When years ago, I first introduced RUP based software development life cycle into the software organization I worked for, the first main hurdle we had to take was moving towards iterative developent. To many developers and managers this was a shockwave very hard to deal with. Eventually, it all worked out. Probably because iterative is much like waterfall, but than a series of little waterfalls instead of one big waterfall.
Did we increased our capability maturity by doing this? Yes we did. And honestly speaking, we were quite happy with the result. This success was probably making the next step more difficult.
The next step was the real paradigm shift: incremental development. Convincing people who did big-upfront-design driven development all of their life to switch to incremental developent is not an easy task at all. Those people live and dream in terms of future proof designs and database models before the first line of code is written. It took a lot of energy and hand-holding coaching action before people were ready to give incremental development a try.
Recent experiences in another company proved the same findings. It's very hard to make people leave the tought that big up front design is the only viable option there is. I even discovered that it's even more easy to "sell" them agile practices as TDD or even pair programming, than to change their ideas on how to come to a decent design and architecture. The positive side of it is that it's worth the investment. Once they experienced it's working - even for their projects (as people are always convinced that the things they are working on is the most complex matter one can imagine, and that these practices are not suited to deal with this level of complexity ;-) - they never want to go back to the old paradigm. But it's a hurdle that is not easy to take. It requires courage of the involved people and coaching from someone who's been there to make it happen.
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Monday, August 27, 2007
"Agile" certification
Well, I guess it's the normal thing to happen, when things get mainstream, the temptation for people to "milk the cow until it drops" is stronger than the principles they used to defend. When I see what is happening around the "certification tracks" that are developed around Scrum, I must say I get mixed feelings about it.
More or less 10 years ago, when Scrum went public next to Crystal Clear, ASD, DSDM all in the shadow of the extreme XP, to me it was one of the more pragmatic flavours of the agile movement that was taking off. In contradiction to the black-and-white take-it-our-leave-it gospels of XP, it was bringing a clear message with the focus on the project management aspects of running a software development project. When looking at what is happening today, XP practices like TDD, pair programming, refactoring, continual integration, ... have become a commodity to modern software teams that take their job serious. The "extreme" aspects have disappeared (although there will always people who love to go for religious wars). I have the impression that the Scrum guys just go the opposite way. They try to score by shocking the people they should try to convince. You can discuss about style, and when looking at the effect XP had on the software engineering community, why wouldn't is work once again for the project management community?
It brings me back to the point I want to raise here. Is commerciallizing these agile ideas embedded in methodologies like Scrum the best way to bring the intended change. From what I hear from peers in my network, they are not really happy about it. Although we do not deny that Mike and Ken earn some return on investment on what they brought to the SE community. Still many people get the feeling, that money has become a bigger driver than the principles of the Agile manifesto.
What was fundamentally different between the agilists and the previous generation of methodologists is the fact that although these gurus all came with their personal flavour of implementation, they all subscribed the same basic priciples. But do the current practices of expensive certification tracks match with the open-source philosophy that turned the agile movement into a success? Eventually, what will be the difference between the more rigid methodology tracks like RUP & PMI which live on commercialization versus the agile practices and Scrum.
I do see the advantage of this commercialization as it will help agile practices entering into the more concervative type of software organizations, as to them something only has street credibility when expensive training and certification programs are required. But will it change them into agile organizations ... I'm pretty sceptic about it. Going agile is a paradigm shift, it's not something you do by following a training or passing an exam. It's something between the ears of people and no certificate will help making that switch ... it only helps upgrading your CV.
More or less 10 years ago, when Scrum went public next to Crystal Clear, ASD, DSDM all in the shadow of the extreme XP, to me it was one of the more pragmatic flavours of the agile movement that was taking off. In contradiction to the black-and-white take-it-our-leave-it gospels of XP, it was bringing a clear message with the focus on the project management aspects of running a software development project. When looking at what is happening today, XP practices like TDD, pair programming, refactoring, continual integration, ... have become a commodity to modern software teams that take their job serious. The "extreme" aspects have disappeared (although there will always people who love to go for religious wars). I have the impression that the Scrum guys just go the opposite way. They try to score by shocking the people they should try to convince. You can discuss about style, and when looking at the effect XP had on the software engineering community, why wouldn't is work once again for the project management community?
It brings me back to the point I want to raise here. Is commerciallizing these agile ideas embedded in methodologies like Scrum the best way to bring the intended change. From what I hear from peers in my network, they are not really happy about it. Although we do not deny that Mike and Ken earn some return on investment on what they brought to the SE community. Still many people get the feeling, that money has become a bigger driver than the principles of the Agile manifesto.
