Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban or Just Ban Scrum? (Part 2 of 2)

Part II: Some Solutions

Continued from Part 1, with the same disclaimer applied.

 

Collaboration and Distributed Scrum

If you’ve been in a successful Scrum Team with geographically distributed members, I would really like to hear from you, O Venerable Master. After all, team effectiveness has been known to diminish with as much as 2 meters of physical separation. If you must do Distributed Scrum (hopefully as a transitory step), then here are a few tips that will (I hope) save you the trouble of learning the hard way:

1. Obviously, ensure everyone on the team is fully aware of language and cultural differences, especially the Power Distance Index (if that sounds familiar, it’s from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers)
2. Email is only 14-17% effective as a medium of communication (Videoconferencing helps)
3. Further, information is lost exponentially as a function of distance and overhead of tools used (simply put, people are inherently lazy…)
4. …Which may prevent you from achieving fully cross-functional teams without specialists
5. Agile at scale requires trust at scale
6. Everyone needs to have access to the same infrastructure (at the same latency) and an identical development environment
7. Get Agile Evangelists (SM, Coaches, stakeholders) at every location and get them to agree on your organization’s Scrum process
8. Eliminate mixed signals, possibly by having a Proxy Product Owner
9. Empowerment and Autonomy are useless without Feedback
10. Establish an Exchange Program where [at least some] developers from different locations get to experience the reality of their counterparts (This will probably be your best investment)

The most important consideration, given all the specific limitations of your situation, must be that whatever arrangement you come up with, is sustainable. Create success stories and replicate the model. And note that Distributed Team can very well exist without Distributed Scrum.

Why Are You Doing Scrum, Anyway?

One day I’m going to be an Anti-Agile Coach. Because I’m convinced they’re so many people getting it wrong, that there’s a lot of money to be made from it. But first, some free advice: You should really consider if Agile or Scrum is really applicable to your Organization, Industry and Business Context. A good starting point is the following thought process:

You would like to adopt Scrum (or Agile) because…

1. …Your scope/specifications/customer commitments change often (If not, you might be indulging in WaterScrumFall)
2. …Your market changes often, requiring quick adaptability (e.g. Competition pops up out of nowhere overnight)
3. …You need to deliver (or release) continuously (As opposed to a one-time deployment, followed by maintenance)
4. …Your technology stack can/will change often (i.e. you haven’t invested tons of $ in license fees, and/or you will evaluate multiple options)
5. …You have the flexibility to experiment/take risks, and your organization rewards failure (or at the very least, doesn’t penalize it)
6. …Your dev team is nascent, so you expect dev processes to evolve
7. …Your industry is neither mission-critical nor heavily regulated (although there are exceptions as Nancy Van Schooenderwoert explains)
8. …You have metrics to show that Scrum would be more effective
9. …Your Admin/HR/IT teams have Daily Standups (yes, I have seen them happen)
10. …Everyone else is doing it

If you scored low on the above checklist, please consider that Iterative Software Development is still a thing, especially if you’re dealing with hardware or manufacturing. It’s not Waterfall, but it’s Scrum with a bit more commitment.

On the other hand, you might be in a field of work where you’re ready to treat software development more like Surgery than Civil Engineering (as Dan North explains in his talk).

Whatever you do, don’t indulge in Reverse Waterfall: Convincing yourselves that what you delivered is in fact what you intended to deliver.

(Please share your thoughts and experiences as a comment or connect with me on Twitter: @survivalcrziest)

 

Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban or Just Ban Scrum? (Part 1 of 2)

Part I: Some Problems

I have been playing the Scrum Master role off and on since 2008, almost all of it for geographically distributed teams. During this period, I have been lucky enough to work for 3 different companies in 4 countries. Over the years, a sinking feeling has been growing within me that we have started using “Agility” to mask unwillingness (or I dare say, often, inability) to commit. Allow me to crystallize some of the thoughts that are forming in my head.

(My usual disclaimer applies: none of the below is intended to reflect on my employer(s) or specific colleagues, whether past or present. These are my personal, generalized opinions intended for retrospection.)

Ceremonies and Metrics

First and foremost, if you don’t have Sprint Retrospectives, or in your organizational/business context, are unable to enforce accountability for, or effectively followup on, action items identified in the Retrospective, then read no further. Your Scrum is Doomed.

Sprint iteration size matters, too: “A 2-week sprint is just enough time for a mini-waterfall, and thus we are all basically whitewater rafting all the time” ( — Dan North).

