Lors de son passage à Montéal le 14 juillet, KenSchwaber a accordé une entrevue à Vincent Tencé. Découvrez comment réussir avec Scrum, visionnez la vidéo!

http://visualstudiomagazine.com/Articles/2010/07/27/Installing-Scrum-Process-Template.aspx

Urban Turtle 3.2 fully supports the new Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 Process Template. Using the index card metaphor with drag-and-drop functionality, it is the perfect replacement for Excel-based planning workbooks.

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In the coming weeks, I will publish a series of blog posts to give you more detail on each of our partners. I started this series with a first partner, the firm Northwest Cadence.

Northwest Cadence is an American consulting firm located in Kirkland, Washington.  They consult, coach, and train organizations to help them perfect their software development processes. They orchestrate the cadence between technology and teamwork to ensure organizations get triumphant results. Through a focus on team capability, Application Lifecycle Management, and optimal tooling such as Urban Turtle, Northwest Cadence is here to make you a winner and keep you smiling.

Steven Borg, founder of Northwest Cadence explains why they appreciate Urban Turtle:

“Urban Turtle dramatically reduces the tool friction involved in adopting agile with Team Foundation Server.  By clearly removing a significant agile adoption blocker, Urban Turtle helps teams ‘get’ agile more quickly and adopt more successfully.  I’m currently recommending Urban Turtle to all our clients adopting agile.  It eases the transition and teams love it.”

You can find an engaging compilation of Technical Tips, Knowledge Expansion, ASK SME, and Event Highlights by subscribing to their monthly e-newsletter. Do not hesitate to consult their website or read their blog.

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One of the main orientations is to build Urban Turtle into TFS (as opposed to integrate with). All our design decisions are made to bring as much value-added as possible while creating a seamless experience for existing TFS users and grow with TFS as Microsoft adds new features.

If you are interested about the details of the three releases we have made since the Visual Studio 2010 launch in April, please read the following posts:

1. April 30th – Urban Turtle 3.0 RTM is now available!
2. June 4th – Urban Turtle 3.1 now available!
3. July 8th – Urban Turtle 3.2 now available! – Support Visual Studio Scrum 1.0

We believe this orientation is what allows us to have a product that installs on the server in less than two minutes and gets a team to use it right away. We are very interested in hearing your stories and get your feedback about how we can further improve the experience.

Help us make our Urban Turtle a Chameleon

Also, our tight integration in the Web Access user interface makes the user feel at home and perceive TFS with new capabilities (as opposed to using an extra product). This is a big plus to have a smooth user adoption. We know that adopting scrum is already an interesting challenge; you do not need tools to get in your way but be a possible accelerator.

Again, give Urban Turtle a try and let us know how we succeeded in turning it into a Chameleon.

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Last week, I attended the breakfast conference presented in Montreal by Ken Schwaber.

As always, Ken gave a great presentation focusing on the “definition of done” in Scrum and the impact of incorrectly defining what done really means.

As I was listening to the presentation, I looked outside the window overseeing René-Levesque boulevard and noticed an asphalt truck and city workers filling a pothole – then it hit me… As interesting and valuable Ken’s presentation was, we need a systemic approach if we want Scrum to succeed in organizations. Let me explain…

Nobody likes to drive on a street with potholes. So what do cities do? Obviously, they fix them! If you live in Montreal, you realize that every year, the city fills thousands of potholes in an attempt to keep their streets in a good driving conditions but no matter how much efforts (and money) the city invests, the potholes keep appearing.

Isn’t this like implementing Scrum within an organization?

As attendees to Ken’s presentation, weren’t we simply like city workers attending an asphalt conference? It is as if an asphalt guru was explaining to us the right mix of tar and rocks to make the most resistant asphalt when in reality, the problem isn’t really with the asphalt itself but with the city’s traffic management approach.

Same goes for Scrum.

The definition of done is critical. The right people in the right roles is important. Dedicated teams members is crucial. But what about the managers in the organization? Are they supporting Scrum? I mean, are they really supporting the use of Scrum within their organization?

Don’t get me wrong. I truly believe doing Scrum the right way is critical but it is not sufficient to be successful. If your managers aren’t on board, you can try to implement as many of the Scrum best practices as you want – including the right definition of “done” – your teams will never reach the highest level of performance they could. Get the managers on board and your Scrum implementation will be greatly improved.

You might be interested in these related posts:

1. Agile Data Warehouse
2. Introduction to Scrum – Shareable Power Point Presentation
3. 4e Salon Business Intelligence in Montreal

A not so far-fetched example

Let’s just imagine that we walk into DoMoreTech Inc. and we are confronted with 40 developers, 4 QAs, a few ivory tower architects and control hungry project managers. Not to mention a management team that believes taylorism is still the best way to create software.

The Java developers are totally separated from the back-end C developers. A test means starting up the Tomcat server and clicking away.  If you mention unit or automated tests, they look at you like a bunch of deers caught in the headlights. For the past 20 years or so, C developers have been masters of their domain and are very comfortable working within the three and half carpeted walls of their cubicles.  One of them even installed a makeshift cardboard roof to cut down on noise! Oh, yes! And everyone is working on at least 5 projects in parallel.

The QAs are on a mission: Embarrassing the developers during the weekly “team” meeting. To ensure that they reach their bug finding quotas, they withhold information that might help developers today.

Developers tremble when he appears at the elevator doors. Even the paying client with clearly define business needs folds under the pressure of the all mighty Architect.  The Architect has positioned BDUF as a critical process that must be respected for any and all projects to be successful. This well defined process is flawless and the Architect’s design is always perfect and final. If there’s a problem, it’s obviously due to the developer’s lack of maturity and experience.

Project managers and management are really happy that this “Agile thing” will help them do more with less. Since they are not part of the problem, only the technical teams need to improve the way they work.  Now that they have “purchased” Scrum, they have ADDITIONAL tracking tools to better control the situation and make better decisions for the teams.

Ok. Now what?

