silk and spinach

This week Wayne Allen is starting an experiment: one of his teams is going to drop the “traditional” agile approach of iterations and velocity, in favour of a kanban-style pull system with capped work in progress. The team will do no estimation, and the only metric for the department will be the average number of days required for a story to make it through the whole process.

I hope Wayne will keep us informed on the experiment’s progress and results, because I believe this is the kind of practical research that the agile world desperately needs right now. I suspect this kind of move could only be made in an organisation that has built up a deep reservior of trust in agile (and in Wayne); I wonder what other pre-requisites ar enecessary for kanban development to be acceptable (not to mention successful). I’m particularly interested the reactions of those who want to know what features are coming in which release at what date: Will they have less visibility of progress and planning information than before? Will they get nervous as a result? Or will they adapt their behaviour to the new throughput metric?

Hats off the Wayne and colleagues for trying this, and for anouncing the experiment publicly.

Last week Clarke Ching put his arse on the line by vouching for me and my work. Clarke does a great deal of fantastic work for the agile community, and I’m very flattered to receive such an amazing endorsement from him. Thanks Clarke!

Clarke Ching has now published the podcast of last Saturday’s Naked Agilists conference. You can download it by following the links from www.nakedagilists.com, or get it directly from Clarke’s blog. It’s a great 90 minutes of presentations and discussions, and the Naked Agilists website has links to the slides so you can follow the presentations along with the speakers.

We had five 10-minute presentations:

1. Servant Leaders — Nancy van Schooenderwoert
2. wevouchfor.org — Laurent Bossavit
3. Fit4Data — Adrian Mowat
4. Shared data for unit tests — Paul Wilson
5. Let them Eat Cake — Brian Marick

And after each little session we had 5-minutes of discussion and Q&A. Also taking part in these discussions were Clarke, who chaired the whole thing expertly, me, and Willem van den Ende, who helped put the show together (as did Brian Marick).

Join the Naked Agilists mailing list to find out when the next event will be — and help us find an inexpensive technology that will make it live and interactive!

One of the highlights of Saturday’s NakedAgilists conference was a discussion of wevouchfor.org. This is a website being developed principally by Laurent Bossavit and Brian Marick, on which members of the (agile) software community can certify each others’ work. It’s a response to last year’s debates about “certification” programmes, and represents an attempt to move towards evidence-based peer certification.

wevouchfor.org looks like a great idea, but it will only work if a lot of us (maybe even most of us) use it. I recommend you listen to the discussion on the NakedAgilists podcast, or simply visit wevouchfor.org, sign up and vouch for someone…

Since our last great adventure in April 2007 it seems that Skypecasts have gone down the toilet somewhat. In fact, during our tests for tonight’s conference we never successfully managed to get more than one person in the Skypecast! So while we look around for decent technology for next time, tonight’s event will instead be a closed call, to be recorded and podcasted later.

We have a great line-up of speakers doing 5- or 10-minutes slots: You can see the programme at www.nakedagilists.com, and that’s also where we’ll post the podcast after the event.

Our deepest apologies if you were hoping to attend “in person”, but that’s just impossible this time around. (If you can help us find reliable technology and a reasonable price, please join the discussion on our mailing list.)

Welcome to the latest edition of the Carnival of the Agilists, the blogroll that skims the cream from the top of the agile blogsphere. This week’s theme is: a bumper bag of liquorice allsorts…

Brian Marick has posted the transcript of his OOPSLA talk in several parts. Part 3 discusses Pasteur’s attempts to educate the French about the causes of anthrax, and relates that to a fun idea for energizing daily stand-up meetings: “another example of using a weirdo theory from sociologists to give myself ideas.” Meanwhile Mark Levison has revived his team’s iteration boundaries by introducing good agendas: “By breaking things down into smaller more focused chunks the new agenda (and prompting questions) has made our retrospectives more valuable”. Dale Emery also chips in on the subject of efficiency, with a great discussion of the causes of multitasking: “If I split my time among all six tasks, I get to tell all six people every day that I’m making progress on their important tasks. And I get to be sincere about that”. (I have no idea why this post appeared in my RSS reader this week, as it was written over two years ago. Still, it fits here and its still very relevant today; think of it as this Carnival’s “Two Years Ago This Week” entry…)

Both Mark Levison and Dave Rooney discuss the downsides of working remotely from the team. And while Mark (and his commenters) provides a list of tools and techniques to help improve communications, Dave’s top tip is: “Remind your significant other that hay and shavings from the rabbit’s cage shouldn’t be washed down the drain in the laundry room.”. Now why didn’t that practice make it into the white book?

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock reports on the findings of a workshop that discussed Challenges When Communicating Designs: “I started by making the connection between telling others about designs and storytelling. Effective designers need to tell good stories. And the tone and means by which we communicate design ideas should vary depending on the reasons we have for telling a particular story, and our audience’s background and expectations”. Now I think about it, the great developers I’ve worked with are all great story-tellers too; Rebecca’s discussion suggests that’s no coincidence.

