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Closed 10 years ago.
The project is poorly defined: we are to write educational software for CS 111 Computer Programming I students focusing on functions. We have 6 student developers with various backgrounds working in Flex. The project has a duration of about 7 weeks. We have very limited face time (30 min per week) and very limited work time (<8 hours per developer per week). We have limited access to the customers (professor of our course, professor of CS 111, students in CS 111).
Our toolset includes Flex Builder, Subversion, and TRAC.
What methodology is best for this project and why? Alternately, what features should be gathered from various methodologies to better suit this situation?
What makes you think any methodology would be successful under these circumstances -- little communication, more requirements than time, and lack of access to customers?
That being said, I would focus on incremental delivery (each iteration should have some few working features), unit testing (all tests pass before check in), tagging of incremental releases (the ability to go back to a working release), and pairing of strong team members with weaker team members to boost the overall productivity of the team. Consider devoting one strong member of the team to integration testing.
Incremental delivery is most important. Showing a working demo of less than what was asked for is always better than showing a non-working prototype.
You could use Agile methodology here but obviously you'll have to adopt it to suit your needs.
For example if you don't have enough access to the real customers that someone with the best understanding of your goals will have to act as a customer proxy. I would also suggest trying to get more access to the customers - almost everyone try to appear more busy then they are and there is usually a way to resolve that obstacle.
Make sure that the limited work time your team have they have at the same time. There could be no Agile approach when you could not work together.
You could definitely use story-based estimations, iterative development process etc.
What is really important is too give every team member a clear and unambiguous understanding of how the Agile process works and what is each person's role in the project. It's very easy to say that you will use SCRUM but unfortunately without real understanding and experience that will not really mean much.
Some advice:
Educate your team members
Get a list of what you would like to deliver if you would not be limited by the time/resources.
Find out what is realistic to deliver given your constraints. That will probably be not much. Don't try to be overly optimistic. Focus on what you could really achieve.
Make sure that your real customers are on board for that.
Use short iterations (1 week or less). Make sure you could deliver fully tested product by the end of each iteration.
Show your work early.
Related
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Closed 11 years ago.
I have graduated from my university almost a year ago. Since then I have worked with many different technologies, such as PHP, JQuery, ASP.NET, C# etc. Recently I have switched to a company where powerbuilder is being used for development.
The problem is that I haven't mastered any of the above languages. I can do stuff with those but when it comes to the complex tasks I often struggle with it because I don't have enough deep knowledge about it. After looking at powerbuilder for a few days I sense that this is going to happen again because most of the application code have been done using some sort of library which requires some advanced level of skill on powerbuilder.
My question is, is it OK for me to work on different technologies without mastering a single one of them?
If you choose to specialise the you are taking an opportunity cost by making yourself unavailable for other types of work. This is good if you can be confident that your chosen specialisation will last for a reasonable length of time. However, you can guarantee (along with death and taxes) that software will change. You will always be required to learn some new framework or approach in order to remain current.
So to avoid finding yourself at an intellectual dead end (are transputers still in use anywhere?) you should adopt a doctrine of constant learning. Learning is usually fun and almost always leads to a joy of discovery of some new tool or design. And never keep this knowledge to yourself (it only has a half-life of 18 months anyway). Share what you have learned with others.
So to answer your question: don't specialise.
According to the Pragmatic Programmer book, one of the tips for a good programmer is:
Invest Regularly in Your Knowledge Portfolio
Make learning a habit.
This means that you constantly have to use, or learn about, new technologies. While becoming a master in one particular technology may be rewarding, technologies come and go, today more quickly than ever. A mastery in one particular programming language, tool or API may make you a guru today, but may mean nothing tomorrow.
IIRC they also recommended developers to master several technologies, but remain versed in many - at least in the sense of having heard about them, played around with them, being able to engage in a conversation about them.
So, I would say yes - specialization is necessary, but this doesn't mean one should ignore domains outside his own.
There is no 'right answer' to this question other than maybe, 'it depends'.
You will find it easier to find better jobs if you specialise, as you call it. I would think of it more as working with a specific language/framework. Further, it is important to solve difficult problems and gain experience, irrespective of the language chosen.
