Author Archives: Paul Boos

A Principle for When Not to Estimate

Based on a prior post, I was ‘asked’ to extract this into a generalized principle. (I invite you to read that in full, so you understand the context.)

Of course, one has to open your mind that the value of estimating has to be questioned in this circumstance and what you are trying to accomplish with estimates and how they may or may not contribute to your work. And I would be remiss not to mention 3 things:

  1. My push on the #noestimates tag is not one of #neverestimate; on the contrary, I am interested in circumstances where estimation may need to improve OR it may need to be ditched to increase value production. I would never advocate to never estimate under all circumstances, yet at times estimation may be wasteful and should be eliminated. Depending on risk understanding, one may absolutely need to estimate. The more potential (in terms of probability and impact) for loss of life or loss of money, the more need to estimate. I do have a keen interest in when estimation may not be needed though beyond just dropping story points.
  2. If you decide to apply this principle, also determine the circumstances and how you would detect that perhaps this principle doesn’t apply in your context. Ask yourself, how does this apply? What will tell me whether I applied it incorrectly, and lastly what possible paths should I take to rectify the situation?
  3. Lastly, this whole set of arguments or debate is very binary. (I’ve only ever seen actual dialog on the topic at Agile Dialogs.) #nobinary is something I advocate on a variety of subjects and you can learn more about how to drop binary thinking and contribute to interventions at Agile Brambles (an evolving site). If your mindset is one where you only see your point of view, then you may find thinking through the paths on the site fruitful.

OK, onto the principle….

When the estimate is not going to be used, regardless of how quickly you can produce it, don’t create one.

Looking back at my context briefly, the old way was to estimate all work that came in and then regardless of the answer, we did the work.  This delayed the start of the work and actually digging into really understanding it by doing it. It doesn’t matter whether you are using a super sophisticated model or a simple guess. In my case it at a minimum delayed work by a week and in some cases more. From a any form of value production standpoint (like weighted shorted job first), the estimation part of the process was hurting the organization. I’m certain many of us can think of times when an estimate wasn’t used and really had no intention of being used.

Be sure though that it truly will not be used. This is important. If this is the case, then it has some degree of importance and then the level of accuracy and precision should be quickly assessed and the estimate done at that level. This brings us to a corollary:

Only estimate at the level of accuracy and precision required (or that has no incremental cost above what is required).

Often estimation takes time and effort. When estimation is needed to understand risk, then only do it at the level required OR if you can do it more accurately/precisely with no additional effort, then go ahead and do it the higher level. This also goes into thinking about creating sophisticated models or simulations that may be used. Bring these in when the situation warrants it, a good prioritized backlog of work, projects, etc. will reveal whether there may be a future for using one.

You may notice that both of these boil down to –

Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.

Hmmmm… I’ve seen that before.

One last principle:

Question whether this principle (or its corollary) continues to apply.

You may have determined you needed an estimate or perhaps you determined that it wasn’t needed; be sure this still remains true on a periodic basis.

I’ll close, ‘anecdotal’ circumstances are evidence. If you find that you don’t need to estimate under some circumstance, then that is a set of evidence showing a different reality. It’s very similar to observations made by Galileo and Copernicus that indicated that a geocentric view was incorrect and a heliocentric view was more accurate. Or perhaps an even better metaphor would be when Einstein was able to explain observations being made through relativity theory. It didn’t negate how classical mechanics worked under most circumstances, but there were circumstances (context) when mechanics needed to be replaced. If we never examined observations (anectdotes), then everything would remain status quo.

Leadership in Agile Transformations: A Haiku

In keeping with my thoughts on transformation; I wrote a haiku on good leadership that is needed in Agile transformations.

Farmers cultivate

Burros make furrows in minds

More emerge to join

Can you see what leadership is happening in the above? How has leadership been happening in your organization?

 

A bit of Agile Transformation Haiku

One of the Agile Retroflections of the Day I submitted is this one, “What haiku can you write that reflects on your transformation efforts thus far?”

