Continuous - Allan Kelly

Big and small, resolving contradition

Agile, Continuous / allan kelly / February 1, 2024 / agile, backlog

Have I been confusing you? Have I been contradictory? Remember my blog from two weeks back – Fixing agile failure: collaboration over micro-management? Where I talked about the evils of micro-management and working towards “the bigger thing.” Then, last week, I republished my classic Diseconomies of Scale where I argue for working in the small. Small or big?

Actually, my contradiction goes back further than that. It is actually lurking in Continuous Digital were I also discuss “higher purpose” and also argue for diseconomies of scale a few chapters later. There is a logic here, let me explain.

When it comes to work, work flow, and especially software development there is merit in working in the small and optimising processes to do lots of small: small stories, small tasks, small updates, small releases, and so on. Not only can this be very efficient – because of diseconomies – but it is also a good way to debug a process. In the first instance it is easier to see problems and then it is easier to fix them.

However, if you are on the receiving end of this it can be very dispiriting. It becomes what people call “micro management” and that is what I was railing against two weeks ago. To counter this it is important to include everyone doing the work in deciding what the work is, give everyone a voice and together work to make things better.

Yet, the opposite is also true: for every micro-manager out there taking far too much interest in work there is another manager who is not interested in the work enough to consider priorities, give feedback or help remove obstacles. For these people all those small pieces of work seem like trivia and they wonder why anyone thinks they are worth their time?

When working in the small its too easy to get lost in the small – think of all those backlogs stuffed with hundreds of small stories which nobody seems to be interested in. What is needed is something bigger: a goal, an objective, a mission, a BHAG, MTP… what I like to call a Higher Purpose.

Put the three ideas together now: work in the small, higher purpose and teams.

There is a higher purpose, some kind of goal your team is working towards, perhaps there is more than one goal, they may be nested inside one another. The team move towards that goal in very small steps by operating a machine which is very effective at doing small things: do something, test, confirm, advance and repeat. These two opposites are reconciled by the team in the middle: it is the team which shares the goal, decides what to do next and moves towards it. The team has authority to pursue the goal in the best way they can.

In this model there is even space for managers: helping set the largest goals, working as the unblocker on the team, giving feedback in the team and outside, working to improve the machine’s efficiency, etc. Distributing authority and pushing it down to the lowest level doesn’t remove managers, like so much else it does make problems with it more visible.

Working in the small is only possible if there is some larger, overarching, goal to be worked towards. So although it can seem these ideas are contradictory the two ideas are ultimately one.

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Why I don’t like pre-work (planning, designing, budgetting)

Continuous, Requirements / allan kelly / December 12, 2023 / workflow

You might have noticed in my writing that I have a tendency to rubbish the “Before you do Z you must do Y” type argument. Pre-work. Work you should do before you do the actual work. Planning, designing, budgeting, that sort of thing.

Why am I such a naysayer?

Partly this comes from a feeling that given any challenge it is always possible to say “You should have done something before now” – “You missed a step” – “If you had done what you were supposed to do you wouldn’t have this problem.” Most problems would be solve already, or would never have occurred, if someone had done the necessary pre-work.

There is always something you should have done sooner but, without a time machine, that isn’t very useful advice. Follow this line of reasoning and before you know it there is a great big process of steps to be done. Most people don’t have the discipline, or training, to follow such processes and mistakes get made. The bigger the process you have the more likely it is to go wrong.

However, quite often, the thing you should have done can still be done. Maybe you didn’t take time to ask customers what they actually wanted before you started building but you could still go and ask. Sure it might mean you have to undo something (worst case: throw it away) but at least you stop making the wrong thing bigger. Doing things out of order may well make for more work, and more cost, but it is still better than not doing it at all.

Some of my dislike simply comes from my preference. Like so many other people, I like to get on and do something: why sit around talking about something when we should be doing! I’m not alone in that. While I might be wrong to rush to action it is also wrong to spend so long talking that you never do it, “paralysis by analysis.” Add to that, when someone is motivated to do something its good to get on and do something, build on the motivation. Saying “Hold on, before you …” may mean the moment is missed, the enthusiasm and motivation is lost.

So, although there is a risk in charging in there is also a risk in not acting.

Of all the things that you might do to make work easier once you start “properly” some will be essential and some till not. Some pre-work just seems like a good idea. One way to determine what is essential is to get on with the work and do the essentially when get to them. Just-in-time.