Once you've accepted the above as a truism and specialised, then I would suggest that you branch out and learn new languages. Fortunately, languages become easier to learn when you have more experience.
However, more than anything, you have to look at keeping yourself interested over a long period of time. That is the real key. If you have interest, you will continue learn and gain experience. Maybe that will mean you do something that is not particularly relevant to most jobs, such as writing a language compiler. Or maybe you will find that the rush of working for big clients on big projects is more important than a specific language/framework.
So that's it - just keep interested, and keep learning. And, where possible, build focus in the thing that interests you, as that will make it easier for you to find employment going forward.
It is important to be specialized in at least one programming language/platform, especially early on in your career. By specialized i mean reading a book about it, cover to cover, and having extensive hands on experience developing for it, at work or participating in an open source project.
The idea behind this is that when you specialize in a language, you will learn many concepts that you can carry over to different languages/platforms. e.g: The master of a language can master another with relative ease.
Further on in you career being exposed to many platforms is a good thing, as you start to shift from begin a developer to a developer/architect, and you need to make decisions about which platform to use, the pros and cons of each platform and so no.
So my advice is try to master at least one language, along with its tools and frameworks. After that you can move on to different platforms. It is important to use the right platform for the current project, you will need to determine that case by case, with the assistance of a senior developer.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I am looking to introduce an agile method to my boss so that we could hopefully implement it at our work place. I've been doing a lot of research yet I can't find what makes it standout from other agile methods. I am thinking maybe it is the consistent meetings or is it the heavy reliance on artifacts? Please let me know. Thanks!
Look on wikipedia. The scrum agile method is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_%28development%29
Here is another stackoverflow question that tells the difference between scrum and extreme programming (XP). Mountain Goat Software also goes into this.
I'd try not to get bogged down in the little differences in the different approaches. It's perfectly legitimate to pick and choose the practices that you think will fit best into your workplace or environment, or the ones that will be easiest to convince your boss (and team) to adopt. You don't have to be dogmatic about just doing SCRUM or XP or whatever.
The key things I would try to implement (but YMMV)
group planning
daily stand ups
time boxed iterations
end of iteration reviews
If I was trying to convince my reluctant boss or team, I'd probably start with daily stand ups. They are low-cost/low-effort, and if done well should help the team gel a little more with understanding what everyone else is doing and what the roadblocks are.
Scrum is focused on how to manage a project, particularly with respect to planning and estimation.
XP (Extreme Programming) is focused on technical excellence and quality within the project, and keeping the cost of change low.
Think of each of them as a toolbox, where one toolbox doesn't build a house. Scrum relies on a low cost of change in order for its measurements of velocity and its estimation off the back of them to be accurate - but it doesn't actually provide the methods for this to work. XP has most of Scrum contained within its practices, though some Scrum techniques like breaking stories into tasks can be useful for teams who are learning.
Even together, you may find that they don't provide quite enough tools for adaptive planning, large-scale organisational change, cultural change, good recruitment practices, and the many other inputs to an Agile team which often get left out of methodologies.
I'd aim for a combination of Scrum with XP, and you might like to look into Lean, Kanban, BDD and Feature Injection while you're at it - there are some useful tools there too.
As for starting, here are my two core practices:
Try to deliver some software (showcase or release every couple of weeks)
Work out why that was hard and what to do about it (retrospectives).
Good luck!
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Closed 10 years ago.
Is anyone using Kanban (or scrumban) for the agile management practices? What is your experience with Kanban? How does it work in large complex environments with dependencies on waterfall projects?
I know the BBC use it quite extensively. See David Joyce's blog for more details
http://leanandkanban.wordpress.com/
He has a quite hefty slide deck in there to sift through.
I think the thing to remember about Lean thinking is that you must consider the value stream as a whole. Whilst you can super optimise the development team using techniques such as Kanban, it is more important to incorporate both up stream (Management/Analysis) and downstream (QA/deployment/support) to fully reap the rewards.
Therefore, to ask how does this fit into a Waterfall or complex process (beyond your personal effect), is not quite the right question. What is a more important question is to ask how can I begin to effect the entire value stream. I know this sounds like the beginning of religious Lean zealotry, but it is how you will realise the true value of a lean process.