I’m a huge fan of haiku; it uses powerful imagery to convey messages. This was the one I came up with for my customer’s transformation thus far:

Strong burro works hard

Bureaucratic harnesses

But it’s pull, not push

I was inspired to use a burro as they are real workhorses ummm… really burros and because I know a fellow Agilista, Lisa Crispin, raises them.

But upon additional thought, I’d rewrite the haiku slightly to become:

Burro of strong heart

Bureaucratic harnesses

But it’s pull, not push

What would your haiku be?

 

 

Team Launch Misfires…

I’ve been conducting Team Launch workshops for awhile now; some for teams doing software development work and some for other types of supporting products.

I_love_my_awesome_teamI’ve noticed teams that go through a significant amount of effort on these types of chartering exercises seem to always be “awesome” compared to most of their peer teams. They get more done; what they get done is more on target with what the end user needs; and they have less post-deployment problems. I really don’t think this correlation is a coincidence.

My views on launching teams are 99% +/- 2% congruent* with Ainsley Nies’ and Diana Larsen’s views as expressed in their book Lift-off. (If you don’t have this book, go get it!) I had about 5 categories of agreement I used, but they easily collapsed into the 3 from the book: Purpose, Alignment, and Context. Now I use those.

Out of these I view Alignment as the most important one. If I can get to a team that is aligned in HOW they will work together, they can overcome the shortcoming in understanding of the purpose (or on a project where the purpose is emergent) and certainly they can handle an evolving context as they probably thought about those ever shifting sands.

The teams I see that are challenged almost always short change this area as it feels soft and squishy. Why should I understand what my co-workers value? Who cares how decisions are made – let the boss do it as he always has… Why do we need to think about what and how we celebrate things? Ignoring this ignores the first Agile Value: Individuals & Interactions over processes and tools. Launching teams correctly celebrates the former and ensures the latter is subservient to it. Every team I see struggling as of late has short-changed this Team Chartering, particularly around Alignment. A guarantee the missile will miss the mark.

Want more info on how to be successful? See my post on Excella’s blog. And/or get the Lift-Off book and think about what Purpose, Alignment, and Context mean in your environment.

 

*You’ll notice that the upper end of this is 101% which is where I think my congruent thoughts are most of the time…

Symptom of Anti-Agility: CRM Groups

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I haven’t written in a bit (well I have actually, but on Excella’s Insight blog), but I wanted to write about an anti-pattern I am seeing in one of our clients. Many have written that management seems to think of “Agile” as only within development teams, and forget that this Lean and Agile thinking needs to permeate everywhere.  It’s a dysfunction to continue working on…

So let me give you the example I am seeing so we can talk in more concrete terms.

The organization has had a rocky past between central IT and the business. Software development is distributed in various business units as well as a central IT shop (I’m staying away from actual terms the customer uses BTW). Central IT also does considerably more though, such as manage the network, run a server farm or three, manage cloud providers, email and content management services, etc.

The complaints from the business have been articulated as (in no particular order):

  • I have to know who to call in order to get good service; any official channel for requests is difficult to know.
  • Service is often slow and paper/form intensive.
  • When I use any official channel, it doesn’t necessarily get routed to the right location.
  • I’m not told everything I need to do to get my request fulfilled, resulting in delays.
  • I don’t know the status on requests that have a longer time to fulfill, nor have I been told or know where to go to find out my status.
  • I’m uncertain if any feedback I provide is acted upon.

I’m certain everyone has seen these before in some mix.  IT also has a set of complaints:

  • People go to whoever they happen to know that is related to the request they want to make to get service. This eats into people’s time without management having much knowledge of it (perhaps the immediate supervisor knows, but no one else).
  • IT needs to begin a charge-back model due to budget restructuring that is removing a great deal of central ITs funding, thus more knowledge of requests and services is needed to be known. The manner in which requests are coming does not provide a means to track it.
  • The business sides doesn’t see the great work we are doing.
  • The right people in IT don’t receive the needed feedback.
  • IT has a blemished image/brand and are thus not viewed as a valuable partner.
  • The CIO can’t keep up with the requests given to him by his peers; too many are bubbling up and being made directly to him.