For example, before you begin a piece of work, it is a really good idea to talk about the acceptance criteria – “what does success look like?” If you pick up a piece of work and find that there are no acceptance criteria you could say “Sorry, I can’t do this, someone needs to set criteria and then I’ll do it” or you could go and find the right person and have the conversation there and then. When some essential pre-work is missing it becomes job number 1 to do when you do do the work.

Finally, another reason I dislike pre-work is the way it interacts with money.

There are those who consider pre-work unnecessary and will not allocate money to do it (“Software design costs time and money, just code.”) If instead of seeing pre-work as distinct from simply doing the work then it is all part of the same thing: rather than allocate a few hours for design weeks before you code simply do the design for the first few hours of the work. That way, making the pre-work into a just-in-time activity you remove the possibility the work is cancelled or that it changes.

My other gripe with money is the way, particularly in a project setting, pre-work is accounted for differently. You see this in project organizations where nobody is allowed to do anything practical until the budget (and a budget code) is created for the work. But the work that happens before then seems to be done for free: there is an unlimited budget for planning work which might be done.

Again, rather than see the pre-work – planning, budgeting, designing, etc. – as something distinct that happens before the work itself just make it part of the work, and preferably do it first.

Ultimately, I’m not out to bad pre-work, I can see that it is valuable and I can see that done in advance it can add more value. Its just that you can’t guarantee it is done, if we build a system that doesn’t depend on pre-work being done first, then the system is more robust.

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More Continuous #NoProjects questions

Agile, Agile Process, Continuous / allan kelly / October 24, 2018

Three short questions and answers to finish off my series of left over questions about #NoProjects, #NoEstimates and the Continuous model.

Q4: How do we prioritize and organize requests on a product that are from opposite business owners? – for example legal (who wants to reduce the risk and annoy more customers) and sales (who want to increase the features and simplify life) can be arbitrated in a backlog?

You can think of this as “which is worth more apples or milk?” It is difficult to compare two things which are actually different. Yes they are both work requests – or fruit – and each can make a case but at the end of the day you can’t make everything number 1 priority.

In real life we solve this problem with money.

Walk into your local supermarket. Apples, oranges and milk are both price in the same currency, sterling for me, Francs for the person who asked this question, maybe Euro’s or Dollars for you. So if we can assign value points to each request we are half way to solving the problem.

Now sales will argue that without their request there is no real money so whatever they ask for is worth more. And legal will argue that nobody wants to go to jail so their request must be worth more. You can set your analyst to work to calculate a value but a) this will take time and b) even when they have an answer people will dispute it.

Therefore, I would estimate a value – planning poker style. With an estimates value there is no pretence of “right” or “correct”. Each party gives a position and a discussion follows. With luck the different sides converge, if they don’t then I average. Once all requests are valued you have a first cut at prioritisation.

Q5: How to evaluate the number of people you need to maintain software?

I don’t. This is a strategic decision.

Sure someone somewhere needs to decide how much capacity – often expressed as people – will be allocated to a particular activity but rather than base this on need I see this as another priority decision. If a piece of software is important to an organization then it deserves more maintenance, and if it is not important it deserves less.

You could look at the size of the backlog, or the rate of new requests and contrast this with the rate at which work gets done. This would allow you to come up with an estimate of how many people are needed to support a product. But where is the consideration of value?

Instead you say something like: “This product is a key part of our business but the days of big changes are gone. Therefore one person will be assigned to look after the software.”

If in three months more people in the business are demanding more changes to the software and you can see opportunities to extract more value – however you define value – then that decision might be revised. Maybe a second person is assigned.

Or maybe you decide that maintaining this product isn’t delivering more value so why bother? Reduce work to only that needed to keep it going.

Q6: How do you evaluate the fact that your application becomes twice as fast (or slower) when you add a new feature in a short period of time?

Answering this question requires that the team has a clearly defined idea of what value is. Does the organization value execution speed? Does the organization value up-time? Does the organization value capacity?

Hopefully some of this will have come out of the value estimation exercise in Q4, if not the analysis is just going to take a bit longer. The thing to remember is: what does the change do for the business/customers/clients? Being faster is no use in itself, but doing X faster can be valuable.

The real problem here is time. Some changes lead to improvements which can be instantly measured. But there are plenty of changes where the improvements take time to show benefit. Here you might need to rely on qualitative feedback in the short run (“Sam says it is easier to use because it is faster”). Still I would keep trying to evaluate what happens and see if you can make some quantitive assessment later.

Notice that Q4 and Q6 are closely related. If you have a clear understanding of why you are doing something (Q4) then it becomes easier to tell if you have delivered the expected value (Q6). And in trying to understand what value you have delivered then you refine your thinking about the value you might deliver with future work.