After a few days, when all these non-winning conditions are confirmed – What do you do as an Agile Coach? Jump in and hope for the best? Run away and never look back? Or maybe do away with the detailed diagnostic and simply leave a Hallmark card on the manager’s desk saying: “Sorry, but this ain’t gonna work”

Personally, I’ve seen watered down variations of the example above in different organizations and I’ve never turned down a client.  But to even hope for agile transition to succeed, the client does need to comply with two simple requirements:

Requirement 1

A pilot project (unless “Big Bang” implementation is considered). Neither a small and meaningless “test tube” project nor a do or die project. How about something just in the middle that involves external dependencies and creates value?

Requirement 2

We need a team. To quote a colleague of ours: “We don’t coach projects, we coach teams!”  And this team needs to be committed to one project. This Scrum team will be composed of a ScrumMaster, Product Owner and qualified individuals to create the solution.

Whether or not these requirements are met, a Mandate Charter is created in collaboration with the client to clearly define, among other things, the conditions of success (COS) of our initiative.  Taking time with the client to establish the conditions of success is a great collaborative activity and allows us to have those hard conversations and setting some facts straight.

If the basic requirements are met, the COS can be far reaching and beautiful things can happen!  If not, the COS might be superficial or even cosmetic in nature.  At this point, decisions need to be made.  Is the client willing to pay for cosmetic changes to his or her organization?  Does the client see value in these changes and is he or she able to sell ME on it?

It’s all about managing expectations.  A client can’t expect an agile coach to turn water in wine. But allow a coach to work with some quality basic ingredients and we just might end up with an award winning Cabernet Sauvignon.

Party on!

Support for Visual Studio Scrum 1.0
Urban Turtle 3.2 fully supports the new Scrum template from Microsoft from the get-go. This post introduces the new features that have been developed for the template, but I strongly recommend that you take some time to read this previous entry to understand the reasoning behind them. Most of these features can be configured to work with other process templates.

New Feature: Approval
Product Owners can now approve PBIs with a single click when looking at their backlog in the Planning Board.

New Feature: Commitment
We made it possible to commit to PBIs contained in a sprint with a single click, again from the Planning Board.

New Feature: Sprint Details
We’ve made it easy to create and access the Sprint work item through the Sprint Details button in the planning board’s iteration list.

New Feature: Favorite iterations and areas
As Dom mentionned before, we have been looking at ways to reduce the number of iterations and areas visible at any time. We’ve come up with a great idea which actually is not our idea at all. I mean, favorites is anything but new in software! Basically, you can now easily switch between viewing all iterations/areas where you can flag some of them as favorites, and then hop back to a view where only favorite iterations/areas are displayed. This effectively reduces the number of work items displayed at once and helps you focus on the task at hand.

Once again, we recommend that everyone upgrades to this latest version and we are eagerly awaiting your feedback. Let us know what you think in our community-powered support site!

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Sprint planning

L’équipe commence à être efficace durant la planification de l’itération, j’ai moins à intervenir! En tant que tel, je trouve que c’est une bonne chose. Ca me fait penser que mes interventions précédentes ont porté fruit et que l’équipe devient indépendante. Du moins pour cette cérémonie…

Backlog maintenance

L’efficacité de l’équipe se propage aux autres cérémonies. Cette séance se déroule avec très peu d’interventions de ma part. Les membres de l’équipe discutent entre eux du contenu des stories, posent des questions au PO et s’entendent généralement, en 2 tours de planning poker, sur le pointage à mettre sur une carte. On pourrait penser que s’est une équipe formée depuis longtemps et qu’ils sont tous habitué de travailler ensemble.

Il reste un point qui risque de devenir problématique, le backlog n’est pas très garni. Ce qui fait qu’il n’y a pas de stories, ou même d’epics, d’avance pour les prochaines itérations. L’engagement de l’équipe pour la prochaine itération risque d’être limité par le contenu du backlog. Il y a de la sensibilisation à faire auprès du PO. À suivre…

Sprint review

Une autre review qui va bien! Cette fois, par contre, il n’y a que le patron du PO qui est présent, l’utilisateur n’est pas là. Ca n’empêche pas à l’équipe de recueillir tous les points auxquels elle était engagée. La patron pose quelques questions et semble satisfait. C’est une review express qui se déroule rapidement, mais ca n’empêche pas que tout le monde est content du résultat.

Sprint retro

Les membres de l’équipe s’attendaient à la formule des 2 sprints précédents; identifier les points forts et les points à améliorer. Un membre me demande en blague « C’est maintenant qu’on chiale ? ». Je lui réponds avec sourire que non, ce n’est pas aujourd’hui! J’ai autre chose de prévu. J’ai constaté que les membres de l’équipe travaillent beaucoup selon leurs spécialités respectives. Je pense que ca a un impact sur le déroulement des itérations, certains membres sont un goulot au début de l’itération et d’autres vers la fin. C’est un signe! Je questionne l’équipe sur le potentiel de travail de façon multidisciplinaire. Ils semblent s’opposer à ma proposition. Je comprends par leur réaction qu’ils ne sont pas contre, c’est qu’ils ne comprennent pas la même chose que moi. Ils entendent que tous les membres de l’équipe atteignent un même niveau d’expertise dans tous les domaines et que chacun peu faire le même travail au même niveau d’efficacité et de qualité. Ouf, je comprends qu’ils s’opposent. Ce que j’entends est plutôt que chacun peut faire du travail qui relève d’une autre discipline, ceci pour s’assurer que l’itération avance bien lorsque qu’un spécialiste n’est pas disponible (avec la saison des vacances qui approchent, ca va rapidement devenir une réalité!).

L’équipe me trouve dur avec mes questions, ils suivent quand même bien l’exercice de rétro. Il faut un peu d’encouragements de ma part, mais les équipiers finissent pas adopter l’idée de travailler en paire interdisciplinaire pour mieux partager la connaissance. On verra à la prochaine rétro comment ils ont apprécié l’expérience.

• Where do we put the time for meetings?
• Do we need to have absolutely all tasks in the sprint backlog?
• When we are pairing, do we do time entries for each of us?
• When we plan, do we create tasks for all the available hours we have? (more on this in the post Sprint and Compelling Goals)

Vince came back home today only to be greeted by firetrucks and the local fire marshal. He was quickly relieved to learn that his brand new condo was not on fire. Unfortunately, for his neighbor Harry, the fire marshal was there expelling him from his own home until he got his mess together.