What was fundamentally different between the agilists and the previous generation of methodologists is the fact that although these gurus all came with their personal flavour of implementation, they all subscribed the same basic priciples. But do the current practices of expensive certification tracks match with the open-source philosophy that turned the agile movement into a success? Eventually, what will be the difference between the more rigid methodology tracks like RUP & PMI which live on commercialization versus the agile practices and Scrum.
I do see the advantage of this commercialization as it will help agile practices entering into the more concervative type of software organizations, as to them something only has street credibility when expensive training and certification programs are required. But will it change them into agile organizations ... I'm pretty sceptic about it. Going agile is a paradigm shift, it's not something you do by following a training or passing an exam. It's something between the ears of people and no certificate will help making that switch ... it only helps upgrading your CV.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Root Cause: design smells
While auditing a software team, I ran into a maintenance project where the estimation of a modification had been underestimated. Looking into the details, the project manager stated that he underestimated the testing effort required. While testing they run into the typical case of "collateral damage" ... you change something here and it goes wrong elsewhere. Digging a bit deeper, showed that this was mainly caused by a software design where tightly coupling was key. "yes we know, as design is evolving, we need to refactor every few years ..."
Refactoring ... every few years ?!? ... How does this fit into one sentence? The weird thing was that even after pointing out the need for a more loosely coupled design and layered architecture, the team was still not convinced that they should focus on refactoring instead of modifying their estimation capabilities. When it came to refactoring, they did not really knew how to sell this to the customer ... make it part of your definition of "done" and just like continuous integration, do it on a daily/frequent basis that will lower the "pain".
Refactoring ... every few years ?!? ... How does this fit into one sentence? The weird thing was that even after pointing out the need for a more loosely coupled design and layered architecture, the team was still not convinced that they should focus on refactoring instead of modifying their estimation capabilities. When it came to refactoring, they did not really knew how to sell this to the customer ... make it part of your definition of "done" and just like continuous integration, do it on a daily/frequent basis that will lower the "pain".
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Who am I to blow against the wind
In a recent discussion on the implementation of agile techniques, I ran into the aspect of "courage" - one of the cornerstones promoted by the eXtreme Programming evangelists. In most of the organizations I rolled out agile techniques so far, there was always some flavour of "courage" required to get things done. But I never really saw it as an explicit requirement. People needed to be convinced of Test First principles, refactoring versus big-design-up-front or pair-programming, but I never had to "stand up and fight" ... eventually these things "sell" themselves if you're willing to muddy your boots. But in a recent implementation, the need for "courage" became key. The tention fields that determined the projectcontext were so strong - we would typically call it a "political" heavy loaded project - that the "common sense" aspects typical for the agile toolbox came to a halt.
Convincing the project team to have the guts to deal with these tention fields instead of going for work arounds was a tough thing to do. Getting people out of their trenches and make them couragous enough to give up the "who am I to blow against the wind" mind-set ... as far as I know, there's no open source toolset yet that can help us on this.
Convincing the project team to have the guts to deal with these tention fields instead of going for work arounds was a tough thing to do. Getting people out of their trenches and make them couragous enough to give up the "who am I to blow against the wind" mind-set ... as far as I know, there's no open source toolset yet that can help us on this.
Sunday, April 1, 2007
Agile banana box
Well, in July we 're moving to our new house. To avoid packing rush-hours, from time to time we already fill boxes with things we don't use regularly. Our neighbour works in a supermarket providing us with piles of empty banana boxes which have the right size and strength to avoid overload.
Last week Martine started with emptying our "library". Most of the books can be taken off-line for a few months, no problem. But my books on change management, methodology and software engineering ... that's my territory. So we agreed that I would take care of boxing these in.
Filling the boxes is not really a problem, piles of interesting books, but nothing I can't do without the next couple of months. From time to time I put a book aside "this one I have to keep at hand" ... after half an hour, the pile of books "I have to keep at hand" was enough to fill a box. That's good, this proves I've invested in the right books - sometimes Martine questions my "sponsoring" of Amazon.com;-)
Although it was not the intention, the vast majority of books "to keep at hand" are related to agile techniques. An Agile banana box. The idea of "just enough" methodologies filling up a banana box ... a strange thought isn't it. Is this a sign that these methodologies aren't that documentation averse after all. Or is it a sign of acceptance. Is our "industry" finally buying into getting things done.
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Organizational ADHD
Have you ever worked in an organization that is a typical case of organizational ADHD? Organizations that change their structure all the time - partially or completely - without respecting or even being aware of the laws of change.Once something does not seem to work (or does not fit the taste or ego of a manager), it's changed . Not by refactoring but in many cases by implementing patch after fix after patch. The first organizational "bug" that pops up is enough to go throught the motions again without worrying about the collateral damage that is created. Things never get the time to stabilize. Before people more or less understand what has changed, the organization has changed again.