Another feedback cycle.

These questions concludes the series of question carried over from the #NoEstimates/#NoProjects workshop in Zurich – see also How should we organize our teams? – Dealing with unplanned but urgent work – How do we organise with a parallel team? – if you would like me to answer your question in this blog then please just e-mail me.

The #NoProjects books Project Myopia and Continuous Digital discuss these and similar issues in depth and are both available to buy in electronic or physical form from Amazon.

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How do we organise with a parallel team?

Agile, Continuous / allan kelly / September 25, 2018 / 3 Comments

2) Offshoring – When Project meets #NoProject
In our department, we maintain products, … we deliver small features. In parallel, we have some offshore teams working in traditional project mode
The hard part comes when we need to integrate/merge our code. We have different cycles, schedules and objectives. How do we manage code handover code from offshore? – we feel we are inheriting a pack of legacy and tech debt that is added to our own stack.
No matter the handover contract agreement we set, … they don’t make the right choices for a long term maintenance vision.
They deliver the requested features, it works from a business point of view, but they deliver it in a way that can be difficult to maintain in production.
Of course, they do not maintain it, so they don’t have the experience of it.

This is the second question carried over from the #NoEstimates/#NoProjects workshop in Zurich last month.

While the question is phrased as “working with offshoring” I don’t see this as an offshore specific question. I think the question is about working with a second team, a team which does not hold maintenance responsibility and a team which perhaps doesn’t have the same quality standards as the primary team. I am sure that offshoring – and probably outsourcing – complicate matters because issues need to navigate additional boundaries.

One question in my mind is: if the second team impose such additional costs on the primary team are they actually making more work than they are doing? That is, every hour the primary team spending dealing with the liabilities of handover is an hour not delivering their own work. I’d want to look at that but lets assume the second team are worth it.

Something which worries me here: “No matter the handover contract agreement we set”. Are the second team listening? Are they making an effort to work with the primary team? Or are they ignoring the primary team?

If that is the case then it is a big problem because there is little the primary team can do to fix how the second team work. So a question comes into my mind: are those responsible for having the second team aware of the issues? Would they like to improve things?

If not then, as the second team and those employing them are not concerned, the problem may be unsolvable. The only solution the primary team have is to insulate themselves from the problems of the second team. In the short run that removes the pain for individuals but in the long run it will make things worse.

To my mind it does fall on the primary team to make a case to both groups that they would like to make things better and to work with the second team and management to make things better.

So how do we make things better?

The good news is there is lots that can be done here, there are people changes, process change and technical solutions. The bad news is, there is no silver bullet.

People changes: team members should visit each other.

I know travel budgets get cut but there is a clear case here that if team members could visit each other, understand each other, known each other then they will both work together better and be in a better position to improve things.

Process changes: ask the second team to do smaller pieces of work and deliver more often.

I don’t know the mechanism by which work reaches the second team but someone somewhere is asking them to do things. That person needs to change their requests. Of course, this means moving the second team away from the Project Model and towards a Continuous model.

Technical changes: there are a lot of options here but each of these options is gong to work best if people have visited one another and the process has been changed to lots of little.

So:

Have both teams practice continuous integration (if they are not already).
Reduce the number of branches, move towards trunk based development.
Have both teams practice automated unit testing (preferably TDD) and automated acceptance testing (ATDD).
Add static analysis tools to the build.
Do manual live code reviews, i.e. developers at one location talk to one at the other location while they do the code review.

None of these changes are unique to the scenario described in the question. They are common quality improvement practices. The only addition I’m making is on the code review, I want the second team to review the primary team’s code, not just the primary reviewing the second. I want this because I want teams to learn from each other.

Hopefully you can spot two themes to my suggestions.

Firstly, I’m treating both teams as equal. That is only fair but it makes sense too. If the onshore team makes the offshore team feel as if they are treated as second class then they will act as if they are second class.

Second, most of my suggestions are straight from the Continuous Delivery playbook: have both teams do lots of small high quality pieces of work and integrate them without delay.

Underlying here is a problem: the second team don’t do maintenance. They have little incentive to do better work and maybe unaware of the problems their style of working is causing.

Now having said all this I might be accused of ignoring the question. The question stated: the offshore team work in project mode. And I’ve just given suggestions which could be considered not project mode. Put it this way, I think changes need to happen one way or another. If the second team want to cling to projects then so be it, but they can still improve their quality as they do so.

If you have any questions about Continuous Digital, Project Myopia and #NoProjects please mail them over and I’ll do my best to answer them in this blog.

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