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I have had a few development managers who don't seem to understand or appreciate the difficulties of software design and implementation.
Such managers believe that processes and methodologies completely solve the problem and I have a tough time explaining to them that it is not so and that you cannot read a book on the latest process fad and hope to get results by applying them as is.
The latest frustration I have is to convince my manager to
(a) Give me requirements not piece-meal but a larger set as far as possible.
(b) Give my team lead time to think about how to design, thrash out a few alternatives, work out an implementation sketch, to plan out the tasks etc.
The frustrations are compounded because of Agile methodology and the interpretation of it that says not to do up-front design (as against BIG up-front design in Waterfall), product owner can change requirements at any time and so son.
So far I haven't had much success and have to put up with the resulting frustrations.
Can you give me some arguments that can convince such managers?
EDIT-1:
Retrospectives are done, though not always at the end of every sprint, and the problems are brought up. But as I mentioned, my manager doesn't appreciate the need for design lead time and the frustrations with piece-meal requirements.
EDIT-2
I don't have a problem with changing requirements. I understand that it will be so, but imagine this: You want a small feature to begin with and then you keep adding more around it. After a few iterations, the design cannot handle it anymore and a redesign (not refactoring) is required. This could have been solved better with an upfront design in the first place, had the related features been investigated together. Its not BDUF, its the natural way of doing it (what I call software engineering common sense).
My manager doesn't understand why I ask for time to redesign (a few times I just call it refactoring so that it fits the Agile way of doing it, but it really is redesign) and not developing and demoing new features.
Every time requirements are changed (or increased) so should
the estimate to complete and,
the assessment of risk
Start giving updated estimates (even if you have to guess) and lists of risks every time you get an updated or new requirement. This will help your manager make the connection.
Try to do this in a spirit of helpfulness--"for planning purposes"--so that you aren't perceived as obstructive or lacking "can-do attitude." Remember that estimates can (in theory) come down, and risks can be reduced.
Business requirements are going to change no matter where you work. It's not your fault, it's not your boss's fault, it's not anybody's fault. The entire point of taking the requirements on piecemeal is to encourage you to think about the problem at hand, not some other problem that you might or might not need to solve. It's quite liberating once you get into the rhythm of it.
Think of upfront design as premature optimization. You may not need it, and even if you know you need it, you'll know more about your design two weeks from now than you know about it today. It'll help you solve your engineering problem with the best possible knowledge about the state of your code.
That having been said, edg is absolutely right. When you add more requirements, the estimate changes. This isn't the fault of the developers or anyone else; more work means more work no matter how you square it. If your boss doesn't realize that adding requirements will result in a larger estimate for the project you need to explain to him that Agile isn't a magic bullet that allows you to add more features without paying anything for them.
Agile Simple Design doesn't mean don't do ANY design/architecture up front.
It means do the minimal design up front, so that you will not pay a horrible price for reasonable change requests.
Scott Ambler talks about Change Cases - http://www.agilemodeling.com/artifacts/changeCase.htm
James Coplien talks about Agile Architecture - http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Agile-Architecture-Is-Not-Fragile-Architecture-James-Coplien-Kevlin-Henney
http://blog.jaoo.dk/2009/03/04/handling-architecture-in-the-agile-world/
The art/craft in all of this is in how to slice the architecture in a way that allows:
relatively fast convergence on overall architecture/infrastructure - on the order of days per months of estimated development time.
developing "just enough" architecture/infrastructure per each feature/requirement
doing the right balance of preparations for the future compared to focus on the features of today.
Its important that your Product Owner is aware of all of this balancing act as well, and you work collaboratively. He should understand that if you disregard all thinking for the future, each change will be very costly. There is a price to be paid for flexibility.
Its btw very similar to investment in QA and test automation. You pay something now, that will pay off only after X times you test the code. if the code never changes it was a waste of effort. but everyone knows that most code changes...
Buy your manager this book. That's what I did, and it worked great :)
First of all this issue seems quite sensitive, so all I wrote below is just my personal opinion, and not necessarily a wise thing to do.