If you work in an IT organization, particularly as a senior manager type, how many of these have you seen? Before I go into how to handle these with some Agility, let’s look at what this organization is doing that I consider an anti-pattern; literally anti-Agility thinking.

The senior manager tasked with solving this sees this primarily as a communications problem in 3 areas:

  • Routing to the right people to do the work
  • Taking in feedback on ITs performance
  • Improving the communications on good performance (improving the “brand”)

To solve this, they are standing up a Customer Relations Group that will take in initial requests/requirements, receive feedback about performance during and at the end of the work and provide it to the group(s) that performed it, and get the word out on the good stuff IT does.

They are starting by creating a master catalog of services IT provides (which on the back-end will have costs associated with them). It’s unclear whether these costs and/or the parts of the IT organization that will perform them will be a part of this catalog.  So far not bad… They also will stand up a single intake service (along with an online form) to process these needs, then ‘interview’ the customer to get any additional information, and route this request to the proper parts of IT.  It seems at this point there will be a hand-off; what is unclear is how this hand-off will work if multiple parts of the organization are involved simultaneously. If software development is the primary concern, it will be handed off to a development team (or a new team will be stood up).

This new Customer Relations Group will also query the customers periodically to find out how well the various parts are doing and give this to the right part of the organization. It will also give any responses back to the customer. And finally it will create some marketing material and positive ‘press’ to help sell IT services.

To keep this from being a burden on the current IT organization, the bulk of this work will be contracted out to a big name firm that everyone respects. Sounds great doesn’t it!? Every organization needs this, right?

As well as intentioned at this group (and its contractors) may be, this creates several dysfunctions.

  1. This is actually adding an additional step that will actually slow requests getting to the right people. This will increase the time to service, probably decreasing happiness, perhaps not initially, but certainly in the long run.
  2. It adds a hand-off of information so that the people needing it are getting it second-hand. This will lead to greater misunderstandings between the groups that need to work together.
  3. Feedback and working communications are at least partly being removed from the group that needs them directly.
  4. There is an assumption that a one-size-fits-all intake process can accommodate getting all of the unique needs a customer needs to portray to a unique supplier. Requests for an email distribution list would be vastly different than one for a software development project, or just even business analysis services for a development project.
  5. Messaging (branding) will be coming from a third party not responsible for any of the results.

Even worse though, there are fundamental root-cause problems being masked over.  For example, why does the business feel feedback they give is not listened to and acted upon? This solution isn’t going to address this root-cause concern. What is causing the long lead-time for IT to respond to business needs? Why are we trying to create a standard process for intake and routing as opposed to simply better connecting people to those that would supply the services and give proper visibility into the incoming work, but allow a self-routing approach? Why do we need to do a charge-back for the services internally as opposed to getting the budget reallocated properly to pay for them?

So how would I approach these items? I’d start with challenging the fundamental way things are done. I would learn where are the bottlenecks causing the unacceptable lead-time. I’d investigate the root-causes to the image/branding and see how to solve those. I’d see how I could make a catalog of services attached to the people that provide the services and work them to create mechanisms that give me an understanding of the allocation of requests. And I would at least talk with the budget personnel to find out how I could simply get the budget allocated properly; if that couldn’t be done, I’d make my service costs transparent to those when they look up my services. If I wanted something Customer Relationship-like, I’d perhaps think about deploying customer relationship software to all the groups directly, if evidence showed it would help.

Bottomline: I’d reduce hand-offs and keep with the spirit of individuals and interactions over processes and tools. I’d do the simplest thing I think is in the right direction and then retrospect on how that is working for me.

 

TWEET Your Feedback

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This post was prompted by Jurgen Appelo’s excellent post on giving a Feedback Wrap on Forbes.

I really like this post as it gives you an extremely useful way to express feedback in a manner that will help the receiver actually take action.  It also helps them become aware of future behaviors they may need to change.