When Vince found Harry he was in a terrible state of mind. You see, 78 years old Harry had been collecting all the newspapers he could get his hands on ever since his wife had died at 52. 26 years of newspaper stacked up against the walls was too much and a suspicious neighbor made a phone call to the local fire department before Harry would turn his home into the biggest BBQ the city had ever seen. Harry had just lost his entire collection.

All this turmoil shook up Vince inside. When he came back to work Monday, he started thinking about all the mess that was accumulating in his own project.

He made the following list of all that was accumulating around him :
- The backlog had tons of duplicate bugs
- A ton of stories were planned for but not estimated
- The main domain classes of the application were starting to have more responsibilities than the companies C.E.O.
- Some of the controllers were getting bloated
- The code produced by the interns had not been peer reviewed for weeks
- The users documentation was dated by two revisions

….

Vince then went to see his Product Owner and told him about the issue. He was dumbfounded to learn this at first, but after a long discussion, he brought the team together, talked about what was most urgent and how much dealing with each issue would cost.

He then added the elements with the best return on the investment at the top of the backlog and chipped in where he could to help the team address these issues. Within a few months, the situation was very promising and the team was now bringing up issues all the time without the need for them to accumulate.

A year later, most of his fellow Product Owners and their teams were engulfed in crap that had accumulated sprint after sprint. Always planning to fix it later,they never ever did.

Meanwhile this team just glided through the problems at a steady pace and it seemed nothing could stop them in their tracks. For the team members, the project just felt like a train anybody would love to embark on. Their biggest pride, was that it was their own.

-Nicholas Lemay

For those of us who have been working with Agile for a while, the values, the principles, the approach, the methods and the practices are almost second nature but for those who start to enter the Agile world, the ramp up can be challenging – especially if you are looking at all of this from a management position.

After being asked by a few people “Where can I start if I would like to know more about Agile?”, I decided to put together this short list of reference material. There is also a good discussion happening on LinkedIn.

I am missing anything? Is there material you would recommend to managers?

What is Agile?

Agile software development refers to a group of software development methodologies based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams.

The term was coined in the year 2001 when the Agile Manifesto was formulated.

Agile methods generally promote a disciplined project management process that encourages frequent inspection and adaptation, a leadership philosophy that encourages teamwork, self-organization and accountability, a set of engineering best practices intended to allow for rapid delivery of high-quality software, and a business approach that aligns development with customer needs and company goals. (Agile software development – Wikipedia)

“Agile Development” is an umbrella term for several iterative and incremental software development methodologies. The most popular agile methodologies include Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, Crystal, Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), Lean Development, and Feature-Driven Development (FDD).

While each of the agile methods is unique in its specific approach, they all share a common vision and core values (see the Agile Manifesto). They all fundamentally incorporate iteration and the continuous feedback that it provides to successively refine and deliver a software system. They all involve continuous planning, continuous testing, continuous integration, and other forms of continuous evolution of both the project and the software. They are all lightweight (especially compared to traditional waterfall-style processes), and inherently adaptable. As important, they all focus on empowering people to collaborate and make decisions together quickly and effectively. (Agile 101: What is Agile Development? | VersionOne)

Just what is agile software development? In 2001, a group of methodologists got together to agree on a common set of guiding principles around effective software development. Rather than summarize their agreements here, I’ll point you to their “agile manifesto”.

From a pure definition standpoint, agile is a conceptual framework generally centered on iterative and incremental delivery of working software, driven by the customer. The iterative part suggests that we are repeating, or iterating, a complete lifecycle of development over a short, fixed span of time. With each of these iterations, we ship some working subset, or increment, of features. (A Brief Introduction to Agile — Developer.com)

What is Scrum?

Scrum is an agile approach to software development. Rather than a full process or methodology, it is a framework. So instead of providing complete, detailed descriptions of how everything is to be done on the project, much is left up to the team. This is done because the team will know best how to solve its problem. (Introduction to Scrum – An Agile Process)

Scrum is an iterative, incremental framework for project management and agile software development. Although the word is not an acronym, some companies implementing the process have been known to spell it with capital letters as SCRUM. This may be due to one of Ken Schwaber’s early papers, which capitalized SCRUM in the title.

Although Scrum was intended for management of software development projects, it can be used to run software maintenance teams, or as a general project/program management approach. (Scrum (development) – Wikipedia)

Scrum is an agile framework for completing complex projects. Scrum originally was formalized for software development projects, but works well for any complex, innovative scope of work. The possibilities are endless. (Scrum Alliance -What Is Scrum?)

The Scrum Roles

Scrum has three roles: Product Owner, ScrumMaster, and Team. (Scrum Alliance -Scrum Roles)

Tips for an Agile Transition

Organizational Impact of an Agile Transition

When development teams adopt agile practices, product management is often caught off guard by the amount of work added to their already overflowing plate. Agile calls for new product management skills and traditional staffing models do not typically accommodate the new product owner role. Given that most product managers are already overworked, how can they manage these new activities to derive more value from software projects and products? (InfoQ: How Product Management Must Change to Enable the Agile Enterprise)

Agile methodologies are helping software organizations stay competitive by delivering products more frequently and with significantly higher quality. Making the switch to agile development also challenges traditional notions of project management, introducing new ways of managing time, cost and scope. Learn how to successfully manage agile projects with the resources below. (Agile White Paper: The Agile Project Manager | VersionOne)

When an organization starts to explore Scrum, there’s often an uncomfortable moment early on when someone points out that the role of “manager” seems to be missing entirely. “Well I guess we’ll have to just get rid of ‘em all!” wisecracks one of the developers, and all the managers in the room shift uncomfortably in their seats. (Scrum Alliance -Manager 2.0: The Role of the Manager in Scrum)

About Agile Coaching

Gartner’s analysts (Thomas Murphy and David Norton) predict that by 2012 “agile development methods will be utilized in 80% of all software development projects”. The authors explain that although Scrum will continue gaining in popularity over the coming years, organizations will not be successful in their transition unless they move toward a team-focused culture (Gartner Predicts 2010: Agile and Cloud Impact Application Development Directions | Analytical-Mind)