In my opinion you cannot make software if you do not know what problem it should solve. If requirements come in small parts that are too small to oversee the problem, then I would just fire questions about the parts that seem to be missing. Like: "okay so the software should do X, but does that also mean Y or otherwise maybe Z? Because if it is Y then ... but if it is Z then ..." Of course if the manager is in the middle of extracting the requirements then he cannot answer, but at least he knows that there are still open issues that influence development.
About no lead time for design: design and development are an iterative process that could go hand in hand. It is just how you name the thing. If the manager wants to see some code at the end of the day, okay then I would just use the first half of the day to design and the second half of the day to make some code based on that design. If the manager does not want to see the design, fine with me then I'll just show the code.
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I am working in a dev team where we religiously follow agile.
However, I have not had to change how I work (unit testing etc doesn't count as I do that anyway). I mean, do I need to change how or how often I communicate? This soft skill side of things with agile is what I am interested in.
Thanks
If your team is utilizing agile well, then you probably should see some changes in how you work. It's possible that you already developed with a fairly "agile-compatible" mindset, even if your previous work experience was in a more waterfall-style methodology.
Some specific things that I think agile developers ought to be doing (and in a well-run agile team, will naturally find they need to do)
Focus on incremental, complete changes rather than massive architectures - This is a core tenant of agile from the macro planning side, but it's also important to practice even for an individual developer. With a 2 or 3 week iteration, you'll find you simply don't have the time to spend 1 1/2 weeks developing something, and half a week integrating it all together.
Check in early, check in often, and check in working code - Don't do this, and you'll soon find you're that guy famous for breaking the build with a day left before the iteration ends.
Know what's blocking you, and what is likely to block you in the upcoming week or two, and tell people about it - No one in an agile team likes hearing at the last second that a developer working on a critical piece is held up waiting for something to complete his work.
Think about the end of an iteration throughout the iteration - Every line of code you write should be done with the consideration of whether this is realistic to complete before the iteration is over.
Always Be Crunching (hey, I couldn't have a pithy list of advice without a cute, Glengarry Glen Ross ripped off acronym!) You'll learn by your second or third iteration that slacking off for a week followed by some all nighters is going to bite you in the ass.
If you're already following all these - great! They're certainly general best practices rather than being specific to Agile. I think most developers do have a bad habit or two that this list addresses, though (I know I do on occasion.)
In addition to Ryan's great points here are a couple more.
Discuss your ideas with other members of your team. Your fellow developers will quickly point out potential flaws in your thinking and suggest alternatives (be ready to listen and not get offended). I found this works best during planning/story tasking. In a 2-3 week sprint it is painfully obvious when you go down the wrong path. It might even stop you from successfully finishing all you tasks/stories. If others know your plan of attack up front it makes it easier for them to step in and help you out finishing your work if you need it.
Do not hesitate to suggest new ways of doing things. One of the great things about agile is that team processes are not set in stone but evolve from a series of retrospectives. If you have developers who never speak up, the process never changes and things do not get better.
Put your user's hat on. Every application has an end user. Sometimes (especially when you do not have a close contact with your users) you have to step back and question decisions (even if made by a product owner). If you can make a good case, not only your users but the entire team will benefit from it since the product will be better received. Developers do not do this often enough. We want to make things better, faster and leaner in the expense of other, sometimes more important things like delivering on time or adding more features.
I hope this helps.
The specifics of agile will be different for every person you ask. Yes, you probably want to communicate regularly, but you don't want to take it to extremes that keep you (or your coworkers) from being productive.
But like I said, it will be different for everybody. The only people who know how best to match your team are the people on your team. Just tell them you aren't used to agile and you were wondering how you've been handling it. They're really the only ones who will be able to say for sure.
Short answer but was very useful to all developers that asked me that question:
There is a book called Practices of an agile developer,http://www.pragprog.com/titles/pad/practices-of-an-agile-developer.
This book will specifically answer to your question. I like it very much because it's not just about the process, but behaviors and psychology.