Giving good feedback is important, whether it is to superiors, subordinates, or peers. Like Jurgen, I won’t claim to be perfect at doing this and more than once, I know I have provided useless and sometimes hurtful feedback. So to provide a bit of additonal advice as a wrapper around what Jurgen is recommending, I wanted to share an acronym I learned at Culture Camp DC 2012 from Chad Wolfsheimer of the Motley Fool.  The acronym is TWEET; here’s how it breaks down:

Take note of impact

This part is recognizing a meaning to the behavior you want to give feedback on; what is this behavior doing to you, others, a team, and/or the organization. If there isn’t any impact (or perhaps if it truly is trivial), then ask yourself is this feedback going to be useful?

Write down (organize thoughts)

Chad recommends writing down your thoughts, but he did offer up that due to the necessary timing you may not have this opportunity. None-the-less, take a mental step back and organize how you plan to present it; non-organized feedback will come across as a rambling complaint and not achieve what you want.  Using Jurgen’s Feedback Wrap technique is an excellent way to do this.

Empathize

Before jumping and giving feedback, try to understand the context the other person may have. Empathy in this case is not only what they may be feeling emotionally, but also what their mental model may be on why they are exhibiting the behaviors they are. Trying to understand this may help give you insight into how to deliver it so that it is received well.

design it be Effective

Using the Feedback wrap as guidance to organizing it and any insights you may have gained through empathizing, think through how the delivery can be made effective.  After all, if the feedback is ignored or it spawns a defensive mechanism, it probably won’t likely alter the behavior you want changed.

Time it appropriately

We’ve heard how feedback should be timely; Chad recommends and I agree to think about timing. Often just after the behavior is exhibited is the right time, but at other times it may be worth making a determination as to the most appropriate time to deliver the feedback to maximize its reception.

On top of the two great ways to look at feedback that Jurgen and Chad have presented, I also recommend including inquiry.  Asking a few key questions can help you both empathize AND open up the recipient’s mind about the behavior you want to change. Be careful what questions you ask though; for example ‘Why’ questions may put the recipient on the defensive. Try and use open-ended questions as well as this prompts some thinking.  Here’s an example of a question that may work –

After you presented your critique of John’s database design, what did you notice about people’s reactions, and in particular John’s, to your statements?

If the person you are providing feedback hadn’t noticed anything, this question may prompt them to think through what may have been happening and help the recipient self-realize the impact. This makes your job much easier.

I’d avoid the following –

Did you notice how people felt dejected, and in particular John, after you critiqued his database design?

While that may be indeed what you noticed, it is your own mental model that produced that. Even if your recipient might come to the same conclusion, this closed question places her or him on the defensive and not in a place for self-reflection of their behaviors.

I hope you found this post useful, if you have any tips or tricks you use in giving feedback, feel free to leave a comment or tweet at me!

 

Incorporating Security into User Stories

Violet_ForcefieldOne of the biggest initial resistors I have run across within Federal government employee stakeholders are information security personnel (and their supporting contractors).  This is often because when they learn about how requirements are managed with user stories they don’t see a fit for their requirements; in the Federal space these are guided by FIPS 200 and NIST 800-53 (currently at rev 4). Other writings on the subject do little to help them. Most advocate a separate and distinct type of story such as this paper by SafeCode or relying wholly on Dark or Evil stories written from a point of view of someone trying to gain access to a system, or deny access to a system.

There is no reason software-centric security controls can’t become user stories and/or acceptance criteria to user stories.  This post is going to attempt to show you a bit how to think on this. There is value in using dark stories as well, but I advocate first getting stories that incorporate NIST controls within the backlog.

First up, one must understand that the controls in NIST 800-53 cover a large number of dimensions including physical space control, configuration management, training, etc.  When attempting to convert the controls into user stories and/or acceptance criteria, focus only on the ones that are software-centric.  Controls that deal with authentication, authorization, audit logging, system monitoring, or encryption are great candidates.

Second, per NIST guidance, the organization is expected to establish the baseline needs of applications/systems and then select and tailor the controls needed. This responsibility can fall to the people managing the product features (in Scrum this would be the Product Owner) in concert with IT Security staff. By articulating these as user stories or acceptance criteria to user stories, these now have business value. The person managing what gets done no longer has to make a leap of faith or be told by someone externally that they just have to have it.