In their recently released study “Agile Development: Mainstream Adoption Has Changed Agility“, Forrester reports that “35% of respondents stated that Agile most closely reflects their development process”. The report is based on Forrester’s/Dr. Dobbs Global Developer Technographics Survey, Q3, 2009, which surveyed 1298 application development professionals. (Forrester Reports “Agile Development: Mainstream Adoption Has Changed Agility” | Analytical-Mind)

Recommended Blogs

Recommended Books

You might be interested in these related posts:

1. Scrum Role: Scrum Master
2. What is Scrum?
3. Scrum Role: The Scrum Team

Supporting MSF Agile 5.0
Urban Turtle 3.0 shipped with built-in support for MSF Agile 5.0 out of the box. We obviously assume most people using Urban Turtle have chosen this template because of this build in support. This template made it a challenge for us to implement a three-column task board because work items only have one Active state. Items are either active or they’re resolved or closed. Back then, we decided to use the AssignedTo field to determine where the work item should appear when it is active. An unassigned and active task should show up in the To Do column while an assigned and still active task would appear in the In Progress column. It made sense to us as we’re Scrum practitioners and we believe tasks should be unassigned until someone actually starts working on them.

While implementing support for MSF Agile 5.0, we made sure to externalize everything that seemed template-specific, like the state mapping for the task board columns or the stack rank (backlog priority) field. We then claimed to be template-independent, but some assumptions would later turn out to be wrong.

False Assumptions
When Microsoft announced the beta release of their TFS Scrum 1.0 process template, we figured we could quickly create a new mapping file to add support for it. We began analyzing the new template and we realized we couldn’t do it without touching the code base. Honestly, it would have been as easy as we thought but the decision by the Microsoft team, to stay true to the Scrum terminology, turned out to be a blocker for us.

When working on the initial release of  Urban Turtle 3.0, we made the assumption that system fields such as Id, State and AssignedTo would not be configurable. That was a mistake. Microsoft decided not to use the AssignedTo field used to determine who’s working on a task and opt to go with a field named OwnedBy. The vocabulary makes tons of sense but the change made it impossible to use Urban Turtle as it was with the new template.

When basic is not enough
This change was all that was required to build basic support for TFS Scrum with a new mapping file. We could easily define what fields should show up where, what states should appear in the task board columns, etc. We built this basic support within a single day, including refactoring the application code to support configuration for the AssignedTo field. However, we found such basic support to be somewhat lacking.

We started testing the application with the new template and we quickly realized that the state mappings pretty much made the task board impossible to use with Product Backlog Items and Bugs. These two types have the following states: New, Approved, Committed, Done and Removed. We ignored the latter and configured the first three to show up in both the To Do and In Progress columns and mapped the Done state to the Done column. However, the transitions configured between the three active states made us realize that only the Committed state actually made sense in the task board.

We thought that choosing to hide new and approved work items from the task board would cause confusion when users would look at their task board and search for missing items. That’s when we decided to implement two new features to facilitate the state transitions.

New Feature: Approval
Product Owners can now approve PBIs with a single click when looking at their backlog in the Planning Board. This feature can be configured as a state transition in the mapping file and could be used with other process templates. In the case of the TFS Scrum template, we’ve mapped the New -> Approved transitions for PBIs and Bugs to the Approval feature.

New Feature: Commitment
Approved work items still don’t show up in the task board. The task board is used to track work being done during a sprint. The team should never be working on something they haven’t committed to yet. It makes perfect sense with regards to Scrum. We could have implemented this feature the same way we did with the Approval, but while a Product Owner usually approves items one by one, a team commits to a set of PBIs. For that reason, we decided to make this a batch process. We therefore made it possible to commit to PBIs contained in a sprint with a single click, again from the Planning Board. This feature can be customized by defining the state transition that should be triggered when this feature is used.

New Feature: Sprint Details
The last thing we wanted to add to our initial support of  TFS Scrum was a way to manage the new Sprint work item type. This type was defined as a way to work around limitations in TFS regarding Iteration nodes metadata. It defines begin and end dates for the sprint, as well as sprint goal and retrospective details. We’ve made it easy to create and access this work item through the Sprint Details button in the planning board’s iteration list. This button only appears when the Sprint work item type is defined in the mapping, another customizable option.

Beta Release
It has been a mere two weeks since the release of  TFS Scrum 1.0 Beta (Visual Studio Scrum) and we are ready to give you a taste of the support we’ve built for it in Urban Turtle with the beta release of Urban Turtle 3.2. We hope that you will take the time to give it a try and we are looking forward to hearing from you  as we strive to improve the Turtle and accomplish our mission to enable your team to create kick-ass software – fast and sustainably.

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In December 09, a colleague of ours was a tad bit envious of a great initiative leaded by Laurent Cobos. Laurent, through a collaborative effort with the Pyxis developer community created the Pyxis Developer’s Charter.

Seeing the rallying effect of the Developer’s Charter, we attempted to launch a similar initiative for Agile Coaches, but we had limited success. Coaches being in high demand these days, we had less time to invest in developing a strong and honest charter that other coaches could easily identify to.

We did however identify some conditions of success:

- The language must be business compatible

- Must show that the coach is accountable to the client

- Must show that our client is equally accountable to the coach

- Can included specific practices

- What else?

And through our internal wiki and a couple of meetings, we came up with this:

As an Agile Coach, I commit to the team and its organization to…

• Never apply recipes
• Respect your distinct culture
• Help you challenge your current culture, principles and practices
• Let you learn from your mistakes
• Not let you make irrecoverable mistakes
• Put in place an empirical process that allows learning
• Allow you to evolve within that empirical process
• Allow the process itself to evolve
• Have to courage to say No
• Guaranty bug free software
  
• Telling you what you must hear and not what you would like to hear.
• Not inflict help
• Help you expose the value you create
• Help you expose non-valuable activities
• Help you identify obstacles
• Help you identify solutions
• Help you to communicate efficiently
• Be continuously aware that I can be profoundly influenced by the non-Agile surroundings, immediate context and personalities. (Inspired from The Tipping Point)

• Stay true to the Agile Manifesto

What would you add, change or simply remove?

What makes uncomfortable?