Attitude-related things:
1) Good pair programming means making an effort to explain things really well and listening carefully. That's a skill in itself. You have to learn how other people tackle things and be patient when other people tackle things differently from you.
2) Being prepared to be flexible and change your mind. The smaller the ego, the easier and less painful it is to handle this.
3) To do agile well, you need to be communicating continuously with everybody in the wider team (i.e. not just devs - sysadmins, managers, customers, network admins, hardware people...) Part of this is feeling comfortable, safe and confident - i.e. there needs to be real trust in the team, not just phoney trust - real trust
4) Be prepared to work outside your specialism and comfort zone. I often have to pair with graphic designers, system admins and DBAs. Saying "that's not my job" isn't part of agile. We're part of a multidisciplinary team and getting the product released in a useful state is the whole team's problem - not just looking after my pet specialism.
5) Try to keep things simple and minimal - no "we'll make it totally generic" or "we'll need it later". Think "you aren't gonna need it." We're shooting for small, simple, concrete steps informed by feedback.
6) Tackle the difficult things and the things that aren't clear first - so that the you get feedback on the problems as early as possible so you if you have to revise estimates or cancel the work the customer gets informed as soon as possible.
7) Try to keep the team dynamics co-operative rather than competitive. Pitting people against each other pulls the team apart - and it gets you well-polished fragments and a broken product rather than a cohesive whole made by people that give-and-take as they find necessary to be successful.
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Our team is debating whether we want to become Agile or not. None of us are really fluent in Agile. I'd like some thoughts on when Agile works well, and when it doesn't.
To give a little background, we are a small group of developers, six in total. We have far more work that we can handle. Our priorities change often. What is a high priority today, may not be tomorrow. We have many applications to create and maintain. We have started to dabble in Agile practices to the extent that we have daily scrums and two-week Sprint cycles.
If you need more information to answer this, please feel free to ask.
Thanks.
Ralph Stacey's complexity matrix is commonly used to illustrate the sweet spot for Agile:
(source: typepad.com)
For simple projects (where both the requirements and the technologies are well known), the predictability is high so a predictive methodology (waterfall) works well.
For complicated and complex projects (and the vast majority of IT projects are), predictability is low and a predictive methodology won't work, an adaptive approach should be preferred. This is where Agile works well.
When both the requirements and the technologies are unknown, you're close to the chaos and the odds of failure are very high, regardless of the methodology.
I'm speaking only from experience; YMMV.
My team was unsuccessful at making agile work. IMO, it was because:
The very first time the dev team
would hear about a project, it was in
the form of a requirements document
and a deadline.
Stakeholders were often reluctant
to take time to look at the result
of a sprint's work, thus they would not take action between sprints if they thought the project was headed in the wrong direction.
When we showed stakeholders our work,
they generally just OK'd it. They
would talk about what they would
like, to which we would reply "That
can be done in about X amount of
time," to which they would reply,
"Well no need to go over the deadline
for that."
The deployment process was long and
complicated, discouraging frequent
deployments. So in practice, we
often deployed things when a 2-month
project was done, not at the end of a
sprint.
Our sprint planning meetings were
long and inefficient.
It seems everyone was confused about what scrum is (and about what our process was), except for the scrum evangelists.
So I'm pretty sure we were doing it all wrong. Don't you do it wrong, too.
Some things that have sped us up, which we continue to use:
automated builds that work on
everyone's machine (HUGE help!)
a formal arrangement for our code
repository
learning how to apply apply
abstraction mechanisms to UI code
refactoring
unit and integration tests
continuous integration
I guess you could say that our code is more agile, though our methodology is less agile. Whereas before we could not keep pace with demands, now we can.
(I'm not saying agile is bad; I'm just reporting my experience. Also, please understand that I do not choose what methodology we use.)
Reposting a related answer of mine:
The discussion is usually agile vs. waterfall, right? I am linking an article, but it is in Portuguese, so I'll try to transmit some of its ideas:
Waterfall is like chess. You think and plan a lot, try to foresee every possible issue as soon as possible. There's a lot of planning, but makes sense only on stable and well-known domains, where change isn't much expected.