For example, consider the following scenario for a typical project:
Analysis time: 18 months
Dev time: 9 months
QA & release time: 4 months
Customer adoption and rework: 12 months
Total: 43 months
If by applying Lean to the development process you improve by 100%, ie a development time of 4.5 months, bringing a new total of 38.5 months. You have then only increased the total value stream by just over 10%... insignificant!!
You need to begin to fight the fight and take the Lean thinking to upper management and demonstrate where real success lies... which is in the re-design of the entire process.
Remember Lean is NOT a development process, it can be applied to every aspect of the business.
Some interesting books on how to take this discussion beyond the the development team include;
Lean Thinking
Beyond Budgeting
Throughput Accounting
The Toyota Way
Freedom from Command & Control
Lean Product & Process Development
Implementing Lean Software Development: From concept to cash
Firstly, it is important to realize the problems that Kanban in software development tries to solve:
Multi-tasking / Overload of work.
Kanban addresses these by its
Just-in-time and Queue systems. There
is sufficient in the queue to keep
everyone busy, but not overloaded
(this comes with practice with
estimation and efficient velocity
monitoring). And JIT ensures that
people do not have to multi-task and
hence loose productivity.
Unpredictable downstream releases. If you work in a large software organization, the piece you are developing might just be one in a large juxtaposition of software. Hence, there might be downstream teams that might wait for your feature. Kanban's queue system along with its time-boxed delivery schedules ensure that there is a certain amount of predictability in the releases.
Mostly, other agile practices also attempt to solve similar problems with different techniques.
large complex environments with dependencies on waterfall projects
This makes it hard if you have a dependency on a project that does not follow agile as then your input queue will not be predictable. If a non-agile project depends on you, the problem might be lesser - but you might end up producing more than can be consumed ('muda' in lean terminology). So, ideally you would want all dependant projects at least following some agile practices, if not kanban itself.
A nice article on Kanban, Flow and Cadence can be found here.
Is anyone using Kanban (or scrumban) for the agile management practices?
Yes, I'm using :-)
How does it work in large complex environments with dependencies on waterfall projects?
In our environment we have >500 developers, so it is quite large. My team was the first, which used Kanban, mainly for maintenance work, and now for development. Our daily work was very hard, because the other depending teams were following classic development and management techniques, and they liked (they still do) to push the work and Kanban is about pull.
Our approach was to communicate as much as possible make our work transparent, but due to the reluctance of the environment we were focusing on our internal work. The WIP limit helped us stay focused, and with the visualize workflow we knew who is doing what at the moment.
Our throughput before Kanban was 90% (in other words, when 10 items came in, we delivered only 9), and after Kanban we had 100.4% and it was increasing. As an additional result, other teams started to came by and ask about Kanban, because they liked our results, and wanted to implement their own Kanban system. At the moment I know about 5 teams, which started Kanban in our organization.
HTH,
Zsolt
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Closed 10 years ago.
If you had to make a case to a business about adopting or moving to an agile development methodology (like SCRUM or XP etc) what case would you make (how do you sell the concept)?
e.g.
How would you describe the concepts and benefits to a non-technical person?
If you have successfully done so, what was the winning argument/case/rationale?
Edit: The reason I ask is that a friend of mine (he is the solution architect at a firm) is currently trying to decide how to approach his management about exactly this topic, and I've given him what I can in terms of suggestions. Curious especially to hear from those who have successfully made a case to move to an agile-aligned methdology.
My Case: The organization thrashed around for a good 2 years and failed before finally jumping onto the agile bandwagon... there is no better alternative (as of now... personal opinion) to produce quality software at the rate at which the world changes. You cannot afford to make things the old way anymore. Some learn the hard way.
Elephant in the room: Just because an idea is good doesn't mean it will be accepted.
Logical Arguments:
Feedback loop is short. Customers can see working software at the end of each month/iteration, play with it... refine and tweak to taste. No more developers sucking dough for a year and coming back with an drunken elephant for the customer waiting for a horse.
You don't need to set everything in stone (the holy SRS) before development gets to work. You CAN change your mind to reflect change in business priorities/market conditions as time goes on.. (developers won't throw a tantrum).