Which statement makes you stand-up and cheer?!

What would be your preferred format?

Would you sign this Charter?

All members of Team Urban Turtle are great fans of the Montreal Canadiens and we were quite sad to hear the news today that Halak had been traded to the Blues. While working on the past few releases, we fed on the adrenaline rush generated by Halak’s breathtaking performance during the playoffs. We’re disappointed to see him go but we wish him the best of luck with his new team.

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Sprint planning

J’apprends que le patron du PO a vraiment apprécié de participer à la review de la semaine dernière. Il veut être invité encore à la fin du sprint présent. C’est une bonne nouvelle!

Pour débuter, j’explique à l’équipe qu’à la dernière itération ils ont réussi à réaliser 4 points de story. En principe, ils devraient aussi être capable de réaliser 4 points à cette itération. À la review de l’itération 1, une story a été refusée par le PO. Je me souviens qu’ils étaient convaincus qu’il ne restait que peu de temps à faire pour la compléter. Alors, l’équipe pourrait s’engager à faire 6 points. Aahhhh! Soulagement collectif. Ils n’avaient pas bien compris qu’ils pouvaient s’engager à plus. L’équipe regarde le backlog, est confiante et s’engage à réaliser 10 points. J’aime ça les équipes optimistes!!

Backlog maintenance

Avant de débuter la séance, nous avons une petite discussion à propos d’une situation « particulière ». Le patron du PO ne peut pas être présent pour la review et demande à l’équipe de faire la présentation à un autre moment pour qu’il puisse y assister. Après discussion au sein de l’équipe, les membres proposent d’échanger les séances de planning et de review. Ai-je bien compris ? L’équipe veut s’engager sur le prochain sprint sans connaître le résultat du sprint actuel ? Il semble que j’avais bien compris… L’équipe justifie qu’elle se sent en confiance de réussir l’engagement et qu’il n’y aura pas de problème. Même si l’équipe ne réussi pas, les membres considèrent l’impact mineur. J’ai fait part de mes réserves, l’équipe connait les conséquences potentielles. Je leur laisse maintenant la décision.

Le backlog n’est pas très garni, ça a comme conséquence que peu d’items sont estimés. Nous avons prévu deux séances de backlog maintenance pour cette itération, pour permettre au PO de rédiger d’autres stories. Pour la séance de ce matin, l’équipe a réussi à estimer 4 stories. Ça ne semble pas beaucoup, mais les discussions entourant les stories étaient intéressantes. Elles ont permis de faire diviser une story en deux, afin de réduire la complexité, de clarifier des éléments et faire ressortir des points que le PO doit éclaircir pour la prochaine séance.

Sprint review

Comme au sprint 1, des intervenants ont assisté à la review. Il y a 3 stories à présenter et le résultat d’un spike. Le PO a pris contrôle du clavier dès le début de la séance. Première story à démontrer; le PO commence à faire le tour des écrans pour valider l’information transmises. Il ressort tranquillement qu’il n’est pas prêt pour la review, il cherche un peu quelles données utiliser et où sont certaines informations. Je prends note que je devrai un peu mieux accompagner le PO pour qu’il se prépare pour la review. Les membres de l’équipe semblent aussi l’avoir remarqué. Je ne serai pas seul à en parler au PO…

Sprint retro

Pour cette deuxième rétro je préfère rester au niveau des processus. Alors je garde une formule assez traditionnelle de faire ressortir les points forts et points à améliorer. J’oriente par contre la discussion autour des cérémonies de Scrum; planning, backlog maintenance, review, retro et le déroulement général des itérations. Des bons points ressortent sur les différentes cérémonies. À l’opposé, l’équipe trouve que la mêlée quotidienne est inefficace; les membres de l’équipe communiquent beaucoup et se synchronisent près du tableau de tâches à chaque matin avant l’heure de la mêlée, alors ils ont le sentiment de se répéter. Pourtant, à quelques reprises durant la mêlée quotidienne, d’après la réaction de certains autres membres face à la réponse à « Qu’as-tu accompli hier? », j’ai senti que de l’information nouvelle circulait dans le mêlée. Elle n’est peut-être pas efficace, mais elle semble utile!

I have been developing software in Scrum for a long time and coaching many teams and organizations adopting Scrum. Therefore, I have been exposed to a lot of situations and feel I have integrated the fundamentals and the theoretical foundations of Scrum.

My general feeling, which you will see expressed throughout this blog post is that the Agile community is falling into the trap of looking for optimizations everywhere and is losing sight of some fundamentals about complexity, creativity, teamwork and commitments.

When I first heard about Kanban, I was intrigued and read about it and even applied it in some situations I felt it could be helpful. There are a couple of nice things that Kanban brings to the table but I also think that it breaks some fundamental things that make Scrum work.

Within sprints, Scrum suggests a simple workflow with sprint backlog items going from ‘To Do’ to ‘In Progress’ to ‘Done’. I have certainly seen some Scrum teams have way too much work ‘In Progress’ and using Kanban techniques to limit the amount of work in progress can certainly help. I also do not think it is necessarily a bad idea that a mature team establishes a more defined workflow and uses Kanban techniques to control its flow of work but going too far (I have seen a Kanban board with 10 columns corresponding to stories’ statuses) in that direction will reduce the possibilities of emergence that creates true performance in self-managing, multidisciplinary teams.

Getting to the actual debate of having sprints or not. Some Scrum proponents say that not having sprints may be problematic because the team needs to hold regular retrospectives to accelerate learning. While I do agree that holding regular retrospectives is absolutely essential, I think that a Kanban team could do regular retrospectives while not completely applying sprints.

I think Ken Schwaber has a much stronger point. In his Waterfall, Lean/Kanban, and Scrum blog post, he presents sprints from the point of view of the complexity theory.

A container is a closed space where things can get done, regardless of the overall complexity of the problem. In the case of Scrum, a container is a Sprint, an iteration. We put people with all the skills needed to solve the problem in the container. We put the highest value problems to be solved into the container. Then we protect the container from any outside disturbances while the people attempt to bring the problem to a solution. We control the container by time-boxing the length of time that we allow the problem to be worked on. We let the people select problems of a size that can be brought to fruition during the time-box. At the end of the time-box, we open the container and inspect the results. We then reset the container (adaptation) for the next time-box. By frequently re-planning and shifting our work, we are able to optimize value.

