages…

  1. Only one developer will know anything about how release B was implemented.
  2. The many advantages of pairing are lost on both efforts because we have only one developer on release B and an odd number on release A.

This option really just throws the team-based approach to building software out the window; so, not an option for us.

Next thought was to create two separate backlogs….

Split the Backlog

Split the Backlog

This makes the problem we are trying to solve clearer, but we still have the problem of how do we stay united as a team, yet timebox each backlog.

The next step was to designate days of the week for servicing each backlog. To give the forward-looking release one fourth of our capacity, we dedicated one pair to that backlog for half of the week. To simplify things, and give it a little more than 25%, went ahead and gave it three full days instead of two and a half. So this is what things looked like…

Split the Backlog and the Week

Split the Backlog and the Week

We rotated the release B pair so that there would always be one person that worked on that last week for continuity and one new person.

In our first retrospective after we finished release A (and moved onto release B fulltime), the team was convinced of a few things:

  1. One team working on two releases at once is hard.
  2. Keeping the team together was really important.
  3. Splitting the backlogs and the week turned out to be a great way to do both at the same time.

Shifting from Scrum to Kanban

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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.

Looking for a ScrumMaster

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[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.