Jeff Sutherland's Pearls

Last week I attend an Agile RTP meetup hosted at the offices of Relevance Software . I heard Jeff Sutherland speak about the "Five Problems solved for PatientKeeper". If you are into Agile then for me to repeat what he said would be redundant, and if you are new to Agile then you probably need some basic education before jumping into his talk.

However, I captured the following pithy quotations from Jeff:


1. "World domination always gets people excited". When the PatientKeeper management team was forming the company, they needed a vision of what PatientKeeper would be when grown-up. Jeff speculated that Bill Gates had a vision of owning the PC desktop. Sooo... the PatientKeeper team decided to own the mobile devices used by clinical professionals. They wanted to create a framework that would be considered the gold standard for third party medical application developers.

2. "If it is impossible show me the impediment list". Attributed to the CEO who took over PatientKeeper in 2003 and wanted the code deployed to hospitals after each Sprint. When told that the installation time was a bottleneck to this tempo, he formed the "Live by Five" program, which brought in PatientKeeper expert services to work with the hospital IT staff to make sure the installation took place by 5:00 the day of install.

3. "If Lean is all about removing waste, then SCRUM is all about removing impediments". Jeff likes to teach Lean Manufacturing to executives trying to adopt agile development because he believes that they can relate to the examples from the world of manufacturing.

4. "Is the Tango a methodology? Neither is agile". Someone in the audience asked Jeff to compare the light-weight "method" of agile with a bureaucratically heavy approach like CMMI. Using the analogy to the Tango, Jeff said that like that dance, the Agilista does not plan so much but responds to the circumstances of the project.

The Pampered Pooch

Last night I joined a crowd of 18 at the Agile RTP group, which was not a bad turnout considering it was election night. We were there to participate in a "59 Minute SCRUM" facilitated by Bob Galen of RGalen Consulting Group. After a 20 minute levelset on what SCRUM is, we divided into three teams of six and elected a Product Owner and Scrum Master. The goal of the iteration release was to deliver a compelling brouchure of high quality for a Doggy Spa called the Pampered Pooch. We had a existing product backlog of approximately 20 user stories. The timeline of our iteration was as follows:

Iteration Planning - 10 Minutes
Sprint Day 1 - 10 Minutes
Daily SCRUM Meeting - 5 Minutes
Sprint Day 2 - 10 Minutes
Sprint Review - 14 Minutes
Debrief - 10 Minutes

Our team of six members had someone with a laptop and wireless access to the printer where we were meeting. While other teams were hand lettering, cutting, and pasting. We were able to produce a polished look feel. Unfortunately, the mechanics of going from several copies of rough draft to one editor caused us to log jam and not have all the content delivered on time.

So besides the fickle nature of modern technology what lessons did I learn about Agile?
1. Achieving the right tempo of working seperately and then coming together to coordinate is critical. On a real world 2-3 week sprint the daily standup may be the right tempo but I would not preclude adhoc meetings for bringing people together for a focused purpose.
2. Having a flexible Product Owner willing to change direction based on what is being discovered is very nice to have.
3. When the team gels and works well the feeling of accomplishment is terrific and exhausting.

All in all, an enjoyable evening at aRTP.

An Agile Exercise

I am a member of the Agile-RTP group which meets monthly to share knowledge on agile development. This month we had a "fishbowl" event where Ken Auer of Role Model Software would grab some members of the audience to be a development team and hold a compressed planning session to capture and estimate a project to develop an application. I played the role of the customer and provided the problem. I asked another member of the audience (Glenn Watson) to join me and also play the role of customer.
I used a real project that the team I managed at IBM had completed for Kraft Foods. Kraft was building a kitchen of the future at their Chicago headquarters to showcase concepts of how meals would be prepared someday. They had a concept video of some of the functionality that they wanted. I showed part of this video to the group at the meeting and then Ken grabbed some index cards and asked Glenn and I what functionality we wanted in the system. We used the classic User Story format (As a I want the system to , so ). Here are some examples:

As a family member, I want the system to capture my food preferences so it can assist with meal planning.
As a family member, I want the system to capture my weekly meal plan, so it can provide a meal suggestion.
As a family member, I want the system to alert me when the meal plan violates my nutritional goals.
As a cook, I want the system to provide a recipe adjusted by my nutritional goals that I can follow, so I will be able to prepare meals more effectively.

We ended up with a dozen cards or so.
Then Ken asked the developers for each card if they thought that card could be implemented within one month. This filter was used to find epic stories that might need to be re factored.
I think that a couple cards were separated into a basic and refined version. And one card (getting recipe info from an XML source) was set aside as possibly not requiring a separate development effort. Ken also suggested that we might want to develop a basic screen navigation flow.
So I think that this left us with thirteen cards.
Now Ken asked each of the developers to vote on if a particular card would take 1,2,3,or4 weeks to complete. If there were a wide discrepancy in opinion, discussion was encouraged and then a consensus was captured on the card.
Now came the magic...

Ken said that in his experience with different team sizes he had determined a rule of thumb for productivity. He had different ranges for different team sizes up to a max of twelve members. For this project the team size was four and the range was 8-12 points per month. Since this team had never worked together before he recommended we stay closer to 8.
Glenn and I then were asked to group cards together into sets of functions we wanted developed in one month sprints with the sum of values on the cards to be approximately 8.
My logic in grouping the cards was to get functionality associated with initial setup, weekly planning, and meal preparation into separate piles and implemented in that order. Turned out with the budget we had resulted in five columns of cards. So this was a five month x four person release plan.
At this point in the meeting we had a lot of Q&A. A lot of discussion over how arbitrary the points process was. Glenn pointed out from his experience at Siemens where they had a dozen teams working agile they let teams calibrate points within the team so that trying to compare velocities between teams was impossible.
I pointed out that this had been a real project and when the dust had settled it had taken a team of 3 developers four months to get the system ready for the Kraft Kitchen of the Future. The team used Java and had some pre-existing frameworks that used the OSGi architecture to implement the embedded aspects of the solution.

Color me Certified

So I took this class that results in my being certified as a Scrum Master. The class was good. Joe Little and Jim York tagged team the instruction. They both bring a lot of experience from Lean Manufacturing, Scrum, XP, and Agile Development.
Even though Jim recommended a low tech approach towards tooling (he likes cards on a whiteboard), I am interested in exploring computer aided environments. We used to call them CASE but that is a term not used much anymore. Having developed some CASE tools in my day and wanting to see how Agile could be used by geo-distributed teams I want to see what can be done in that area.
As far as Scrum itself... I like the concept a lot. From commentary during the class it seemed that there are a lot of variations in how it is applied. Since I come from a background where a lot of model content is created before code is written I want to see how a best practice team goes from User Story to Code. The book says that during the sprint the Team does analysis/design/code/test on each User Story. Are model fragments created? If so do they persist in a repository? Are they reuseful by other team members? If so, it seems that a RUP like approach is being taken with a timebox on the cycle.