Agile is like soccer (or many collective sports): decisions are made in-game and should be done fast. There's no much time to analyze every consequence. It is "ideal" for dynamic and unstable domains, where change is always expected (web applications, for instance, tend to fall in this category). Another point to note is: even if you have the best players, if they don't do well as a team, you won't be the winner.
IMHO, Scrum would be useful, because:
Once every two weeks (or every month, depending on iteration time) you'll be able to see what's working or not. And this is very valuable, specially as an "amateur" team, which is expected to be learning and finding things out much more constantly.
As amateurs, you probably won't be able to foresee everything (and that's something agile embraces)
There's more space for sharing experience (stand-up meeting, retrospective, and even planning meeting). And you share REAL experience (you must write code every week rather than just plan)
It appears your priorities are changing far too frequently for either methodology Agile or Waterfall. With priorities changing frequently, you are likely churning in and out of projects leaving a lot of them partly done. The Agile alway be ready to release may help. It has been my experience that getting a methodology in place will improve productivity.
Your situation reminds me of a project I worked on. The developer on the project asked one question at the start, "Do you want me to be do it right or be responsive?" I was on the project when it was two years into a six month project. One week the same functionality was implemented Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Tuesday and Thursday were spent removing the functionality.
I would suggest you start adopting practices from Agile. Scheduling a short sprint period could help with changing priorites. It may be easier to maintain priorities for a period of a week or two and may make it easier to stabilize priorities. You will also need a backlog (sounds like you have a large one already).
Management may be more willing to hold off new priorities if you can slot them into a sprint in a week or two. You will also be able to identify the priority tradeoffs. If you add something to the next sprint, what will be removed.
Consider having part of the team working Agile while the others maintain the status quo. Rotate one team member each sprint as you are gaining experience. Consider having the whole team participate in a daily stand up status meeting, and the post sprint review. Once you have demonstrated increased productivity and returns to the company you should be able to increase the amount of work being done using your methodology.
Agile is a adaptive methology. Expect to be making major changes to your methodoly for the new year or two. Eventually, you should reach a stage where you are fine tuning.
In my experience, you absolutely need the following for agile (XP or Scrum at least) to work. Without these prerequisites you are likely to fail. Hard.
Team must be stable and 100% dedicated to this.
Team must be colocated in one workspace.
Customer/product owner must be available on site at all times.
Support from management. This means providing funds and courage to ensure the points above.
Give these points, you can probably tackle anything as long as you keep to the values.
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I know that for me I first got started following the waterfall method of project management and along with that I went with the predictive approach to software design. In this I mean we had huge packets of documentation, UML, database schemas, data dictionaries, workflows, activity diagrams, etc.
Having worked in software for over 10 years now I find it to be much more realistic to approach software design from a Reactive approach. I frequently follow a scrum approach to project management and with that very little heavy documentation is ever generated. We have very little workflow specification (though they still have there use). This is a much more dynamic approach to software creation. Of course along with it comes frequent refactoring as time goes on as we find out new features over time that had we planned for up front would have changed things dramatically.
The big difference for us is that the first approach takes longer, seems to fail more frequently in a software construction world, and isn't nearly as flexible. The second approach provides more flexibility, makes us aware of failure faster (so we can course correct faster), and provides some form of functionality at the end of every iteration.
Knowing both sides from experience, I still find many people that LOVE the waterfall approach over the agile approach for software development. I don't get it.
question: Why would someone use waterfall over some form of agile with all of the research backing agile? What are strong arguments for using waterfall over agile?
When I started programming (with COBOL no less), waterfall was the "new" approach. Today, I'd tell you that I use a waterfallish agile methodology. For larger systems, I find a waterfall type start works best. Not creating huge documents (that's a waste of time IMO) but rather to take some steps like creating a UI prototype and/or use cases to get our heads around the business problem at hand. Once we are comfortable we have the problem scoped and we have a solid understanding, we move into an agile development mode.
To answer your question though, I think the big reason waterfall sticks around is many people don't like change. It's scary to change and moving from waterfall to agile is a big change.