Vincent also brings an interesting viewpoint in his recent post Scrum is not about project management
.

While explaining the notion of container, Ken mentions above: “We put the highest value problems to be solved into the container.” I would like to push this a little further and relate it to planning and commitment. I have always insisted in my Scrum classes that a successful sprint planning is not about delivering a sprint backlog, it is first and foremost about having a team committed toward a goal that is compelling for them as a whole including the ScrumMaster and Product Owner. I believe, this is one of the fundamentals to create creative hyper-performing, self-managing teams that can sustain.

I have felt during the last few years that as a community we are putting too much focus on the concept of velocity and, therefore, many teams are un-passionately identifying their commitment based on their velocity and do not get to the true nature of what it means to be committed toward a compelling goal.

Before you throw tomatoes at me, I am not saying that measuring velocity is useless. I am saying that while it is useful for a team to measure and be aware of its velocity, I think we let it drive too much the commitment decisions of the team. Some tools are in my opinion putting too much emphasis on using velocity to drive the sprint planning process.

This belief of the importance of being committed toward a compelling goal was reinforced recently while reading the following book: The three laws of performance. Here are the three laws presented in the book:

1. How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.
2. How a situation occurs arises in language.
3. Future-based language transforms how situation occurs to people.

I will not try to summarize the book here. I thought it is useful to mention this reference because I think it links the importance of creating an environment in planning sessions that enables the team to choose a goal that is compelling for them to some fundamentals of human beings.

In summary, I suggest to use sprints as defined in Scrum because when done in the true spirit of Scrum, they enable a team to look at the highest value problems, imagine a compelling future, and use all of the thinking, collaboration, and creativity possible to put together solutions and plans. Then, you leave the people alone within the container of the sprint to apply their professional skills, without interruption so they can concentrate and focus on their work. This is the core of them being creative people doing creative work rather than resources being managed to optimize productivity.

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Warning: The following post might provoke a mild aneurism to some scrum purists.

Don’t you love a nice, clean and deep Product Backlog, filled only with strong user stories tightly linked to clear business objectives and estimated by business value and story points?  As an Agile coach working with large organization with even larger challenges, I don’t usually have that luxury. And If I do, I don’t believe it!  The amount of stuff that needs to be done to ship out quality software is astronomical and never ceases to amaze me. So of course the “Definition of DONE” is equally immense.

The definition of DONE

Creating and shipping software in large organizations involves tasks and deliverables that go beyond straightforward testing, coding and releasing.  To get all this work out into the open, I ask teams to focus on a couple of “juicy” user stories and ask them to identify ALL that needs to be completed to get this product in front of the user.  We might get something like this:

And the list goes on and on…

Teams are then challenged to get everything done within a user story.   Of course this is impossible.  The best the team (and the supporting organization) can do for now is to complete some DONE items at the sprint, milestone, release or project level (see fig.1)

Figure 1

The further away we are from the user story level, the more nervous I get. At the beginning of an Agile transition, I can live with that as long as we identify these “non-story DONEs” as debt and we manage it appropriately.  I don’t judge or question any of the DONE items (ok, maybe I do, but not out loud) But I do want to the team and the organization to clearly see the sheer volume of overhead and offer them some kind of tool to start cutting out the fat.

This tool will be…The Product Backlog.

The team will manage this debt by adding non-functional work items in the Product Backlog.  In other words, all DONE items not included within a user story will become a work item in the Backlog. If the team’s initial estimate is 4 sprints for a release, then those sprint-level DONE items will appear four times. This continues with milestone, release and project DONE items. This makes for one polluted Backlog – And that’s ok…For now!  As you can imagine, this can double the scope of the project.

A product backlog can go from this:

To this:

What does it mean?

Based on the team’s velocity, it’ll probably take 4 to 5 sprints complete the project and not 2 – That is, if nothing changes. It means that it won’t take 15 points to produce $26,000 in business value but at least 33. Nasty!

It can also show an organization that went through a chaotic period and decided to structure all that is I.T. into a defined process; a normal reaction. Over design and over documentation is heavy and expensive, but it’s still better than the anarchy of the early years.

Finally, it means we need find the correct balance for this project and organization.

What do we do?

If the organization is polluted, so shall be the Product Backlog – Deal with it! No really, you need to deal with it.

The Product Backlog can’t remain in that state. It’s needs to be filled, almost exclusively, with items that deliver business value.  That said, don’t hide the real work that currently needs to be done or simply take that work into consideration by inflating story points.  It needs to be out there, for all to see.  We want to provoke a sense of urgency and change.

All the $0 business value items are now action items, things that a Scrum team and the surrounding organization need to deal with now.  If we can’t eliminate an item all together (Ex.: Code document? – I mean come on!), then we need to find out how we can reduce the effort needed to get it done.  We need to reduce waste and those dollars signs might motivate those upper management folks to get things moving.

This approach is provocative but in many large organizations, shock and awe is often required to encourage change.  If a Product Owner and ScrumMaster can clearly show that it costs $1 to create $0.25 of value, I promise you that something will happen.

So between a polluted Product Backlog and a clean one that doesn’t show us the full picture, I choose the former…For now!

Il y a un auditoire pour le premier sprint review, le patron du PO et un utilisateur expert sont présents. C’est encourageant!

