Five years ago, almost to the day, Ron Jeffries wrote a great post entitled “A Metric Leading to Agility“. In it he coined the term “Running Tested Features”.

More recently he has talked about another helpful metric for teams transitioning to Agile. It is “Running Automated Tests”. For those who need some guidance about choosing the right test automation tools (and avoiding the wrong ones), Elizabeth Hendrickson has written a great article.

As Lean enthusiasts might be tempted to celebrate the demise of General Motors and the assumption by Toyota of the #1 auto maker rank, James P. Womack* gives us pause to think about the end of an era.

*Author of “The Machine That Changed the World : The Story of Lean Production“.

Last night’s 4th meeting of the Cape Town chapter of the Scrum User Group of South Africa was addressed by Hilton Giesenow on the topic of Continuous Integration in Scrum. Hilton is an MVP (C#) and Development Manager at Cape Town-based 3Fifteen. Intec kindly sponsored the venue and food, and Scrum Sense the drinks.

There is a summary of his talk on the SUGSA site. If you want to get more serious, buy the book.

My message is: it’s not necessary to implement good software development practices like CI, unless you’d like to have a high-performing team!

We’re running public Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) and Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) courses in Midrand and Cape Town during June 2009.

Briefly:

CSPO Midrand 08-09 June
CSM Midrand 10-11 June
CSPO Cape Town 22-23 June
CSM Cape Town 24-25 June

The cost is R9900 per person, including VAT. All courses include Scrum Alliance certification and membership.

This is your opportunity to pump up your Scrum skills!

The next courses after these will be in August/September.

Click on Training in the menu or follow these links for course information, schedule and venue details and online registration.

Scott Ambler talking in Cape Town. For free! One of the Agile thought leaders, now working at IBM Rational. Also a notorious Scrum maligner. I had to go. If only to be equipped to do damage control. So I pitched up with as open a mind as any Scrum Coach and Trainer could…

After coffee and muffins, nearly 200 people filled the small Sports Science auditorium. Scott gave a discursive and entertaining three-hour talk that spanned a number of threads. His blunt style evoked laughter as the audience identified with many of his observations. Here are some of the things I heard him say - I think.

Myths and Facts

• Software development is an art rather than science with people rather than technology at its core.
• IT organisations all over the world are messed up in more-or-less the same ways; all making the same mistakes, due to all basing their way of working on the same set of false premises.
• They discover a problem, put a band-aid over it, discover another problem, fit another band aid and so on. Nothing actually gets fixed.
• Traditional project management is based on lying, and stakeholders know this.
• Earned value management is another lie - there is no value until the software is delivered. It is just not the right metric.
• The US has a $600 billion data quality problem. And it’s not getting smaller.
• We (IT) are not professionals - we don’t get respect from anybody.
• Most organisations choose to fail - it’s more comfortable to fail in familiar ways than to succeed in unfamiliar ways.
• Project retrospectives don’t work - the lessons ‘learned’ are not put into practice, because the project has ended and there is no longer motivation to do so.
• Doing things against natural human behaviour will always fail.
• Every hand-off is a risk and a point at which defects are introduced.
• Media richness theory tells us that the best way to communicate is face-to-face and the worst is via written documents.
• Change management is a euphemism for change prevention and is unethical.
• Logged defects older than a year are waste and should be deleted.
• The most valuable artefact to Agile developers is working software; the least valuable is Gantt charts.
• There is no statistical difference between the success of projects in organisations who implement the CMMI and those who don’t, whether Agile or not. There is a significant difference in success between Agile and not.
• Collocated Agile teams report a 79% project success rate compared with 73% who are “near located” and only 55% who are “far located” (requires air travel).
• Collocation results in increased job satisfaction.
• Near location often needs only a “decorating decision” to save 6% and payback is achieved in one week!
• Regarding distributed teams: (1) don’t; (2) observe Conway’s Law - distribute in relation to your architecture; and (3) use appropriate tools and techniques.
• Most distributed development is based on a lack of trust.
• Beware of off-shoring: if you’re failing now to manage your own people locally, there is no chance you will succeed in managing people off-shore.
• Fire the evil bastards who hang art on the wall in your IT department! Fill all walls with white boards or whote board wallpaper.
• A repeatable process in software development is nonsense. In every instance there will be changes for scaling, distribution, domain, people, …
• The bureaucrats are out of control…and so are the HR people!
• You can change your organisation [fix it] or you can change your organisation [move to another]!
• Lean (”optimise the whole”) helps explain why Agile works
• Two-thirds of software features built are rarely or never used (Standish report) - so don’t build them! The product backlog addresses the risk of building the wrong things.
• Business wants estimates in order to manage financial risk. Agile makes this unnecessary - we only have to fund one iteration (at a time).
• The iron triangle - one of scope, schedule and cost has to be variable; if you fix all three vertices, quality becomes the undesired variable.
• Traditional development is gambling! We need to remind management that they got burned in the past and there is (now) a better way.
• Fixed price work is unethical. As wannabe professionals we need to stand up to the bureaucratic treadmill.
• Every developer should attend a two-day “introduction to usability” course. And an “introduction to security” course.
• There are simple ways to refactor databases - to learn how, buy Scott’s book!