I think that part of the reason why people still often cling to waterfall is that it gives the illusion of control. In a waterfall, you can do enough up front work to put together a beautiful schedule that nicely addresses every contingency that you can think of, and then give a detailed roadmap for the future to anyone on the business side who asks when feature X will be available.
The problem is that you can almost never follow that plan to the letter, and you are almost always late/dropping features. However from the upfront, it looks very controlled and manageable.
I'm a big Agile fan, but what I've always struggled with is the long range roadmap/forecasting that is often asked for by the sales and marketing folks. I think that the waterfall's illusion of certainty is very comforting to managers and business folks.
My boss tells me to.
I suspect many people have no choice and old bosses don't learn new tricks.
Not taking sides, but pretty much any research would be unscientific at best.
You say (emphasis is mine)
question: Why would someone use waterfall over some form of agile with all of the research backing agile? What are strong arguments for using waterfall over agile?
but don't link to any studies.
It's one of those things that are known to be extremely difficult to actually test. You can't have two identical teams work on the same project at the same time, because there's no such thing as two identical teams. You can't have the same team complete the same task twice in a row using two different methodologies without the first pass tainting the second. I've never heard of anyone designing an experimental (or even statistical) study that can convincingly argue for any software development methodology. I'd be interested to see one though, if you have a link.
Short of real evidence, it boils down to personal preference. What are the strong arguments for chocolate over vanilla?
I'll play devil's advocate and state that agile is flawed is nearly as many ways as the waterfall method is. I'm not one of those that love the waterfall method, but I don't love agile either.
My experience with agile hasn't been very positive. To be fair, I used it in a corporate environment, which paid lip service to "agile" while still expecting our manager to produce long term milestones and deliverables upfront.
However, I found that agile (scrum in particular) methodologies often disguise major problems with design. While waterfall gives managers the illusion of control, agile seems to do the same for development teams. I've seen teams where bringing up any issue that aren't in the current sprint/iteraton is frowned upon, with the expectation that it'll be handled "in time". It only requires a few major design decisions to be ignored for the project to go belly up in future, while current iterations go smoothly and project looks to be on track.
You can argue that the team's at fault for not understanding the spirit of agile, but I'd like to see better methodologies that incorporate the best parts of agile.
One of the premises of (at least) XP is that change is cheap. The waterfall model was built on the principles that change, any change, is costly. The assumption in the waterfall model is that once software has been written, changing it is more expensive than investing the time up front to come to a "complete" understanding of the problem.
Experience seems to indicate that it is very hard to come to a complete understanding of the problem and that if some precautions are taken (e.g. Unit Testing) change can become a lot cheaper. Therefore if you encounter a problem where some of the agile premises don't hold true other approaches might become feasible again. In between Waterfall and Agile there is at least Spiral development which is - sort of - what we practice.
You need to be preditive enough to deliver the goods. You need to be reactive enough to deal with the issues.
I was once stuck with six months to complete a project estimated to take a year, and based on past experience experience would take two. So I spent three months researching methodolgies. We finished on time (in three months), using the appropriate parts of a waterfall process.
A few points that made the methodoly work:
- Create an use standards, update them when needed.
- Build libraries: Do it once, do it well, fix it without breaking existing code.
- Do just enough documentation.
- Version control everything you can.
- Break things down; a method should either manage work or do work.
- Increase cohesion, decrease coupling, reuse.
- Buy or build the tools you need.
- Track your issues and progress.
Another project I was breifly involved was a six month project. I didn't get involved until a year and a half after it started. The development lead had been hired at an extreme markup as he was leaving a career with a pension plan. At the start of the project he asked the project manager, "Do you want me to do it right or be reactive?" Can you guess the answer? The week I was involved same feature was implemented on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Guess what happened Tuesday and Thursday?
The strength in Agile is its emphasis on just enough, just in time. The strength in the waterfall methodoly is that it covers all the things you need to think about. I've yet to work on a project that did or should have done all the steps. I have worked on many projects that did steps which should have been done on a corporate basis.