Better communication: No more 'This isn't what I asked for!' when nothing can be done to salvage the ship. Dev talk to real customers in real time to clarify doubts and verify that they build the right thing. The onus is squarely on customer + development to ensure that the right product is built... by talking to each other.. all the time.
Human process: Agile recognizes the fact that software is made by people for other people. The practices facilitate interaction, learning and respect among the team. Better morale is also observed
Following practices like TDD, Automated tests, Pair Programming, etc. lead to better Quality products. Time traditionally spent in the 'bug-fixing-and-churning' phase at the end of the project is minimized.
Ease of maintenance. Regression testing is a SNAP! The systems built are amenable/easier to change/extensions.. if done right. The developers value simplicity vs over-engineering as second nature. Developers are not afraid to 'go in there and change it' vs 'I'm not touching that twisted thing.. last time's scars haven't healed yet.'
More realistic chance of meeting deadlines due to developer buy-in. Estimates are revised based on actual team velocity rather than gut-estimates of the person tasked with creating the chart/mpp/plan
Visible Progress - Big visible charts (burndowns, etc.) tell you exactly what's happening in the project without having to mine it out of secretive/reluctant/very busy people. Issues are In-your-face and can't be ignored/hidden for long. Development doesn't have to context switch to 'progress reporting' mode for a day a week to generate information for management... Easy to gather metrics that developers don't seem to mind.
Did I break the char limit?:)
Non-technical people are interested in projects done on time and within budget with good quality and which would satisfy their requirements at the time of the delivery. You should focus on how Agile helps to deliver those qualities.
It's sometimes quite difficult to sell Agile to a non-technical person for two reasons:
The concept of not trying to plan 100% ahead is not really intuitive
Quite a lot of people claim that they use Agile, fail miserably to deliver anything and give the great SDP a bad name
Talk about Agile process ability to handle changes.
It's usually easier if you work with the customer who already work with you. You could easily show them for example all of the change requests accumulated over the time and show how they affected the schedule and the costs of the project. You could then go into explaining how Agile process will help handling such cases.
Along the same line you could take the initial estimations done on a 'waterfall project' and compare them with real-life results.
I would also talk about the Agile approach to quality. Testing during iterations increase the quality considerably. Short iterations with immediate feedback are great help too, mention them.
Things that sell it well is:
Tangible product after each iteration that can be tested, played with, and released. (Good for a product owner who likes to see what his/her money buys)
It brings transparency to the development process, especially during daily stand-ups and so cuts down on functionality duplication and confusion
Having a demonstration after each sprint educates fellow employees about what direction the product is heading, what is available after the development work and gets people talking and thinking about what would make it even better
Development estimations can be made to a reasonable accuracy after a dozen sprints. At least after a few modifications to focus factors.
Improves developer buy-in as they get to own a particular functionality
Cost of product changes when using Agile tends to be much smaller than when using a waterfall methodology
Great for smallish development teams, but require buy-in from the development team.
It's almost impossible to introduce a new methodology without specifically referring to problems with the old methodology and how the new methodology is going to fix those problems.
In reality, you probably need to offer a bunch of choices, and then end with recommending your favourite. Come prepared with a good explanation of why it is your favourite, and with a really good knowledge of the weaknesses of your chosen methodology.
And make sure that you're not confusing the strength of your feeling for the strength of your argument, and that you're not trying to pass off personal value choices and cultural attachments as objective technical evaluations. Your colleagues aren't stupid - they will know if you're doing this, and they'll quickly flip the bozo bit on you.
If you want to get philosophical about this, communication doesn't actually depend on eloquence, rhetoric, or articulation, but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving towards you, not when your words are pursuing them.
In my experience, the one thing that instantly sells Scrum to non-technical management is the burndown chart. The idea that there is a paper chart - available for all to see and readily understand - that shows daily progress is an instant winner. It clearly shows very early on whether a project is on schedule.
Since the backlog, sprints, daily scrum etc are all required to make the burndown chart work, sell the idea of the burndown chart first, then explain there is a need for the rest of Scrum and finally point out that it is viable to perform a three week trial of the process with minimum impact to the schedule.