A first side effects of this continual cascade of organizational changes is the fact that people get into the mode of "wait a bit, it will change anyway".
Another derivative of organizational ADHD is an organizational structure with a complexity that is not in synch with the complexity of the organization's goals set. An hierarchical chrismas tree with loads of managers, all with a very limited span of control and the "right to decide" on a micro piece of the process chain.
Although you find these "bad smells" in all organizations in one way or another, in ADHD organization, you can find them in extreme forms:
- "limited span of control": For every "two men and a horse head" (translation of a Flemish saying) there is a manager. This leads to upside down pyramids with more managers than "workers".
- "hierarchy over process": due to the fact that managers are all over the place, they need to be recognized and respected in one way or another. Due to that, processes suffer, because they are defined in such a way, that managers and departments get the visibility they "deserve". Resulting in havy processes with endless chains of process steps, and checks, stamps and signatures all over the place ('cause noone can be trusted).
- "too many decision makers": for every step in the process, someone else decides on go/no-go
- "hidden agendas": The personal "at-stakes" get priority over the end-to-end process or company "at-stakes".
- "ego over ratio": Although people know the current way is no good, they don't want to change it as it might damage their position, range of influence, ego.
No change before it hurts
All in all, our business is doing well. We're selling more products than ever. And if we may believe the analysts, "the best is yet to come".
In the mean time, our organizations get into a comfort zone. Things are going well. We're growing and gaining weight. We know we have "room for improvement", but why worry? We're making money, a lot of money! There is no sense of urgency to anticipate on future change.
But everybody knows that fairytales don't last. Like always, change will come in one way or another, whether we like it or not. Our inovative products will become a comodity (let's hope) and we'll have to come up with the next hot thing. Competitors will emerge. Shareholders will come and go. ... Are we ready for that?
When things go well, organizations fall asleep, and they sleep until a real crisis sets in. In the best case scenario, they "get away with it" by restructuring blindly - and getting the shareholders from their back ... for a while - but for some organizations it's the end of their business.
Stay awake! is the message, not to find your self in a "we knew it but we did not do anything about it" mea culpa situation. Stay alert for the signals, get and keep the sense of urgency alive, make your organization look forward and enjoy the rollercoaster of change. And although rollercoasters are scary - at least for me - they are exciting to ride!
In the mean time, our organizations get into a comfort zone. Things are going well. We're growing and gaining weight. We know we have "room for improvement", but why worry? We're making money, a lot of money! There is no sense of urgency to anticipate on future change.
But everybody knows that fairytales don't last. Like always, change will come in one way or another, whether we like it or not. Our inovative products will become a comodity (let's hope) and we'll have to come up with the next hot thing. Competitors will emerge. Shareholders will come and go. ... Are we ready for that?
When things go well, organizations fall asleep, and they sleep until a real crisis sets in. In the best case scenario, they "get away with it" by restructuring blindly - and getting the shareholders from their back ... for a while - but for some organizations it's the end of their business.
Stay awake! is the message, not to find your self in a "we knew it but we did not do anything about it" mea culpa situation. Stay alert for the signals, get and keep the sense of urgency alive, make your organization look forward and enjoy the rollercoaster of change. And although rollercoasters are scary - at least for me - they are exciting to ride!
Navi-System syndrome
The first time I had a car navigation system I was totally excited. It takes you where you've never been before.
Fact 1: It's amazing to see how people tend to follow the instructions given by a machine. Is it the woman's gentle voice that makes the driver obey the guidance instructions - for the women in the audience, male voices are also availabe for guidance. Is it the colourfull map display or the animated arrow icons that provide the necessary "street credibility" and make you follow the indicated route? Or is it simply becouse you don't know your way around?
Fact 2: When you travel in an area new to you, the quality of the calculated route is difficult to judge. But when traveling in an area you know fairly well, you frequently wonder what logic is behind the routing mechanism. Why is this device seldomly calculating the route you would take blindfolded? The system never tends to choose the natural trail choosen by people who commute every day.
Adding Fact 1 and 2 together, cummulated with the increasing congestion of our roads, results in the estonishing conclusion that these devices always get you where you want to go, but you're rarely the first to arrive.
You'll get where you want to go, but when will you arrive?
What has this to do with a learning organization or even with Quality Management?
