Posts Tagged ‘agile process’
SBWA – Scrum By Walking Around
If you’ve been in the software business long enough, you’ve probably seen just about every methodology. Waterfall, RAD, OOP and Agile, just to name a few, have all been at the forefront of methodology circles, each briefly having its place as ‘the’ methodology, the One Right Way of doing software development. As different as these methods may be, they all have one thing in common: without execution by talented engineers, none are worth the paper they are printed on. Which brings me to the topic of this post. If you’ve settled on one of the agile methodologies and are using scrum to manage your engineering projects, you may encounter more than just a little resistance from engineers when switching to daily stand-ups and burndown charts. Beyond training, there’s one often overlooked practice that can help socialize the idea and practice of scrum inside your team – talking to people.
The daily walkaround that most managers engage in isn’t designed to randomly annoy engineers. Rather, it is one of the most proven methods of management – management by walking around, or MBWA. This simple practice ensures that you and your team members talk face to face, semi-privately at least once a day, partly to get caught up on activities, and partly to socialize new ideas. If the new idea is scrum, you might want to try a variation on MBWA that I call SBWA – Scrum By Walking Around.
The idea is simple. You’ve trained the team, but the daily scrums aren’t going well. People are missing their commitments, and the burndown chart seems to be flaming up like tech stocks in the good old days. Engineers are frustrated, and their frustration is partly directed at you for advocating YAM – Yet Another Methodology. If this is your situation, you need to do a better job of socializing scrum among your team members. There’s no better time to do this than during your daily walkaround.
Try this: plan your walkaround to take place in the hour before the daily scrum. As you visit each engineer, ask them how they feel the new methodology is going, and take lots of mental notes. Then spend a minute reinforcing the key goals of scrum: accountability to commitments, visible progress measures, and short term rigidity combined with long term flexibility. Later, after the scrum is over but before everyone leaves the room, share the concerns that you’ve gathered privately from your walkaround, and get everyone to agree on a plan of action to address the issues. Chances are that there are a few common concerns that everyone has. By getting these out in the open, it signals to the team that you’re responsive to them, and not just another pointy-haired paper-pushing process wonk.
The Truth About Agile
When you work for a company, it’s important to align your goals with the company goals. In software engineering firms, that often means setting a goal to be adept at your coding job while following the company practices and development processes. If one of those processes happens to be agile development, strange things can happen when engineers try to ‘get with the program’ (coding pun intended!) Engineering managers at software companies, read on to learn how to help your team adjust to agile.
I think there’s a good reason why engineers can sometimes have a hard time adjusting to and adopting agile. The truth about agile as applied at software development companies is that it is not a software development process. It is a product management process, fundamentally designed to feed prioritized, must-do requirements to engineering teams. Once an engineering team has these requirements in front of them, individual engineers may find it hard to distinguish life before from life with agile. Someone, a manager or scrum master, asks the engineer to commit to doing some work. If the team is using scrum and doing short 2-week sprints, then engineer gets to give the most tried and true answer in software development: yup, it’ll take about 2 weeks. And then they put their heads down and start coding. Every morning they stand up at the daily scrum and say ‘yup, it’ll take till the end of those two weeks I told you about yesterday and the day before…’. From an engineer’s point of view, this interaction can be indistinguishable from their behavior under older methodologies like waterfall, and therein lies the rub.
For engineers to really commit to agile, they need to be told another truth. The hard truth in the software business is that it is market driven – and thus the real goals of a company from a product perspective are and should be defined and socialized internally by the marketing department. What agile really does for a company is to force marketing – product management, specifically – to constantly engage with engineering at a fine-grained level. Reviewing requirements, crafting stories, building a global, prioritized backlog. In other words, doing real work to ensure that requirements are understood and that new information on customer needs and market direction is properly reflected in the backlog priorities.
To successfully socialize agile within engineering, there are three things a manager must communicate to their team:
1. Priorities change
2. Team and individual commitments do not
3. Our process moves as fast as the market
The good thing about agile is that it is self-reinforcing with respect to these three points. By doing short sprints, changing priorities become an evident norm. Unlike waterfall, where an incoming course change forces developers to drop what they’re doing and work on something new, agile maintains current commitments until the end of the sprint, reinforcing point number two. When a course change comes in in agile, the next planned sprint can immediately reflect this, highlighting point number three.
Agile isn’t hard or easy. But it is different. By communicating clearly to your team about how priorities are reached, holding them and yourself to commitments, and adeptly shifting gears as your customer and market priorities change, you will improve your success with agile and win over even the most process-skeptical engineers on your team.
Getting your software tools ready for agile
Just to kick-start this site, here is a link to a post I did for the company I work for, AccuRev, Inc. It is a summary of a webinar that I participated in recently as a panelist about proper tooling for Agile Software Development. The webinar covered how to evaluate your development toolset, particularly SCM (software configuration management), to get ready for agile. (I’m the Technical Marketing Manager at AccuRev. Opinions expressed herein are my own, etc.)
Technistas 