Au début du sprint, l’équipe s’était engagée à livrer 3 stories, il y a 3 stories a démontrer. Bon départ! Un membre de l’équipe se prépare à démontrer le contenu de la première story. Je me permet d’intervenir et suggère que le PO prenne plutôt le clavier pour expérimenter lui-même le système et qu’il tente d’accomplir ses vérifications des stories (les conditions d’acceptation). Il vérifie la première story. Ca va bien! Les intervenants présents posent des questions. Il y a interaction entre les personnes présentes et ca sent l’intérêt envers la story livrée. Le PO navigue dans le système et confirme que le comportement est bon. Story acceptée. On passe à la deuxième story. Il y a autant de discussions dans la salle. On se rend compte qu’une règle n’est pas complètement respectée. Le PO hésite un peu, mais refuse la story. L’équipe est mécontente. « Ce n’est qu’un petit bug, on en a pour 30 secondes à le corriger, on pourrait quand même avoir 1.8 points (sur les 2 points que valait la story) ». Je fais mon méchant et je dis non; la story est refusée alors l’équipe n’obtient pas les points associés à cette story. L’équipe n’est pas contente! Je vais expliquer le principe plus tard, maintenant on termine le sprint review. Pour la dernière story, ca se déroule bien, les discussions continuent et le PO accepte la troisième story. L’équipe a réussi à livrer 4 des 6 points engagés. Ils gardent un mauvais goût de s’être vu refusé une story pour si peu. De mon côté je me dis que c’est l’apprentissage qui débute!

Coincé entre sa direction qui ne comprend pas encore les enjeux et les répercussions de la mise en place d’une approche de gestion de projet agile  et son équipe qui maintenant prend ses responsabilités, le manager d’une équipe agile reçoit des balles de toute part.

Bien entendu, tout le monde ne souhaite qu’une chose, réussir le projet. Cependant, les 3 protagonistes n’ont pas le même point de vue sur ce projet. Ils n’ont pas les mêmes connaissances de l’ampleur, du détail et de la difficulté de l’ouvrage. Ils n’ont pas non plus les mêmes besoins aux mêmes moments pour se rassurer (ou être rassurer) sur les chances de réussite ou sur la santé du projet.

Le gestionnaire agile dans les lignes de tir (photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/mashleymorgan)

Lorsque qu’après avoir convenu qu’une première livraison de 2 mois permettrait de lever les risques et d’obtenir une ‘tranche’ verticale de logiciel fonctionnel, afin estimer de façon plus sereine le reste du projet, la direction décide de demander à l’équipe de réestimer la totalité du backlog après seulement 1 mois de travail, la fusillade éclate et le gestionnaire ou manager agile se retrouve dans les lignes de tir.

Satisfaire la demande de la direction ou soutenir l’équipe qui est tout à fait d’accord de réestimer le backlog, mais seulement après la release, une fois qu’elle aura l’information pertinente qu’elle cherche à obtenir.

C’est à ce moment là que le manager « au service de l’équipe » devrait faire son apparition. Être au soutient de l’équipe et l’éducateur de la direction.

Il doit être en mesure de répondre clairement aux interrogations des uns et des autres et d’expliquer à chacun les besoins de l’autre comme par exemple :

• Pourquoi la direction veut-elle une réestimation maintenant? Y a-t-il un besoin concret qui échappe à l’équipe comme par exemple une communication stratégique ou bien est-ce simplement une crainte, une insécurité générée par les nouvelles façons de faire, le nouveau reporting?
• Peut-on patienter encore quelques semaines? Admettons que les estimés préliminaires sont faux. Normal, ce sont des estimés! Ceux d’aujourd’hui, réalisés avec des connaissances encore incomplètes sur des risques identifiés, ne seront-ils  pas aussi faux? Seront-ils plus pertinent s’ils sont établits dans 4 semaines une fois les risques levés?
• Pourquoi l’équipe ne souhaite-t-elle pas réestimer maintenant? A-t-elle peur? Refuse-t-elle de communiquer, d’être transparent vis-à-vis de la direction? Pense-t-elle que l’investissement à ce moment donné n’est pas rentable? Manque-t-il des informations nécessaires?

Les arguments de tous seront valables. Alors que doit faire le manager? Rester au milieu et prendre les balles? Ne satisfaire personne? Ou bien se positionner et prendre le risque de décevoir sa direction ou son équipe?

Pour ma part, je pense que le calcul à faire est celui du succès de l’équipe. Est-ce qu’une journée d’estimation rapporte plus qu’une journée à coder pendant laquelle on apprend sur les risques techniques que l’on doit affronter? À certains moments peut-être, à d’autres non. Ce qui est certain c’est qu’une équipe frustrée qui ne se sent pas soutenue, est moins productive et performante.

Faire le calcul de répondre à la demande de la direction sans tenir compte de l’équipe est peut-être bon pour la carrière, mais n’est pas le meilleur moyen d’aboutir à une équipe auto-organisée, performante, motivée et responsable. Il est plus pertinent d’éduquer la direction, de la rassurer, de lui expliquer que l’équipe ne juge pas pertinent de réévaluer maintenant mais qu’elle le fera dès que possible et qu’il faut lui faire confiance. Il est aussi judicieux d’expliquer qu’en Scrum cette (ré)estimation est permanente et fait partie du cadre.

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Vous serez peut-être intéressés par ce précédent billet :

• Faut-il réestimer les stories non terminées ou celles refusées par le PO à la fin du sprint?. N’hésitez pas à voter, votre avis m’intéresse

This is the plan for the next trip !

In the first sprint, we will make sure that the Turtle can sprint with the new Team Foundation Server Scrum v1.0 template announced at TechEd on Monday. You can download the new template here. We are really excited that Microsoft has decided to jump in the scrum world!

In the second sprint, we will implement a natural way to filter areas and iterations using a tag concept. You will have the option to put a push pin on some areas and iterations to apply a filter based on those selected and work with a subset of the work items. This will simplify backlog visualization and make sure the team’s focus is on delivering awesome software sprint after sprint.

This will help you doing enterprise scrum and complex project management with the Turtle.

If you want to manage your projects like one big project as suggested by Martin Hinshelwood on his blog, this feature will let you do that with Urban Turtle. I think you will really like this new feature.

Send us your comments on the forums!

Dominic !

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Being in an open space format (which I love) we’ll all have the opportunity to expose our own views and experiences and of course learn from fellow practitioners. Looking at all the position papers, I don’t think we’ll run out of topics!

That said, are there any Agile coaching subjects YOU feel passionate about and consider important to bring up during this event? If so, feel free to propose it and it’ll be my pleasure to add it to the queue!

I’m looking forward to sharing my experience in my next post!

Key highlights of Urban Turtle 3.1 include:

Support for Areas
Areas are now supported in Urban Turtle. Just like iterations, you can easily organize your backlog using areas with a simple drag and drop.

