Scrum is just a tool! You choose when and how to use it. Don’t be a slave to it!

I really like the treatment that Henrik Kniberg has given when contrasting Kanban vs. Scrum. He expresses a dialog that is not too dis-similar to conversations I have heard especially in fire-fighting environments that are asked to shoehorn Scrum as this is best thing since sliced bread. Okay, that is a bit of a stretch, as I can do without Scrum but not without food!.

From what I have seen, this shoehorning occurs as usually the impetus is to conform to a mandate coming from a higher authority within an organization. This is usually management needing to use a common methodology by which all business operations that are delivering projects. This being most acute with groups that interface with Engineering teams, where Scrum is usually rolled out first. I’ll go out on a limb here and say Scrum isn’t a methodology. Sure it is a framework of iterative practices to deliver quality product (or services) in small batches. This is aimed to be in concert with the customer, so the customer gets exactly what they want and when they want it. The practices are one of team work and really fostered as bottoms-up approach to solving problems of delivering projects (products or services) that otherwise far often then not have failed to materialize value to the customer as either they are too late to market, at times the wrong thing at the wrong time, or just too costly to be of benefit.

The problem with the top-down approach suggested by mandates I refer to are – that they do not see the whole picture in terms of work flow within an environment. Sure this is a tactical issue of The how? as opposed to The why? when it comes to shoehorning any set of practices, including Scrum. By the way don’t get me wrong, mandates can be a good thing for kick starting change as much as getting everyone pulling the oar in the same direction, and hopefully the right direction. Scrum truly helps in this as it quickly surfaces issues that block team work and allows one to steer the team and potentially organization in the right direction if error is made in charting the wrong direction. I have also witnessed an initial shoehorning exercise where a divisional group lead would say “we just need to do is speak the same vernacular of Scrum that the Engineering teams were doing”, and by implication this will make the group Agile!. If this isn’t cargo cult behaviour then what is?

So you can see why I like the line Scrum is just a tool! You choose when and how to use it. Don’t be a slave to it! is the nub of what Henrik has stated. This is to say one may need to shape and customize how Scrum is practiced in your environment, this includes your Engineering environment and not just roll it out of the box. In order to customize this you’ll first need to identify and analyze some of the first order problems you are seeing in your environment and you wish to solve. It is not enough just to say “we want to deliver quality products or services first to market to our customers”. Tell me who doesn’t want to do that! Scratch this surface statement and ask what is it that is holding you back from doing this today, and which of the Agile work practices such as Scrum or Kanban (Scrum on steroids) mustered in software development environments by XP & TDD practices will best help overcome some of these impediments. Don’t kid yourself with tools of technology if fundamentally communication or timely decision making are the real problems. You’ll need to be honest to yourself at the team level, as well as at the organizational level when dealing with the gap in the Knowing & Doing of what are two critical components leading to less then stellar project work outcomes.

Based on my experience with software development and service operations teams I have to say the pull practices of Kanban, initially instrumented with WIP (work in progress) limits is a better starting point. To some this may be getting teams to swim in the deep end, in truth no more so than taking on a fresh graduate or a new employee and saying okay you are part of the following team. If there is no nurturing in the work practices in your particular environment then one only sees cargo cult behaviour when it comes to Scrum.

In conclusion, I firmly agree Scrum is just a tool!. You choose when and how to use it. Don’t be a slave to it!. Which means weave in team work practices such as Kanban and foster software development teams to adopt XP, TDD as part of the overall Agile framework that you need. The need being defined by the set of first order problems related to team work (individual) and Team Work (organizational) that you as part of a group are trying to solve.

As for the organizational team it will be of great help if you also map the value chain within your organization. This map addresses all the functions that are involved in product or service life cycle, from both the customer view point as well an internal view point. After all customer doesn’t see or experience all the pieces of the jigsaw that brings value to them. Use Lean principles to guide the Agile practices you are adopting and refine these based on your and the teams experience. After all much like a car engine that has to be tuned to match the organizational & team culture, with culture change being on a relatively slow time scale. Which means be patient with the teams and don’t rush to refine before you have some real evidence from the Teams in what is working and what isn’t. Most of all be pragmatic in your approach for nurturing Agile practices, and take great care not to read into the tea leaves of statistics of How well Teams (organizational level) are doing? based on a voting turn out in internal surveys that are lower then the turn out at a U.S election. I have witnessed this too, from those who have a vested interest in calling out the success of the fruits of their labor of rolling out Agile practices. Sure is difficult to be independent even in a Scrum and an Agile environment!.

As for pragmatic, I mean use base principles such as Lean to support the decision making and tune the Agile practices in your software development or otherwise work environment. These principles are tried and tested in many situations, from Lean manufacturing, construction to Lean Health care – and as such not unique for software development. Many have expressed the Lean principles, and currently I am using the following mnemonic D.E.A.D B.S.E (hey, this has nothing to do with the mad cow disease, far from it. It sure is a guide to preventing the effects of this within software development teams ):

• Dilver as fast as possible
• Eliminate Waste
• Amplify Learning
• Delay Decision making
• Build in Integrity
• See the Whole
• Empower the Team

as a reminder to help any team that has to make a decision on some issue that hasn’t been previously encountered and past experience and know how does not point to a clear choice amongst a selection of options. It allows the team to shape Scrum practices and frames a more constructive team discussion then does knowing and doing the Scrum practices alone.