IN the following examples, we’re going to follow the Specifications by Example format and use a generics  records review system as an example that places records in a list for authoritative storage (a separate system); it handles Personal Identifiable Information. Let’s start with a story…

User Login Story

As a User Requiring Authentication,
I want to Login to the DataReview application
So that I can review incoming survey data for quality

//Standard Login Scenario
Given the username jsmith // valid userid
When I attempt a login using “nS3cure” // correct password
Then I the main home portal page is displayed for me

Given the username jsmith // valid userid
When I attempt a login using “123” // incorrect password
Then I see the login page again with the statement “Incorrect userid or password” stated along with a count of Login attempts.

Given the username smithj // invalid userid
When I attempt a login using “nS3cure”     //password correctness is immaterial
Then I see the login page again with the statement “Incorrect userid or password” stated along with a count of Login attempts.

// Multiple Login Failure Scenario
Given two failed login attempts and the username jsmith // valid userid – 3 attempts require a lock out for a period of time
When I attempt a login using using “123” // incorrect password
Then I see the login page again with the statement “Third failed login attempt, your IP address has been locked out for 3 hours” // 3 hrs by policy

Given two failed login attempts and the username smithj // invalid userid – 3 attempts require a lock out for a period of time
When I attempt a login using “nS3cure”     //password correctness is immaterial
Then I see the login page again with the statement “Third failed login attempt, your IP address has been locked out for 3 hours” // 3 hrs by policy

Given the IP address 130.3.55.121 is locked and the password lockout timer less than or equal to 3 hours // we’re testing using a static IP
When I attempt a login using any username or passowrd
Then I see the login page again with the statement “This IP address has been locked out.” and the password lockout timer is reset to 3 hours.

There could be numerous other additional acceptance criteria as well (password complexity for example), but at least now one can see how these user stories can articulate some of the NIST requirements (in this case AC-7 Unsuccessful Logon Attempts).

Let’s look at how security controls for auditing significant events might show up as acceptance criteria.  In the following example from our records management system, post QC review, we are adding the person’s record into a queue for inclusion into the authoritative system. It is fundamental that we know when this data is placed in the queue for transmittal. This has been determined to be an auditable event per control AU-2.

Approve Record Story

As a QC,
I want to approve records
So that they can be queued for entry into the official records repository.

//Approval
Given authenticated user jsmith has a valid QC role and bjones submitted the record “Mary Maryland” to jsmith for approval
When I approve the record “Victoria Virginia”
Then I see the message “Victoria Virginia record approved”,  the record is appended to awaiting transmittal queue list, and an entry is made to the security audit log with <date-time>, “jsmith”, “QC”, “approved “Victoria Virginia” // policy requires approvals to official records to be logged

//Disapproval
Given authenticated user jsmith has a valid QC role and bjones submitted the record “Mary Maryland” to jsmith for approval
When I disapprove the record “Mary Maryland”
Then I see the message “Mary Maryland record disapproved and returned to bjones” and  the record is returned as the first item in the review queue for bjones

Here we can see how the record gets logged (one form of auditing) when approved.  Because the record isn’t being readied to transition to the authoritative system when disapproved, it was determined that event wasn’t auditable.

Hopefully, this helps folk understand how NIST 800-53 security controls can be incorporated into user stories. By putting them into this format, the development tem now can develop to them and hook them into acceptance testing via something like Cucumber.

 

The UX-CX Dance

How seriously do you consider user experience for your internal applications? There  seems to be much discussion around creating good user experiences for outwardly facing applications; however, equally important is those that are internal, particularly if they support people that directly interact with your organization’s customers.

Here’s an example of what I mean; let’s start with some context.

My family and I were flying back from Australia earlier this week. In order to make our flight, we got up very early (4am) to do final prep before our taxi picks us up.We made plans to arrive a little over 2 hours20140523_VH-XFB_Keith_Anderson prior to our flight knowing that would be sufficient to check-in, make it through security, and have a coffee. We’re going to be flying domestic to Sydney before boarding our international flight to LAX and then transfer to their affiliate airline domestically back to DC. We have a premium economy seating internationally and domestic internally; that isn’t offered domestic in Australia (only economy and business).