The title says it all. (Actually: proactive vs reactive). Why chose the reactive way and give up control unless you don't have to? Waterfall is not the only alternative, you can have any kind of development process what you refine when you like. Control is the key.
It's a spectrum btw, the waterfall on one end and the totally reactive, zero documentation methods on the other end. If you work in the consultant industry for powerful (and usually indecisive) clients, you have to resort to reactive methods. If you develop shrinkwrap software you can plan ahead and manage knowledge. Some projects also require tons of specifications and rules, where the code and fix approach just don't cut it. For me software engineering is primarily about knowledge management and design, coding comes second.
P.s. there is no such a thing as agile and fixed price. Not in the classical way they usually sell the method. See http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FixedPrice.html
If you exactly know the requirements that never chagen, if you know how long each step will take and if you know all the resources are avaliable at the time needed you can do waterfall and it will work. But in deed these kind of projects are quite rare and I think I will never be part of it.
When designing systems to be used by end users, agile often works well because the requirements are likely to be incorrect and a large part of the process is getting feedback from users in the form of a usable version.
However, when creating software that interfaces with other software often the requirements can be worked out in very clearly. In this case it is often more productive to ensure that you have a very clear and accurate specification, unit tests In this model you can also generate fairly good work estimates and there would be a great deal more cost to use the agile model.
retroactive behaviour
If you have a team of a few dozen people that have over the course of a decade, refined the waterfall strategy to the point that it works well for them, who are you to come in and say, "You're doing it wrong..."? Really, if it is working for them, why change things? Yes this is merely flipping the question around but I think it may be a valid point.
In my team we've found that with maintenance projects (which is the bulk of what we do) where we're tweaking or replacing like with like there isn't always as much need for user input beyond perhaps some UI prototypes.
In that case, particularly given that there are commercial deals involved the waterfall approach at a macro level can fit well. Even then we still like incremental / agile approaches at the implementation level.
It is worth noting that most of our clients are large lumbering organisations in love with their paperwork, so that adds even more impetus for us to at least appear traditional to them.
The documentation generated during the waterfall process allows for a lot of CYA. You can point fingers when a project goes off the rails. Very few executives are going to be OK with "oh well, I guess that project got away from us! Well, at least we found out early, no harm no foul!"
Also, design docs can automatically generate test plans, which is useful for QA.
It's pretty common when bidding for a contract that one of the iron-clad conditions is that you follow their "process" which on inspection is waterfall.
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Maybe my understanding of agile development isn't as good as it should be, but I'm curious how an agile developer would potentially use off-the-shelf (OTS) software when the requirements and knowledge of what the final system should be are changing as rapidly as I understand them to (often after each iteration of development).
I see two situations that are of particular interest to me:
(1) An OTS system meets the initial set of requirements with little to no modification, other than potential integration into an existing system. However, within a few iterations of development, this system no longer meets the needs without rewriting the core code. The developers must choose to either spend additional time learning the core code behind this OTS software or throw it away and build from scratch. Either would have a drastic impact on development time and project cost.
(2) The initial needs are not like any existing OTS system available, however, in the end when the customer accepts the product, it ends up being much like existing solutions due to requirement additions and subtractions. If the developers had more requirements and spent more time working on them up front, this solution could have been used instead of building again. The project was delivered, but later and at a higher cost than necessary.
As a software engineer, part of my responsibilities (as I have been taught), are to deliver high-quality software to the customer on time at the lowest possible cost (among other things). Agile development allows for high-quality software, but in some cases, it might not be apparent that there are better alternatives until it is too late and too much money has been spent.
My questions are:
How does off-the-shelf software fit in with agile development?
How do the agile manager and agile developer deal with these cases?
What do the agile paradigms say about these cases?
Scenario1:
This can occur regardless off the OTS nature of the component. Agile does not mean near-sighted.. you'd need to know the big chunks.. the framework bits and spend thinking time on it beforehand. That said, you can only build to what you know .. Delay only till the last responsible moment.Then you need to pick one of the alternatives and start on it. (I'd Avoid third party application unless the cost of developing it in-house is infeasible.. but that's just me). Prototype multiple solutions to check feasibility with list of known requirements. Keep things loosely coupled (replacable), easy to change and full tested. If you reach the fork of keep hacking or rewrite, you'd need to think of which has better value for the business and pick that option. It's comes down 'Now that we're here, what's the best we can do now?'
Scenario2:
This can happen although the chances are slim compared to the team spending 2-3 months trying to get the requirements 'finalized' only to find that the market needs or customer minds have changed and 'Now we want it this way'. Once again, its a question of what is the point of time till which you are prepared to investigate and explore before committing on a path of action. Decide wisely with whatever information you have upto that point.. Hindsight is always 20-20 but the customers wont wait forever. You can't wait till the point of time where the requirements coalesce to fit a known OTS component :)
Agile says Do whatever makes sense and strip out the non-value-adding activities :) Agile is no magic bullet. just my 2 agile cents :)
Not a strict answer per se, but I think that using off the shelf software as a component in a software solution can be very beneficial if:
It's data is open, e.g. an open database or a web service to interact with it
The off the shelf system can customised easily using a similar programming paradigm to the rest of your solution
It can be seamlessly adapted to the rest of your work-flow
I'm a big fan of not re-inventing the wheel, and using your development skills to design the 'glue' between off-the-shelf solutions can be a big win.
Remember 'open' is the important part, and a vendor will often tout their solution as open when it isn't really.
I think I read somewhere that if during an iteration you discover that you have more than 20% more work that you initially thought then you should abandon the sprint and start planning a new one taking into account the additional work.
So this would mean replanning with the business to see if they still want to go ahead with the original requirements now that you know more.
At our company we also make use of prototyping before the sprint to try and identify these kind of situations before they arise on a sprint. Although of course that still may not identify the kind of situation that you describe.
C2 wiki discussion: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BuyDontBuild
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I'm the second dev and a recent hire here at a PHP/MySQL shop. I was hired mostly due to my experience in wrangling some sort of process out of a chaotic mess. At least, that's what I did at my last company. ;)
Since I've been here (a few months now), I've brought on board my boss, my product manager and several other key figures (But mostly chickens, if you pardon the Scrum-based stereotyping). I've also helped bring in some visibility to the development cycle of a major product that has been lagging for over a year. People are loving it!
However, my coworker (the only other dev here for now) is not into it. She prefers to close her door and focus on her work and be left alone. Me? I'm into the whole Agile approach of collaboration, cooperation and openness. Without her input, I started the Scrum practices (daily scrums, burndown charts and other things I've found that worked for me and my previous teams (ala H. Kniberg's cool wall chart). During our daily stand up she slinks by and ignores us as if we actually weren't standing right outside her door (we are actually). It's pretty amazing. I've never seen such resistance.
Question... how do I get her onboard? Peer pressure is not working.
Thanks from fellow Scrum-borg,
beaudetious
While Scrum other agile methodologies like it embody a lot of good practices, sometimes giving it a name and making it (as many bloggers have commented on) a "religion" that must be adopted in the workplace is rather offputting to a lot of people, including myself.
It depends on what your options and commitments are, but I know I'd be a lot more keen on accepting ideas because they are good ideas, not because they are a bandwagon. Try implementing/drawing her in to the practices one at a time, by showing her how they can improve her life and workflow as well.
Programmers love cool things that help them get stuff done. They hate being preached at or being asked to board what they see as a bandwagon. Present it as the former rather than the latter. (It goes without saying, make sure it actually IS the former)
Edit: another question
I've never actually worked for a place that used a specific agile methodology, though I'm pretty happy where I'm at now in that we incorporate a lot of agile practices without the hype and the dogma (best of both worlds, IMHO).
But I was just reading about Scrum and, is a system like that even beneficial for a 2 person team? Scrum does add a certain amount of overhead to a project, it seems, and that might outweigh the benefits when you have a very small team where communication and planning is already easy.