Scrum and XP from the Trenches – a great Scrum Master & Scrum Team notebook, pragmatic with common sense practice for using Scrum

Well, I just finished reading Scrum and XP from the Trenches, by Henrik Kniberg. I found my experience resonated with all the practices that is documented in this scrum masters notebook - a common sense approach to the tactical work of Scrum. I highly recommend this those new to Agile and specifically Scrum. You don’t have to be a Scrum Master to make use of this. Its a fast read with a journey into how Henrik and his teams practiced Scrum. He expresses situations they encountered and what they experimented with. he is good enough to share what was thought of but hadn’t been tried out at the time. The good part of a lightweight framework and practice of Scrum is that you can adapt it to your environment, and as the situation changes tailor the practice to best suit your needs. You don’t have to worry about the Scrum Police, mind you like everything else in life there are purist who insist on practices that they consider a must, of course this contradicts Agile. You can use Lean to assert the Scrum practices that your team is successfully using and living up to the need for transparency, continuous learning and improvement as a result, rapid delivery of what the customer values.

I have no doubt in my mind that you will pick some good practices, as for the best practices well that is for you to work out with your team taking into account your environment (company and team culture, business needs etc.) – context is everything!

As for the must haves (listed below), they are indeed a best practice. The thing about a best practice is that there is no time like now! to start doing

• The Product Owner must have a Product Backlog with estimates created by the team
• The team must have a Burndown chart and know their velocity

Is this a requirement for Scrum ? – A must have ….. Part II

So here is the Part II, a continuation to Part I, where I raised the couple of must haves that have been expressed in Scrum as measured by the iterative Nokia standards – ref: Scrum and XP from the Trenches, by Henrik Kniberg. Just as a reminder the two must haves were stated as:

• The Product Owner must have a Product Backlog with estimates created by the team
• The team must have a Burndown chart and know their velocity

The first of these was dealt with in Part I, so:

• What of the team must have a Burndown chart and know their velocity?

Burndown charts are unique to a team, given the mix of talent and experience, and in reality they are not forward looking – which is to say allowing one to project what is expected in the next sprint based on current burndown chart. They really are a record of past performance and really a barometer in highlighting the anomalies that may have occurred during the sprint that blocked the team achieving what they had planned. During the sprint it is used to signal to the team to make decisions of reallocating resources within the team, doubling down on the most difficult area as well as having the reality check in terms of scope that was targeted for the sprint. This is after all agile in practice, making good sound decisions to support what needs to be done in order to get the team back on its course to meet its commitments. Really I’d like to say such occasions are rare, but the truth is far from this. Lets remind ourselves that the endeavor of software and system development, and really the realm that knowledge and creative workers play in is not a production line, often there are managers who loose sight of this. So at times like this, when decisions are being made, it is helpful for the team to think lean. Ideally one wants the team to think lean through out all iterations, but in particular get into the practice of putting their hat of lean thinking when ever weighing up decisions to address how can the team best to reach the goals that they have committed to. As I said sometimes this may mean doubling down with resources from within the team on a particular task at other times the hard reality may be that the team has overloaded the plate and can’t possibly consume all that in time boxed for the current iteration. The hard reality of decision making may mean delaying the release, this may be especially true if the rhythm of release in your environment is of high frequency, say every week or two weeks versus every three or four months.

So what about knowing your velocity. Let me start by some basic physics, velocity is a vector, it has a direction and magnitude. The magnitude is measured as speed – you know in m/s. Fundamentally given my Engineering and Physics background I have a problem with the loose use of this term to connote what a team is capable of accomplishing as number of story points delivered per iteration or in the macro view story points delivered per release. Aside this objection, one wants to be smart about using this metric in predicting and really looking forward as to what the team is capable of accomplishing. I say smart, as far to often variables that have a strong bearing on this metric may have changed. For instance my experience has been that the team complement changes after one of two releases, or for that matter the release cycle changes, and or most critically one hasn’t sized the backlog to the same standard. After all this is not the repeat cycle of building the same widget over and over. For the greater part there is variability in developing something different but for only using similar patterns that one may have encountered when developing earlier items of the backlog. Even when this is the case there may be new set of complexities that were just not present previously. Far too often stakeholders do a linear intra/extrapolation and then confront the team with the 64,000 dollar question – why not as much as previous releases? Some see it as holding the teams feet to the fire, thats one way to make stew!