If:

• you’re not collecting metrics (at the very least: Capacity, Velocity, Committed vs Completed Story Points, Release Burn Up, possibly correlation between Story Points and Hours, if you’re organization is into that sort of thing, and various forms of Lead Time)
• or not really paying attention to what they’re telling you
• and they are not visible to and understood by the whole team

then you have already failed, you just can’t see it yet.

Demo vs Release

On the other end of the spectrum, when the mandate for Scrum or Agile comes top-down, often there is excessive emphasis on ceremonies. Specifically, the end-goal of the Sprint becomes the Demo, rather than the Release. Scrum clearly dictates that no additional or specific effort must be spent on the Demo, it should be more like a natural outcome.

You can have as many Demos as you want, but what really matters for a product is Customer Feedback. Which, just to be clear, is not the same as Internal Management Feedback. Management is inherently biased in favor of your team, after all they very likely played a big part in hiring and building it. 10 internal demos are worth a single demo in front of a potentially paying customer.

The focus, then, should be on the Release of the Potentially Shippable Product Increment (complete with changelog, user documentation, installers, troubleshooting guides and quality reports) rather than an orchestrated demo in a controlled environment. This is where Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment and more recently, DevOps comes in to the picture. If your Release Process is time consuming, unpredictable, not automated and/or has too many dependencies that are not in your control, your team is not yet Agile.

Dependencies

If your software dev team is Agile, but the rest of the organization is not, Agile is going to fail. By rest of the organization, I mean other dev teams that they have dependencies on, manufacturing, HR, Admin, IT — every single department in the organization needs to understand, live and breathe Agile. Because if they can’t respond to change effectively, then they will hold your software dev team back.

The most effective way of crippling a self-organizing Agile team is to give them full accountability, with limited or no influence over those responsible for potential impediments.

Another assured path to mayhem is when multiple teams work on a shared codebase in concurrent sprints, or when a dependency is being iterated on in the same sprint as a feature that needs to be delivered.

The Bottomless Backlog

Often in geographically distributed teams, and/or on large scale projects, the physical Scrum Task Board is replaced by a more practical virtual one. Such task boards, like those provided by JIRA Agile, Rally, Trello and several others, replace Post-Its by virtual cards, enhanced by features such as attachments, comments, time tracking and reporting. Just like any other application of technology, there is a flip side: It just a matter of a few clicks and keystrokes to add something to your Product Backlog, or to alter project plans in a significant way by moving tasks around. It’s very easy to get carried away, and often we start injecting scope creep into the Backlog, disguised as finer details of existing features (for example see User Stories vs The User’s Story).

If your organization uses different tools for Requirements Management and Project Tracking, and if there’s no strict mapping from requirements to user stories (yes, it happens 🙂 ), then it becomes very easy to lose control of the project without realizing it. A more typical scenario is working with a limited budget (usually allocated upfront),  but adding tasks endlessly — kind of like a fractal with fixed surface area, but infinite perimeter. Even with regular Backlog Grooming and prioritization, your team will still feel dissatisfied because a major chunk of the Product Backlog will end up remaining undelivered.

Finally, if you’re not in a position where you can compromise features over quality, then your Agility is severely limited.

Upfront Architecture and Specification

Probably the biggest excuse we use Agile for is to do away with high-level architecture altogether. Different Sprint teams work on different areas of the project, each optimizing locally and focused on the immediate Sprint (or two). Eventually it becomes apparent that several teams have been solving the same problem, maybe (surprise) even in different ways. The Scrum of Scrums can help, but on the rare occasions when it does happen, it is more focused on execution than design. Towards the end, more incompatibilities surface and there is a rush to “adapt the Architecture to the Business Reality”, which is basically an update of the Architectural artifacts based on the code being delivered, rather than the other way round.

So let’s recap:

1. Being Agile does not mean no design, it means less upfront design.
2. There needs to be traceability from Requirements to Specification to Architecture to Design to Execution to Validation to Deployment. It doesn’t matter what you call these things in the context of your Industry, but just because you aren’t doing Waterfall doesn’t mean you can decouple execution from specification.
3. Technical Delegation is not the same as Management Delegation. If you ask 5 teams to report progress using a specific tool, they will all report it the same way. But if you ask 5 self-organizing Scrum Teams to architect a technical solution, you will get at least 3 different results, if not 5 (or 7 with secondary recommendations).

Read on for some recommended solutions. I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences, please leave a comment or connect with me on Twitter: @survivalcrziest