Call to Action

Scott made a clear call to action amongst IT and business managers in organisations:

1. Start experimenting with Agile. This is the easiest decision in decades for management to make! There is a very big upside with very little downside.
2. Train your people.
3. Get some help (coaching).

Despite his sniping at Scrum, I was pleasantly surprised at the sense he made. And I hope local organisations heed his call - my phone should ring off the hook on Monday…

I’ve been updating myself on the activites in the Prince2 camp to update this project management framework. One thing that stuck is the lamentations about the large number of PINO projects. PINO is an acronym (actually an initialism) for Prince In Name Only. In the Scrum world this has commonly been called ScrumButt, drawn from “we’re doing Scrum, but…” as well as the frequent desire to kick such teams in the butt!

Martin Fowler, one of Agile Manifesto signatories has blogged recently on “flaccid Scrum” (http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/FlaccidScrum.html). FWIW, I agree with him.

We must constantly remind ourselves (and those whom we seek to influence) that:

• Scrum is silent on which “software engineering” practices to use, but not on their use.
• We must continuously assess our way of working against the Agile principles.
• Undone work (aka technical debt) will continue to cripple delivery of value as long as we continue allow it to accumulate.
• Scrum is just a tool to expose deficiencies and dysfunction in the team and the organisation - the problems remain ours to tackle and solve.

So while we continue to battle our demons, how about honestly calling some Scrum implementations SINO (Scrum In Name Only)?

At the Scrum Gathering in Orlando last week Pete Behrens facilitated an Open Space session on “Metrics and Myths”. We considered four categories of measurements: productivity, quality, predictability and value. In each we each contributed measurements that are either “metrics” or “myths”. We stuck them up on a wall as you can see in the photos. In this first post I’m simply showing the pictures I took of the session. In subsequent posts, I aim to construct some reasoned arguments for a few Agile metrics Mike and I consider valuable to any organisation transitioning to Scrum.

Metrics & Myths

Right now I’m sitting at the back of the class while my good friend André is conducting an introduction workshop on ITSM (IT Service Management) using the ITIL framework at a major retailer.

He tells a story to illustrate the difference between incident management and problem management. The latter requires a root cause analysis. The aha! moment for me is when he says that root cause analysis is the start of a CM (Change Management) process.

I realise that Scrum is an ongoing change management process. In every daily Scrum meeting, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective the team (and stakeholders) inspect their work and their process and make adaptations to improve.

Scrum rules!

I was fortunate to attend the Scrum gathering last week. It was held at the impressive Gaylord Palms resort in Kissimmee, Orlando. I arrived early and spent Sunday visiting Disney’s nearby Epcot theme park.

Space Shuttle Discovery launch 2009.03.15 19:45

Planet Earth at Epcot

Our evening cocktail party, hosted by the PMI, was interrupted to observe the launch of the space shuttle Discovery at Kennedy Space Centre, some 50 km East of Orlando. Just before the 7:43 pm launch time we gathered on an East-facing balcony to watch. This was to be the last night-time launch of the shuttle as we know it. We weren’t disappointed.