My good sense says be pragmatic with use of this metric; first monitor it over a reasonable period of time. Then use statistical methods of measuring standard deviation about the mean that the team should try to achieve. One can set the lower and upper limits that are 6 sigma from the mean in this metric as the boundary points for the pessimistic and optimistic with the mean value representing the most likely in size for delivery during a release. Over time, with the team maturing as a work unit the tolerance may be narrowed down to 3 sigma thus giving higher fidelity in the estimates of what the deliverables are going to look like. In essence work with the team to establish this metric pointing out the use it is going to be put to as there are supporting cast besides the Product Owner, such as Sales, Marketing and Capacity planning, who are in the business of drumming up more customers for the product as well as setting expectations to existing customers.

Fundamentally, are these truly must haves, sure for high performing teams, but such teams are not build in a day or by virtue of few days spent in training on Scrum or one other Agile practices. Truth be told more often then not it is both the organizational and/or team culture that one has to foster in order to achieve teams to become high performing teams in nature. Let me know which team doesn’t want to become high performing and is this even a willful act on the part of the team? – Possibly in an environment that has fostered the wrong culture, but for most part these must haves are a work in progress. By the way these must haves are not the only metrics of measure to assert a team with the title of high performing in nature. I will save this topic for another day.

Is this a requirement for Scrum ? – A must have ….. Part I

I am reading Scrum and XP from the Trenches, by Henrik Kniberg. This is the online edition, written couple of years ago, so I am catching up on some reading what can I say?. Anyways, in a forward for the book, Jeff Sutherland conveys a story from a London conference where there was a discussion about Google’s implementation of Scrum. By the sounds of this discussion this is not Google specific, as there were others who must have participated in this discussion. Jeff had asked questions relating to how many were doing Scrum and really iterative development by Nokia standards. This standard apparently asserts, amongst other things:

• The Product Owner must have a Product Backlog with estimates created by the team
• The team must have a Burndown chart and know their velocity

These two must haves in Scrum as measured by the iterative Nokia standard are interesting, and I will address these in 2 parts, as they open up the following questions:

• When is the Product Backlog considered to be true backlog given that estimates from the team are required to make it so?

Surely the role of the Product Owner is responsible in developing a meaningful product backlog that has been prioritized. When I say meaningful, it means this has been written in a form of User stories (including epics). This backlog is prioritized based on the following needs:

• expressed by customer(s)
• identified as gaps in the market place that not only differentiates the product amongst its competitors, but critically appear on the product roadmap as having strategic value

In a sense the backlog is providing the scope horizon for the product. Clearly in the A, B, C of steps to follow, the items of highest priority on the product backlog will have been reviewed by the team, broken down further if need be and sized with estimates on an arbitrary number scale that the team has agreed on to represent as a common measure. This is a relative scale uniquely representative for this team, it expresses the mix of skills, experience and appetite for risk that this team has – which by the way is unlikely to be represented exactly in the same way by another team. So, during the sizing exercise, which usually takes place during formal planning meetings but there is no reason why a Scrum team can’t decide to size a story one or or more (based on some agreed rule by the team) per week during the current sprint. When ever needed I encourage this practice with the mindset that “a story or two sized keeps long planning sessions at bay” – okay it isn’t as good as an apple a day keeps a dentist away.

Based on my experience to date I have found this practice has been a sustainable approach to having a backlog that is primed for the next sprint. Don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating a long head with detailed planned backlog, clearly this would not be lean not to mention as a process it doesn’t bind the team with commitment in mind either. Lets say, just do enough planning to help prime part of the next sprint. In the mean time the Product Owner, who after all has been interfacing with the customers and has identified what is being valued and needed in the market place can seed the remaining backlog with estimates for size. This helps express the target of what can be expected that is of value for the next release, and in turn allowing other stakeholders from such quarters as engineering, operations, support, sales and marketing to influence and help refine this target. One can expect to have discussions, where you have multiple product teams, around cross dependencies that are going to impact teams and as a result having to reset priorities or refine the product backlog in order to mitigate the impact.

When it comes to estimates for size, it is well known from traditional Project Management techniques that using single point estimates for sizing just doesn’t work. It is far better to make use of statistical estimation, using 3 point estimates and if need be Z scores for % of confidence level to support the basis of the estimate. In the 3 point estimate one can cover the bases of pessimistic, optimistic and most likely estimates accounting for the expert viewpoint, the individual who is committing to do the work and the voice of caution addressing the risks be it in terms of resources available to accomplish all the testing that may be needed to verify and validate the functionality.

So really the conclusion I, and really many others have long ago come to is that the Product backlog is to be imagined as a pebble being dropped in a pool of water. When this occurs, it creates a set of waves some of these are of relative high amplitude, marking close proximity to the center, and then others of relative low amplitude further away you are from the center. The larger ripples closer to the point of drop means greater information being made available, this information has higher fidelity of knowledge supporting it and in contrast to ripples at the edge of the echo where information is imprecise and of low fidelity. Yes the Product backlog is a mix, with higher priority items floating to the top and as these float up they are adorned with more information, including decomposing epic level backlog into component backlog as well as having attributes such as acceptance criterion’s that customers will measure their need being satisfied to.

As for the second must have I will address this in the follow on article.