We arrive at the airport without a hitch. Because we are starting off domestically and not going straight international from Melbourne, we go up to the domestic agent to do our check in. She is very pleasant and nice! (Particularly for this early in the morning, which is about a 5:40ish and a bit earlier than even we anticipated arriving.)

First up, we provide our information and US passports and at her request place our first bag up for weighing. She states that we’re overweight on our bag. The policy of the airline as we had checked it, was 32kg international premium economy (it was 23kg for just economy). I personally checked each bag with a sale we bought as we packed it and ensured we were well under for each bag (greater than 4kg). My wife pleasantly points this out; our agent wasn’t argumentative, but stated she would have to check since we started off only on economy. About 5-6 minutes later when she returned, she had her answer that yes it was allowed. By the time she had gotten back, my wife already had the policy pulled up on their own website. UX point #1: This should have been available on the screen to her without her having to go check with someone (presumably a manager).  Perhaps an agent at a check-in for international would have had this available, but I doubt it; most likely they would just know the policy due to necessity. Given the airlines current route structure, MOST international flights to places in other parts of the world would fly from airports other than Melbourne, thus this ‘help’ feature would have made sense to be made available to every agent.

So she returns to entering our passport information. She apologizes that she has to key in the address we are going to (in this case our home address) for each person separately and thus consumes more of our (and her) time. We casually discuss that this multiple entry seems inconvenient. UX point #2: There should have been a way for identifying people flying together as being members of the same household so that the address field would only be need to be entered once. There is good reason for having this as an option; I could tell she was a bit frustrated about it and it was preventing her from helping others in the line as the airport got busier. She remained very pleasant to us and it never impacted us being able to depart on time.

My wife is both a US and Australian citizen, where as I and my son are just a US citizens. The next issue came up when she entered my wife’s passport information; it didn’t want to let her complete the transaction since she hadn’t entered in on a visa.  She had flown in on her Australian passport since she is an Aussie citizen and didn’t need a visa, where as my son and I entered on visas. So she swapped to using my wife’s Aussie passport; now it wanted a visa for entering the US. After a bit of hassle and finally asking someone, she found out that it wasn’t possible to enter two passport numbers on the screen without having someone link the records on the back-end (presumably some configuration/database entry) to enable that feature. UX point #3: the developers had not considered the persona of a dual citizen and now it had become a clunky customer support  feature. There are lots of dual citizens in Australia, particularly with Britain.

So at this point, let’s stop for a moment and consider perhaps a deeper cause to these three UX points. (BTW, I never saw her screens, but the last two had her frustrated enough that she was pleasantly talking through what she had to do.) I would venture to guess that the development team, and particularly the product owner/business representative, of this application never fleshed out many personas of either the agents nor the customers they would be helping. They probably ONLY considered ‘agent’ role as the one possibility and never the people they help.

Want to improve the product owner’s ability to support her or his user base? Help them understand their customer and that customer’s customer using customer journey maps. (I particularly like using the Lego Customer Experience Wheel or the Innovation game Start Your Day.) Flesh out the personas with Empathy maps and further refine your backlog based on these.  If you want to understand better how backlogs change based on personas (whether it be customer persona or role), check out the game “Backlog is in the eye of the beholder” game.

Organizational or business agility means attending to customer needs; gaining the right UX/CX experience in your product, release, and iteration planning is key to doing that right.

(Incidentally, we had overall CX impacts with how the airline had negotiated arrangements in how people are physically moved by a bus between terminals in Sydney as well, so using customer journey maps can really help give you a holistic view in how to improve your relationships with them, something that is all important these days.)

The Story of Codemess

It’s that time of the season, so it’s time for a story…eiMAogLin

’Twas the night before review

The team stayed up late
To get all the stories done;
Tasks cleaned off their plate.

The CI server
Pulled all of the code
Mongo, Apache,
and a server named Node.

Each dev checked in their bits
Fast as light
Check the acceptance criteria? Pshaw!
I want to go home tonight.

So assumptions were made
With no consultation
And when the code built successfully,
The team squealed with elation!

But they skipped some tests
That kept showing up red
And just prayed that the demo
Would run and not be dead.

So next day was show time
They filed in with fake smiles
The Scrum Master put on all of her charms
And her witty guiles.

They fired up the screens
And showed all their work
The Product Owner turned red
He knew he was going to feel like a jerk.

He couldn’t accept not one
Not two, three, nor four
All stores had failed
Absolutely no score.

So nothing was right
While their efforts were of heroes
All of their stories
The points completed were zeroes.

A failed Sprint they had
One to be remembered
They should be glad
They had not been dismembered.

How they had worked
Needed serious reflection
But to hell with the retro
On to make this damn correction.

So off the team went
Stuck that they knew right
To code and recode
Many a more sleepless night.

The team talked to no one
Silence fell on them all
The Product Owner was be-puzzled
They never did call.

So with that I must state
Team and Product Owner should be as one
Collaborate more often
More stories will get “done-done”.

Keep to your retros
Use them to explore
The reasons for failure
I deeply ask, no implore!

Then enjoy your holidays
With family and good friends
Use the values and principles
As the means to the ends.

So Merry Christmas; Joyous Mawlid el-Nabi
And Happy Rohatsu and Hanukah
And any other you celebrate
Like Yule, Solstice or Kwanzaa.

Happy Holidays may it be filled with tests of green and zero of red…

Agile Dialogs Recap

This will be a short recap of the Agile Dialogs unconference held yesterday.  We discussed ways of predicting value production with and without estimates.  Over the next few days I’ll blog more of what we uncovered, but this will be a simple post on how the unconference was approached.

We had a good mix of people that were passionate, though no one was at I’d say fully at each end of the spectrum. The big takeaway was that both sides are right in many ways and wrong in many ways.  The idea of not using estimates of time, money, and/or story points can be done and is highly context dependent. As with any approach it may nor may not work in your context; it depends, or YMMV.  The best you can do is try it as an experiment and see whether it works for you.

What we did at Agile Dialogs was –

  • register with one side or another along a continuum (how strong we felt on the issue),
  • post the types of things we estimate,
  • tell our stories of both our successes and failures on both sides – with and without estimates
  • explore our objectives for either using or not using objectives and the techniques we use for each side
  • Explore the assumptions used when using estimates
  • Explore the assumptions used when not using estimates
  • Explore what each side could learn from the other
  • Posted and voted on what could possibly be the next thorny topic we tackle
  • and retrospect on how the Agile Dialogs unconference could be better

Here’s a few teasers of some of the discoveries… I’ll go more in depth on what was discussed in future posts as well as post some proceedings on the Agile Dialogs site.

  • When management or customers are asking for estimates, it is more important to understand their need for it; then more valuable alternatives to fulfill that need may be explored. Estimates may prove best for fulfilling that need though, so don’t force fit an alternative technique.
  • Estimation has become a scapegoat for other dysfunctions within the works system. Removing estimation won’t fix these dysfunctions, but it may help uncover them.  Whether at the end of the day, you remain with or without estimation, if these more fundamental dysfunctions can be fixed, then the work climate will improve.
  • Estimation always exists, but when pursuing a noestimates approach, the nature of the estimation actually changes from cost, time, and/or complexity to value (which is not based on those in most environments).
  • Focusing on understanding time and money estimates tends to introduce longer feedback loops for actual learning. If it is possible (and that is an IF), then removing them can eliminate waste in the work system to that learning.
  • Measurement is important in both approaches; when doing estimates we sometimes get lulled into a false sense of security that good measurement exists, when often it doesn’t.
  • Humans suck at estimation except on conceptually obvious items (obvious equating to the obvious domain in the Cynefin framework); mathematical models (particularly when the underlying assumptions on those models are validated by the team doing the work) can really help produce accurate results in the complicated domain.  The complex domain can be assisted greatly by these mathematical models, but the loop through is validating a hypothesis.
  • Another way to test a hypothesis is to set time or cost box and see if the solution at the end of the box is on track decide whether to spend more, accept as-is, or abandon; think Lean Start-up approach.

I have set-up The #AgileDialogs Daily that curates information from both sides of this thorny topic; other thorny topics will get added as a discussion on them emerges.