Many companies build "navigation systems" for their organization. They provide nice process descriptions, policies, procedures, work instructions, guidelines, piles of document templates... all documented and accessible via sophisticated intranets and controlled by state of the art configuration management tools. Quality Management Systems (ISO 9000 series, CMMi, Six Sigma...), with renowned certification programs, stimulate this to increase the capability maturity of your organization
So when you start "driving" around in a new organization, the guidance is only a few mouse clicks or phone calls away. You'll get where you want to go, but again, when will you arrive?
Refactoring Human Resources:
In these well structured and documented organizations, people tend to switch to automatic pilot and follow the guidlines without questioning. I've seen it happening multiple times, the creativity and agility needed for survival in a CMMi level 1 organization, tends to crumble when this organization climbs the ladder of capability maturity. Off course these organizations grow more mature, but what about the agility and creativity of the average worker in these organizations.
As survival is less of an issue in these mature organizations, this agility and creativity could be used for other means. And that's where most organizations tend to fail: refactoring their human resources.
Although I never worked for a CMMi level 5 company yet (lucky me ;-), but I've seen a few acting in the mean time. I've been everywhere between level 1 and 3 in the past years. People stop thinking and lose their imagination, creativity and agility if they are not lead by managers who are aware of these risks and know how to cope with it.
Having process descriptions, procedure for every single task and a job description for every memeber of your staff is fine, but it is not stimulating people to think out-of-the-box and look at things from a "non-documented" perspective. Worse, in some of these organizations, thinking out of the box became a sin once the "certification" is accomplished.
In navigating through an economical climate that changes continuously with an ever increasing speed and frequency, "getting there" is no longer the main requirement. Changing the focus of managment from a purely "operational" perspective to a "change" perspective is the main challenge now. The average manager is not ready for this.
Fact 1: It's amazing to see how people tend to follow the instructions given by a machine. Is it the woman's gentle voice that makes the driver obey the guidance instructions - for the women in the audience, male voices are also availabe for guidance. Is it the colourfull map display or the animated arrow icons that provide the necessary "street credibility" and make you follow the indicated route? Or is it simply becouse you don't know your way around?
Fact 2: When you travel in an area new to you, the quality of the calculated route is difficult to judge. But when traveling in an area you know fairly well, you frequently wonder what logic is behind the routing mechanism. Why is this device seldomly calculating the route you would take blindfolded? The system never tends to choose the natural trail choosen by people who commute every day.
Adding Fact 1 and 2 together, cummulated with the increasing congestion of our roads, results in the estonishing conclusion that these devices always get you where you want to go, but you're rarely the first to arrive.
You'll get where you want to go, but when will you arrive?
What has this to do with a learning organization or even with Quality Management?
Many companies build "navigation systems" for their organization. They provide nice process descriptions, policies, procedures, work instructions, guidelines, piles of document templates... all documented and accessible via sophisticated intranets and controlled by state of the art configuration management tools. Quality Management Systems (ISO 9000 series, CMMi, Six Sigma...), with renowned certification programs, stimulate this to increase the capability maturity of your organization
So when you start "driving" around in a new organization, the guidance is only a few mouse clicks or phone calls away. You'll get where you want to go, but again, when will you arrive?
Refactoring Human Resources:
In these well structured and documented organizations, people tend to switch to automatic pilot and follow the guidlines without questioning. I've seen it happening multiple times, the creativity and agility needed for survival in a CMMi level 1 organization, tends to crumble when this organization climbs the ladder of capability maturity. Off course these organizations grow more mature, but what about the agility and creativity of the average worker in these organizations.
As survival is less of an issue in these mature organizations, this agility and creativity could be used for other means. And that's where most organizations tend to fail: refactoring their human resources.
Although I never worked for a CMMi level 5 company yet (lucky me ;-), but I've seen a few acting in the mean time. I've been everywhere between level 1 and 3 in the past years. People stop thinking and lose their imagination, creativity and agility if they are not lead by managers who are aware of these risks and know how to cope with it.
Having process descriptions, procedure for every single task and a job description for every memeber of your staff is fine, but it is not stimulating people to think out-of-the-box and look at things from a "non-documented" perspective. Worse, in some of these organizations, thinking out of the box became a sin once the "certification" is accomplished.
In navigating through an economical climate that changes continuously with an ever increasing speed and frequency, "getting there" is no longer the main requirement. Changing the focus of managment from a purely "operational" perspective to a "change" perspective is the main challenge now. The average manager is not ready for this.
The blue dotted squash ball
Once a week I go squashing with a friend of mine. There are different types of squash balls. Their properties are indicated by a colored dot. We're used to play with a "Super Slow" yellow dotted one. But this time we ran out of our favorite type, so we had to help ourselves with a "Fast" blue dotted ball.