Ranking across multiple pages
We’ve designed a more convenient way to rank stories across multiple pages in the planning board. We’ve replaced the concept of pages with one of card stacks. While the stack itself cannot be moved and its number of stories is fixed, you can easily expand them with a single click and push a card onto the stack with a simple drag and drop. We feel this implementation is much more akin to how a product owner would manage a large set of user stories written onto index cards. We hope you feel the same way, but if you don’t, please do ensure that your voice gets heard in our forums!

List View Display Option
In the planning board, a new option allows you to select whether the area or the iteration should be displayed on the card.

Reduced installation footprint
We’ve always had the goal to minimize Urban Turtle’s impact on TFS installations. We were looking for the smoothest way to append our Planning Board and Task Board tabs to the TWA interface. The result in this new version is a single configuration change in TWA’s web.config file.

Quick access to reports
We’ve added a shortcut on the toolbar to have direct access to project reports from the planning and task boards. We have plans to go much further by providing access to real-time reports right inside the planning or task board tabs. We are convinced that your feedback and incremental steps will guide us in the right direction!

We love to hear from you and we love even more to validate that we deliver software that truly fits the needs of our users.

We recommend everyone already using Urban Turtle 3.0 to upgrade to this new version. For others who have not yet taken the red pill to transport their team to a world where they are enabled to create user-delighted software fast and sustainably, please give it a try by requesting your free 30-day trial.

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Release plan

Durant le sprint 0, une seule epic avait été estimé. Alors une première version d’un release plan a été fait avec une hypothèse farfelue. Elle est farfelue, mais avec l’information que nous avons à ce point du projet, c’est la meilleure que j’ai trouvée.  Mon hypothèse est que toutes les epic ont la même complexité (en considérant que même s’il y en a des plus petites, il y en aurait des plus grosses, donc le tout s’équilibrerait). Dans notre cas, la somme des valeurs des stories qui composent l’epic est 31 points. En faisant des calculs savants de conversion de points en heures selon le découpage en tâches des stories, ça mène à une date de fin potentielle à la mi-juin 2011. Nous allons voir avec le temps si mon hypothèse tient moindrement la route…

Une livraison “pilote” dans un certain nombre de magasins (1 à 3, le nombre reste à déterminer) est prévu pour la fin de l’année 2010. Alors une deuxième itération sur le release plan est nécessaire pour vérifier ce qui peut être réalisé pour le pilote. Une nouvelle estimation des epic est faite en les comparant à la première (celle-ci a été développée durant la première itération). Pour faire la ré estimation, la première epic a été considérée comme un 5, ensuite les autres ont été estimée selon l’échelle de presque Fibonacci habituelle. En refaisant encore des calculs savants, le release plan a été révisé pour mener la fin potentielle du projet vers la mi-mai 2011*, et anticiper que le pilote est réalisable pour le début décembre. Il faudra sûrement jouer sur l’étendue de l’epic, c’est à dire sur les éléments qui composent les epic “essentielles” pourront être livrées pour le pilote.

* l’hypothèse farfelue du départ ne semblait pas être si farfelue puisque la date de fin n’a bougée que d’un mois, ce qui ne me semble pas significatif comme changement.

Pour terminer, nous avons mis sur une échelle du temps la date où certains dépendances externes (interactions avec des systèmes externes) devraient être abordées/mis en place, ceci afin de ne pas risquer les dates anticipées.

Backlog maintenance

Le PO a rédigé quelques stories et bougé des priorités dans le product backlog. L’équipe doit maintenant estimer ces nouvelles stories. Nous avons 4 stories d’estimées (3 qui ont été développées durant la première itération, et 1 non amorcée) qui serviront de base de référence pour les nouvelles estimations.

Je laisse l’équipe estimer 4 stories avant de leur faire part d’une inquiétude. La première itération contenait 6 points. Les nouvelles stories estimées sont de 5, 13 ou 20 points. En principe, ces stories ne pourront donc pas être réalisées durant une itération puisqu’elle dépasse la capacité de l’équipe. On arrête pour une quinzaine de minutes la maintenance pour discuter de la taille des stories et voir si elles peuvent être découpées en plus petites. Le PO dit que les stories ne peuvent pas être découpées plus parce que (par exemple) “une commande ne peut pas être exécutée complètement si on n’a pas les SKU et les items”. D’accord! On discute pour voir si on peut quand même le découper en 2, question de diminuer le risque. Pas certain. Pour ne pas détourner l’objectif du backlog maintenance trop longtemps, la discussion sur le découpage des stories est reportée. On continue à estimer des stories restantes. Même si on n’a pas complètement conclu le sujet, la discussion a portée fruit; on se question si on peut découper les stories suivantes lorsqu’elles semblent un 5 ou plus. Aussi, une nouvelle story est rédigée pour traiter un cas plus spécifique, réduisant ainsi la taille d’une story du PO.

Il y aura de travail à faire avec le PO pour qu’il écrive plus de stories qui sont réalisables dans une itération. Il pense qu’il y a assez de travail pour occuper l’équipe pendant plusieurs itérations, alors ce n’est pas nécessaire d’ajouter des stories. La logique n’est pas fausse, mais la faille est que le travail semble trop gros pour être réalisé dans 1 itération. Si les stories restent de cette taille, elles ne seront que partiellement développée durant une itération. L’équipe s’est d’ailleurs questionnée sur la durée des itérations (présentement 2 semaines). Nous allons probablement (si l’équipe veut aborder le sujet!) en rediscuter durant la rétro d’itération.

À maintes reprises ces derniers mois, j’ai dû répondre à la question qui tracasse beaucoup d’équipes et de Product Owner (PO) lorsqu’ils viennet d’échouer une ou plusieurs stories :

Faut-il réestimer les stories refusées lorsqu’on les prend dans l’engagement du sprint suivant?

Je demande alors ce qui fait sens pour eux. Quelle information tirent-ils de l’estimation d’une storie? Qu’est-ce qui serait le plus pertinent pour réussir le prochain sprint puisque le dernier vient d’échouer?

Les réponses varient bien évidemment, mais le plus important est alors de déclencher avec l’équipe une conversation autour de la notion de vélocité¹, de son utilité, de son utilisation. