Real World Agile - Week One

Two weeks ago, I had the privilege to participate in an Agile Planning and Delivery training with James Shore and Diana Larsen. This week we had the chance to put that training into practice. While the training was very hands-on and interactive (we actually did four iterations and built working software the last three days), it was also in an artificial environment. In the real world, things didn't quite fit into the neat patterns we practiced in class. Here's I present what we did, what we didn't do, what worked and what needs improvement after week one.

TL;DR Version

• Task Board and Test Driven Development (TDD) are Very Good Things.
• Software tracking tools, not as useful as a rolling white board and post-it notes.
• Early practice shows promise and we'll continue to build on what we've learned.

Our Early Attempts

There's a lot more to Agile than the ceremonies and tools - or maybe a lot less. In the past we focused on story planning, iterations and a software tool to help us keep track of what was going on, but all we were really doing was cramming a waterfall methodology into one week sprints. Needless to say, that didn't work. We didn't gain much from daily stand up meetings, putting all the stories, tasks and estimations into a tracking tool or having a scrum master. We still ended up trying to cram too much scope into too little time with the added complexity of a new methodology run by an inexperienced coach. It could have gone better.

What We Did This Time

Fewer Stories So Could Confidently Commit

One of the key points that I brought away from our training was to deliver value with each story. Even if the value is small, it's still an incremental gain for our customers. Rather than plan a project up front and stuff all the stories into iterations several weeks into the future, plan the week's stories and only commit what can actually get done.

That last point is worth reiterating - only commit to what can actually get done. Completing stories energizes the team and gives us a real sense of accomplishment toward our end goal. We had previously guessed wrongly and over-committed and got farther and farther behind with our stories. This week, we took a look at all the possible stories, prioritized them and only committed to a handful (no more than 6-10 is a good rule). The rest went into the backlog.

What we knew intuitively, but failed to account for in our previous attempts was a buffer for technical debt, regular support and maintenance of other software and administrative overhead (meetings, email, interruptions, etc.). This time we left plenty of buffer and committed to paying down technical debt if there was buffer time we could use.

Test Driven Development (TDD)

I had previously advocated Test Driven Development to the team, but it was new, seemingly complicated and I wasn't very good at it myself. I was familiar with the concept and had done it myself, but didn't do a good job at explaining the technique or the value to the team. Luckily the training spent a fair amount of time on this concept with real-world examples and practice. And as fortune would have it, this week an excellent online meetup, "Test Driven Development Demystified", occurred and we could all listen in to help reinforce our learning. With that baseline established, we are committing to TDD as a regular practice for our coding.

One challenge we face with TDD is that we have piles of legacy code. We chose not to try to do any retro-testing of legacy code, but rather write unit tests for all new code and test old code as we end up working with it. Part of paying down our technical debt will be refactoring old code with tests, but only as the system and time demands. Our rule is "make the code better than it was before". Small improvements add up and eventually we will be fully covered.

What We Didn't Do

Demonstrations

We are committing to one day a week (we chose Wednesday) as our demonstration, retrospective and planning day but since we only had three days before base-lining our iteration schedule we chose to skip the demonstrations this week. Next week will be a different story.

Retrospective

For the same reasons we didn't do any demonstrations, we skipped a formal retrospective. Instead, we chose to talk about what we learned in the training and commit to a few key concepts (TDD and story planing being the most prominent). We also used this time to estimate stories and add stories them to our task board.

Use a Software Tracking Tool

Speaking of a task board, we chose to skip a software tracking tool for our iteration planning and use sticky notes and a rolling white board instead. The board is visible to everyone in a communal area and it's very nice to interact with something tangible for planning and doing stories and tasks. The board did eventually get translated into the software tool, but that is only because we have a developer who isn't co-located and we need a way of sharing the task board across time zones.

What Worked

The Task Board

Of all the things that are really working this week, the physical task board has to be the winner. Prominently displayed stories and tasks (completed and in progress) is a great reminder of what we're working on and what we got accomplished. Planning using the board was also much nicer as we could move stories around in priority order and drop them into the iteration much quicker than fumbling with a software tool. This is definitely a keeper and I'm actually excited about planning next week's stories.

Daily Stand Ups

We went back to a five minute stand up - one minute per team member. We can check in, get a level set for the day and move into planning and clearing road blocks immediately afterward. We are using Scrum's "did, doing, impediments, confidence" questions which is working for us. When it becomes tedious or boring, we'll switch it up to something that works for us.

Areas of Improvement

TDD

We're all practicing TDD now, but I didn't feel I was able to really get in and write the tests I wanted to for the week. I saw plenty of room for refactoring, but a couple of in-progress stories that had hard deadlines meant I only had time to do some incremental improvements to code, rather than create fully tested objects. That being said, we spent a lot of time learning the process and tools, so it wasn't a failure, just an area for improvement.

Planning

Our planning was a bit rushed this week. Impending deadlines and being short-handed due to illness and planned PTO meant we had to crash through our planning session. We were missing our primary product owner since he was at a conference, so we did the best we could with the people we had. Like TDD, not a total failure but I'm confident we will be better next week.

Summary

Agile in a classroom and Agile in the real world are two different animals. In the classroom there aren't meetings, email and support calls to take and everything works (almost) according to the book. As a way of building software, it's incredibly useful, but we're going to have to slowly incorporate all the best practices as we're able to absorb them. I would say the first week was a huge success at small improvements - each of which will add up to better efficiency, better code and better value for our customers. It might just take a few months to get there.

Additional Resources

Test Driven Development

• MXUnit - This is a unit testing framework for ColdFusion. If you do CF, I highly recommend it.
• James Shore's Let's Play TDD - Jim goes through an actual Java software project from scratch using TDD. You get to see it built up warts and all. It's incredibly useful to see it in action.
• Test Driven Development Demystified - this online meetup was an excellent one hour presentation on TDD and Katas. Like the Let's Play, a demonstration of TDD happened live (it's now recorded and available).
  Slides and Code

Agile

There are a ton of resources on Agile out there. Here are a couple to get you started.

• James Shore's Blog
• Diana Larsen's Blog

What Do You Think?
Do you have a question or comment about Agile? Have you tried it or are currently doing it? I'd love to hear your experiences and what worked and didn't work for you. I'd also like to know if you have additional resources I should add to my list. Thanks!