I think the number one selling point to the business is that they decide what you are going to work on, so they will be setting the priorities.
My boos, a non-technical person, usually prefer to listem about how a new methodology will improve productivity of the team. So, our aproach to introduce SCRUM, as a management methodology, focused on gains at progress visibility, better communication and sooner feedbacks.
All the other gains, as a fact of matters, seens intangible for people like my boss.
From what I have read and heard the term Agile seems to get a bad rap and scares people. From a business perspective I think what it boils down to is how can I provide business value in a more responsive way. Agile is a method of supporting the concept of delivering business value quickly.
Instead of discussing it in technical terms I would suggest your friend discuss it in business terms and state that he has some ideas that could help deliver business value to his end customers more quickly.
I would not reccomend he discuss XP or agile as the methods but instead introduce short, deliverable focused meetings (ie SCRUM) and then attempt to grow it from there. I feel if you tell the business that you can get them what they want faster and in a more predictible fashion and you deliver on that statement you will get buy-in to the practices that get you there.
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Closed 10 years ago.
What type of client is likely to support XP (Extreme Programming) practices?
I'm working for a company which is doing Agile (not strictly XP, but still applicable), and our client base is exclusively government organizations. Once they saw the results of the agile process at work, even those who had requirements to provide documentation in a Waterfall like manner were more than happy to continue to reap the benefits of the agile process.
And, yes, I agree with vfilby. Your customers should care about the results, not how you achieve them.
If your team achieves great results with a proven track-record, then companies desiring a successful result. If the converse is true, only companies who are wandering blindly will be interested.
There is the odd case where the client will want a certain practices followed. Like a experienced dev manager outsourcing a project to an external firm, or potentially a client who has heard that XP is good in passing but has no real knowledge or experience with it. In the former the experienced consumer will know what he wants and if you do not provide those services they will go elsewhere. If you try to fake it, they will know and be most displeased. The later, it doesn't matter so much as long as they get good results and think it was their own wisdom that brought them forth from the ground.
Either way, it is results that matter.
Now begins my diatribe which so far has inspired much ire:
Would you jeopardize your good practices just to suit a client? If you are staunchly in favour of XP, sell it! If they want you to use a methodology that you strongly disagree with. Tell them that. If you can't come to a consensus, there should be no deal.
Do I tell a baker what grain to use? How hot to have the ovens? Hell no. If I say I want poppy seeds on the buns I don't care how they are put there so long as they are there. Dp I select a baker based on his methods, or on how damn tasty the bread is? Letting a non programmer tell you how to do your craft is just plain bad.
If you are trying to extol the virtues of XP then be upfront, pitch the cost-benefits and ROI. Show them why it is better for them in terms of developer efficiency and defect reduction. If you are working for non-programmers, you are the expert, take the reigns and give advice.
If your team excels at XP and has great results you will have no problem selling any potential client on your practices. Results matter to clients; if you can prove that you consistently produce high quality products within consistent timelines you should have no problem selling your methodology. (with some exceptions that absolutely require waterfall).
Either clients who've already had good results on XP projects.
Or clients who've swallowed the Kool-Aid.
Which arguably makes these clients few and far between :-)
I think it probably takes less convincing than it used to for customers to accept agile development practices, particularly XP, since they are now much more mainstream. Customers who have had positive experiences with agile teams in the past are more likely to buy into these methods. It's probably easier for a smaller customer, or a customer with a smaller problem to accept XP if they have concerns about it. With a skeptical customer, I would suggest starting small and building confidence. And make sure you deliver on your promises!
Almost everyone else seems to be interpreting your question in the context that you are or work for an ISV writing custom software for a client. Is that the situation?
If your question had been something along the lines of what kind of company is likely to adopt XP, then I would say a company who has been burned in the past spending too much time writing developer documentation and designing for reuse only to have to throw it all away as a big waste of time and effort.
The customer has to accept iterative delivery with fixed time, fixed resources, fixed quality (it's working to 100%), and a slightly variable scope, per iteration.
However, it is much more usual that they want to fix time, resources, quality AND scope.
The type of client that is likely to support XP practices,
is one that already understands the benefits and drawbacks of the software production system that XP provides.