Month: January 2012

6 principles for a productive agile development team

Posted on by will

“Being Agile” is more than following a checklist. It’s more than following the Scrum or Kanban handbook (in fact, it doesn’t even matter if you’re “doing” scrum or kanban at all!). Being an effective and productive agile software development team is about understanding and believing in a set of values, practices and principles.

Starting with our engineers, we tried to boil these values and practices down to a handful of core ideas. We wanted to share a common language and have a common set of checkpoints where we could track and assess where we are as a team, and give us guidance on where to focus to help us get better. We created what we call the “Agile Sliders”: a set of 6 guiding principles and practices for agile engineering teams.

  1. Code Quality
  2. Unit Testing
  3. Acceptance Testing
  4. Self-Organisation
  5. Pair Programming
  6. Code Ownership

Code Quality

  1. Thinks code as it is, is OK
  2. Understands and appreciates OO
  3. Identifies ‘smells’ in code
  4. Desire to fix smells and continually improve code
  5. Deals with technical pain and debt
  6. Uses solid OO design principles
  7. Understands the importance of fixing ‘broken windows’
  8. Understands and uses design patterns
  9. Encourages debate and learning

Unit Testing

  1. No Unit Tests
  2. Reluctant to write tests / low quality tests
  3. Always writes unit tests; tests the right things
  4. Always writes tests first
  5. Unit tests follow good OO principles
  6. Challenges the team when they don’t write enough tests

Acceptance Testing

  1. No Acceptance Tests
  2. Manual ATs done by devs
  3. ATs defined by devs with input from QA and Design
  4. Some automated ATs by devs
  5. Some automated ATs by devs in the build
  6. Outside-in development using ATs
  7. Run ATs locally before every checkin; fix breaks including other’s tests
  8. Call out team members who don’t write tests

Self-Organisation

  1. Needs micro-management
  2. Participates actively in plannings, estimations, etc
  3. Trusts team members
  4. Steps up to lead planning, etc without prompting
  5. Seeks out and gives feedback safely
  6. Team runs own standups, etc. Solicits feedback

Pair Programming

  1. No Pairing
  2. Reluctantly pairs when asked
  3. Willingly pairs when asked
  4. “Where’s my pair?”
  5. Pairing effectively in driver and navigator roles
  6. Asks team members why they are not pairing

Code ownership

  1. Mine / Theirs
  2. Willingly works on other code
  3. Not defensive about changes to code you wrote
  4. Seek out stuff you don’t know and work on it
  5. Go out of your way not to drive when working on ‘your’ code
  6. Encourages the rest of the team not to think of code as Mine / Theirs

Each principle exists on a scale representing a journey to an ideal state. In every retrospective we assess our progress against these scales. Did we get better? Stay the same? Get worse? The point isn’t so much to score ourselves, but it is a trigger for a conversation, and a tool for the team to use to challenge themselves on their journey.

We have also found that we can view progress from multiple viewpoints:

  1. The team as a whole, and
  2. Individual developers.

We’ve had some success linking these principles not only to team targets, but to individual performance targets as well.

We constantly iterate on our “sliders”, and we love feedback. Please leave any thoughts in the comments. I would like to expand the set of sliders to cover Product Owner and Experience Designer roles.

The Agile Team Values Poster

Here are the 6 principles and practices in a poster form. Click the image below to download a larger version suitable for printing. You are welcome to print it, change it, make it better!
Agile Team Values

A Scrum Master/Agile Coach job description

Posted on by will

I’m often asked for help putting together a job description for a Scrum Master, so I thought I would post an extract of one we’ve used recently.

We are a product team of developers, QA experts, user experience and visual designers and product owners who are looking for someone to help us get better at what we do. We’re pretty good at the basics of agile software development but can always use new ideas about how and where to improve. We’re less concerned about what it’s called (Scrum/Kanban) and much more excited about results, whether that means moving towards continuous deployment, using ATDD, or seeing our active users grow.

You are someone who leads by example rather than by dictate and you know how to bring out the best in people. You’re not afraid to deal with conflicts. You know when it’s good to say “No” and when to push for more results.

In addition, we’re looking for someone to act as a galvanizing force for our whole wider team in terms of sharing Agile knowledge across the company. Whether it be organizing 1-day open spaces for our agile community, or organizing cross-team workshops, the goal is for you to establish an Agile center of gravity around our team.

Your main responsibilities will be:

  1. Act as Scrum master for 1-2 scrum teams with a focus on guiding the teams towards improving the way they work.
  2. Facilitate sprint planning, retrospective and sprint demos
  3. Assist the product owner with keeping the backlog groomed
  4. Ensure cross-team coordination
  5. Reach out to the larger company network for impediment removal
  6. Maintain relevant metrics that help the team see how they are doing
  7. Coach and mentor other scrum masters in our product team. Ensure that our ways of working are consistent across the teams.
  8. Liaise between the developers and User Experience/Visual Designers. Foster better communication between the disciplines.
  9. Act as a project manager when necessary. Take responsibility for managing dependencies between our team and third parties or between our team and other scrum teams.
  10. Strengthen the presence of our team as an Agile centre of excellence. Actively contribute to the company’s Agile and Lean Community. Keep the rest of the company network aware of our activities.