Michael Feathers’ latest addition to the Beautiful Code blog is a post entitled Elegant Byte Counting, which centres on the use of the SpecialCase pattern to solve a tricky little code duplication problem: “This is a particularly elegant way of handling things. Rather than having separate code to traverse writable things for size and write, all of the work can be done with the same piece of code, the write method. There’s less duplication and less possibility of error in maintenance.” There are nowhere near enough of these great little design vignettes around, in my opinion.

After the summer-long debates about certification of various sorts, Willem van den Ende has discovered that you’ll make more money if you are not certified. He quotes Mark Gallaher thus: “A new report from industry research firm Foote Partners LLC finds that the average pay for noncertified IT skills topped that for certified professionals [...]“. Less is more, it seems.

And finally…

The calls-for-participation have been published for both Agile 2008 and Scotland on Rails. Give them a look and submit a few sessions — I know I will!

To suggest items for a future carnival - especially from a blog we haven’t featured before - email us at agilists.carnival@gmail.com. As ever, this and all previous editions of the Carnival are catalogued at the Agile Alliance website. Look out for the next edition of the Carnival around the end of November, hosted by Pete Behrens.

For this year’s AgileNorth 1-day conference we’re moving to a new venue - the Palace Hotel in the centre of Manchester. We’re putting the finishing touches to the programme this week, and we’ve managed to keep the delegate rate frozen at 95 GBP, an absolute bargain!

This year’s event will feature session tracks on “business” and “technical” aspects of agile software development, together with keynotes, plenary sessions and plenty of networking opportunities. If you’re in the North of England and you’re interested in agile, AgileNorth ‘07 is the place to be!

For details of the event visit http://agilenorth.net. And join our mailing list to hear further announcements, including details of the full conference programme as they become available.

My apologies if this has been said or written a thousand times before: YAGNI is XP’s way of exploiting the constraint.

Which means that XP, and hence most agile methods, are set up on the assumption that the development team is - or soon will be - the bottleneck. And having identified that bottleneck, our first task is to EXPLOIT it - that is, we make sure that the bottleneck resource only works on stuff that contributes to overall throughput. YAGNI and test-driven development do that. Oh, and a relentless pursuit of quality, so that the bottleneck doesn’t have to spend time on rework. And effective communication, so we get to spend more time developing and less time writing documents and attending meetings. And tight feedback loops, so that we can identify which stuff is valuable and which isn’t.

Next we must SUBORDINATE the whole flow to the pace of the bottleneck. Fixed-length iterations help us to measure that pace, and the various forms of planning game and iteration commitment help to prevent work arriving too fast.

And only when all of that is working well is it safe to ELEVATE the constraint, perhaps by expanding the size of the team. I’m fairly sure I’ve never seen a real-life case in which this step was required. For most of my engagements, successfully exploiting the bottleneck caused the constraint to move elsewhere; and in the rest, the SUBORDINATE step revealed a deeper constraint elsewhere in the organisation.

Brian Marick emailed me to ask whether the Carnival has an RSS feed. The simple answer is ‘no’, but there are several services around that will allow you to subscribe to a search for Carnival of the Agilists articles - Technorati or Google, for example. In fact, either of these is likely to be more foolproof than relying on us to always remember to tag our carnival posts correctly.

Almost a year ago InfoQ carried an interview with Jim Johnson of the Standish Group, in which Jim used a term I hadn’t heard before:

“InfoQ:

Agile must bring in new issues: how do you say when “planned” scope is accomplished, for a project using adaptive planning?

JJ:

That’s a good question. With companies like Webex, Google, Amazon, eBay, it’s a challenge - they’re doing something called “pipelining” instead of releases. “Whatever is done in 2 weeks, we’ll put that up.” They’re successful because users only get small, incremental changes. And their implementation is proven - remember, some projects only fail after the coding is finished, at the implementation step.

InfoQ:

Pipelining? Sounds like variable scope..

JJ:

Yes. It’s very enlightening to work on variable scope - it makes people a lot happier to see things getting done. People like to see progress and results, and Agile embodies that.”

The metaphor “pipelining” is interesting, and at first I liked the different slant it gave me on incremental delivery. But having lived with it now for a couple of days I’m no longer so sure. The image of the relentless drip-drip-drip of new features is compelling, but the metaphor conjures no representation of the growing system or product. In my mind’s eye I’ve always likened software development to building a space-station: because there’s no gravity we can add, remove or rebuild any part we wish. The time-lapse film of our activites would show something that was unmistakably space-station-ish from day one, whose features and capabilities gradually expand like a flower opening. (There - I just used a simile to help explain a metaphor; who said language was dead!)

Anyway, “pipelining” as a metaphor seems to me now to offer an incomplete view of agile/lean development. And building space-stations seems to be more fun, too.

(Hat tip to C. Keith Ray for the link.)