Without her input, I started the Scrum practices (daily scrums, burndown charts and other things I've found that worked for me and my previous teams (ala H. Kniberg's cool wall chart). During out daily stand up she slinks by and ignores us as if we actually weren't standing right outside her door (we are actually). It's pretty amazing. I've never seen such resistance.
Question... how do I get her onboard? Peer pressure is not working.
Yikes! Who would ever want to work in such an oppressive environment? If you're lucky, she's sending around her resume and you'll be able to hire someone who is on board with your development process.
Assuming you want to hang on to her, I'd turn down (or off) the rhetoric and work on being a friend and co-worker first. If the project is a year late, she can't be feeling good about herself and it sounds like you aren't afraid to trumpet your success. That can be intimidating.
I know nothing about Scrum, however. I'm just imagining what it would be like to walk around in your co-worker's shoes.
beaudetious, buddy,
I would really suggest you read Steve Yegge's blog called "Good Agile, Bad Agile". It's an oldy but a goody, and I think it's a must read for anyone - like myself about 2 months ago - who gets a little let's say "over-eager" to agile-up their workplace. Agile offers a lot of good practices, but you have to take them all with a grain of salt and adopt what you're lacking and skip out on all the other crud that might be unuseful for a particular situation - e.g. the daily scrum. If your co-worker would just like to code in quiet (read Peopleware for why this is a good thing) and she's being a productive team member quit bugging her with your scrumming a let her work in whatever way she likes most.
People are usually less "hostile" about these practices if you just approach them and simply say "Do you have a sec? Listen, communication is really a problem right now, I feel like I don't know what you're doing and I really don't want to step on your toes again and spend two days writing something you already did like last week, so let's work on this. I'd like to try X, what do you think?". Be compassionate and don't tolerate "bad apples", that's literally how I agiled up my workplace, and many problems have started evaporating. We're by no means an 100% XP or 100% Scrum compliant place, because we just use whatever works and was needed.
Simple. Don't talk about scrum. Don't use scrum on her. Instead take the underlying principles of scrum (e.g. the purpose as opposed to the application) and create different approaches that accommodate her way of working but have subtle tints of scrum.
All humans are different and a lot of programmers dislike scrum. I wouldn't force it upon them as that would just be counter-productive. I'd suggest identifying the problems in the development process (in a non-scrum fashion), see if you can get her to agree that the issues exist, then ask her what she thinks would be a good solution. Her co-operation and input into the process is essential to her co-operation, if she doesn't have buy-in she wont become a citizen.
From there on in you can hopefully create some sort of quasi-hybrid scrum + her approach to the process where you can both agree on the way forward.
I think the key would be to help her understand why you are doing Scrum in the first place. I guess you have your reasons, so why not tell her? You are likely to get resistance towards any change if the people involved don't understand why there is change or what they will benefit from it. If you can explain your reasons for using Scrum, and the following benefits, to her in a way that relates to her everyday work, I think she is more likely to adapt a more positive attitude towards it.
If she sees no value in the Scrum process, or doesn't understand how it relates to her, she probably won't care about it.
I think one of the most important concepts for someone to understand regarding Scrum is the fact that you are working as a group and commit to your project as a group, not as individuals. For many people, this is the hardest thing to grasp, since they are so used to living in "their own World".
I'm not sure Scrum is the central issue here; I'm guessing she feels threatened by the new guy bringing in a lot of new ideas and stirring things up. I've been in that situation before as the new person bringing in a new perspective on things, and sometimes it's just difficult to immediately bring those existing people around to a new way of thinking. It often requires a culture shift which doesn't happen overnight.
Try to get her input and opinion on things as much as possible, and try to show that you respect that she has been on the team longer than you. If after a while she still doesn't participate, then all you can do is mention it to your Manager and let them take it from there.
Continue your efforts to involve the other developer. Remember you are the one who wants to make this change. Ask for help with problems you have. Invite them to the daily stand up meeting. I currently do the planning for the daily stand up and I make sure all the pigs and chickens are invited. If you are the lead on the project it is up to you to address the situation and take a risk. Put yourself out there.