Qualifications:

  1. Knowledge of the software development life cycle
  2. Certified scrum master/scrum practitioner
  3. Knowledge and/or experience of Kanban
  4. Excellent communication skills in English in written and spoken form
  5. At least 3 years experience working in an agile environment, preferably in a variety of situations

Feel free to use this, re-use it and copy it. I hope it’s helpful!

What would you add to make a better Scrum Master job description? Share your tips in the comments.

Everyone’s a marketer now

Posted on by will

It’s a question that every tech startup or product has to ask itself: when the budget is limited (and it nearly always is), where do you spend your cash? On improving the product, or on marketing and advertising campaigns? To me, the answer is clear: every dollar spent on advertising is a dollar not spent improving the product. Can you afford that? Can your product afford that?

But what do you do if you don’t have money to spend on marketing?

Twenty years ago to reach a million people with a message you needed to run a TV ad during a prime-time TV show or book a page in the national newspaper. If you wanted to sell your product to 1 million people, you just needed to insert enough advertising cash. Insert x dollars: ship y units.

Today, thousands of blogs, YouTube videos or Tweets reach millions of people every day. And it’s free.

Every individual has a reach now through the internet far greater than ever before. We can communicate messages immediately with our friends, who we trust, as well as broader social networks, easily, and it’s practically free. Everyone in your product team – from the product manager to the last software tester – is a potential marketer, reaching out to their social networks with a trusted and genuine message about your product.

In the world of web products, the products themselves have far greater reach and avenues to be found in the web than any physical product on a shop shelf could ever hope for. You can leverage Facebook and other social networks to promote and talk about your product, as well as create conversations with and between users. You can use Facebook as a platform to publish individual activity or status from the product, which has the dual benefit of strengthening the user’s social feed as well as promoting the product to every one of that user’s trusted network of friends. Pay a little bit of attention to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and you can target and optimise incoming traffic from search engines.

Guerrilla marketing campaigns like this one might be limited to a fairly local reach, but they are cheap (and fun!) to execute. Getting the whole team involved in local guerrilla campaigns can also be great for morale. The best performing and self-organising teams look at the whole end-to-end of their product – and marketing is no exception.

Today everyone’s a marketer. Getting the word out, finding more users, getting more traffic: these are no longer only the marketing team’s responsibility.

Rallying the “troops”: how things can be misunderstood

Posted on by will
Soldiers at attention.

I was reminded today of a story about managing people. About 8 years ago I was in my first management job, managing a team of about 15 web software designers and engineers. I saw a key challenge in bringing the team together, inspiring one vision and building a sense of identity and unity within the team.

At the time, I was fresh out of the Army, and was still active as a part-time Army reservist. I took to calling the team my “troops”, and turned some of the key challenges we faced as a team into our “key battles”. I saw it as a term of endearment to the team. In my mind, I saw it bringing a sense of unity and a common, understandable vision to the team. I saw it flattening the hierarchy, putting us all at the same level to encourage shared responsibility and the willingness to speak out. I saw it helping to build individual relationships between each of the team members. (Looking back, I think subconsciously I also hoped it would help give me, as a very young manager of an experienced team, a sense of authority; but I wouldn’t have told you that at the time.)

All-in-all, I saw it as a positive, understandable and motivational message. Indeed, military expressions like “rallying the troops”, “strategic battles” and “war rooms” were common in business parlance then, as they are today.

In reality, though, the team themselves saw something quite different. In short, they hated it. They hated being referred to as “troops” or “soldiers”, which they found disrespectful. Where I saw it flattening the hierarchy within the team, they saw a new hierarchy emerging: one with officers who sit back and give orders and soldiers who follow them. Where I saw it encouraging initiative and shared responsibility, they saw themselves reduced to simple soldiers who just follow orders and are not expected to think for themselves. On top of that many found the frequent references to war and battles offensive and tiring. (This was just after the second invasion of Iraq, and soldiers were still dying every day in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

I learned two very valuable lessons from this in my young management career.

Firstly, be very careful with military references in the workplace. While it’s still common in business to hear talk of “battlefronts” and “attack plans” and so on, I’ve learned to be cautious with how often, and in which situations, I use these. I think in the context of a conversation between a few people it’s probably ok; but I wouldn’t frame the team objectives/targets for the year in terms of “battles” and “wars”.

Secondly, sometimes you just don’t know how people are responding to the messages you deliver and the things you say. As a manager, when setting a vision or delivering a message, you need to remember that your job isn’t done until you can confirm that the message was heard and understood by your team in the way you intended. For my example above, how could I have known that my efforts to bring the team together were not working out as I had intended? I think the answer is: ask. Ask for feedback from individuals, from the team. Just like in agile and scrum, constant feedback helps you constantly iterate and adjust, which applies as much to management and communication style as it does to code.