The blue dotted ball turned the weekly routine into a totally different game. It bounced in all directions, points and sets were lost. Frustration filled the squash court. Until ...until I realized that different situations need a different approach, even when it's caused by a small colored dot.
From that moment in time, the game turned. Ok, it didn't turn into the weekly routine game, but I got the ball more or less under control ... and ... won the game.
The game is yours, focus on the ball.
The blue dotted ball turned the weekly routine into a totally different game. It bounced in all directions, points and sets were lost. Frustration filled the squash court. Until ...until I realized that different situations need a different approach, even when it's caused by a small colored dot.
From that moment in time, the game turned. Ok, it didn't turn into the weekly routine game, but I got the ball more or less under control ... and ... won the game.
The game is yours, focus on the ball.
Silver Bullet Methodologies
I started working as a software developer in a C, C++ environment back in 1991. At the end of 1998 I made a career move towards the world of Quality Management in software engineering environments. At that time the Agile methodologies went public with XP at its frontline.
I remember Quality Week Europe 1999 where the first signs of this Agile movement appeared. At that time the subject of the day was all about CMM. XP was mainly seen as "extreme" and "not realistic", a brainfart that would soon be gone.
One year later at that same conference there were multiple sessions on XP and although there were still a lot of people sceptic about it, at least some of the XP concepts were accepted as "might bring added-value".
As the maturity of our industry is "rather" low, Quality management is almost automatically linked to "Change". The Agile movement, and Kent Beck's "Embrace Change" theme in particular, has been shaking the tree for the last 10 years.
As the Agile methodologies are rather shocking for the traditional/conservative European ICT community, they form an interesting playground when studying "Change". I've been reading most of the books that are published so far on the Agile methodologies, XP, ASD, SCRUM and their related practices, with as main points of interest "how is change introduced?" and "How to cope with the resistance to change?”
I do not believe in religious advocacy, in my opinion process fundamentalists - whether they are iterative or waterfall, process oriented or Agile driven - risk of being blinded by their faith. And although I feel great sympathy with the Agile movement, there are no silver bullets, a team needs the "processes" - sorry for the ugly word - that suits it fine, neither more nor less. I guess that's what the scrum guys mean with "self organizing".
I remember Quality Week Europe 1999 where the first signs of this Agile movement appeared. At that time the subject of the day was all about CMM. XP was mainly seen as "extreme" and "not realistic", a brainfart that would soon be gone.
One year later at that same conference there were multiple sessions on XP and although there were still a lot of people sceptic about it, at least some of the XP concepts were accepted as "might bring added-value".
As the maturity of our industry is "rather" low, Quality management is almost automatically linked to "Change". The Agile movement, and Kent Beck's "Embrace Change" theme in particular, has been shaking the tree for the last 10 years.
As the Agile methodologies are rather shocking for the traditional/conservative European ICT community, they form an interesting playground when studying "Change". I've been reading most of the books that are published so far on the Agile methodologies, XP, ASD, SCRUM and their related practices, with as main points of interest "how is change introduced?" and "How to cope with the resistance to change?”
I do not believe in religious advocacy, in my opinion process fundamentalists - whether they are iterative or waterfall, process oriented or Agile driven - risk of being blinded by their faith. And although I feel great sympathy with the Agile movement, there are no silver bullets, a team needs the "processes" - sorry for the ugly word - that suits it fine, neither more nor less. I guess that's what the scrum guys mean with "self organizing".
Getting Started
It feels a bit strange to kick off a blog, as if I had something to tell the world. What a strange idea.
On the other hand, when discussing agile software engineering practices with many people in my "network", I frequently see a "aha!" reaction. Things that look/sound straight forward or common sense at first sight, are not happening because a number of "only-human" aspects.
Getting into Agile is a paradigm shift that is harder to make than most people expect. I always compare it to the paradigm shift of going from procedural software development towards object oriented development. It all seems straight forward, but when you go through the motions of this change, man it hurts! All those little habits we've built for years, we all have to change them.
Well this blog will dance around this theme, hope you come join - and enjoy - the dance
Lieven
On the other hand, when discussing agile software engineering practices with many people in my "network", I frequently see a "aha!" reaction. Things that look/sound straight forward or common sense at first sight, are not happening because a number of "only-human" aspects.
Getting into Agile is a paradigm shift that is harder to make than most people expect. I always compare it to the paradigm shift of going from procedural software development towards object oriented development. It all seems straight forward, but when you go through the motions of this change, man it hurts! All those little habits we've built for years, we all have to change them.
Well this blog will dance around this theme, hope you come join - and enjoy - the dance
Lieven
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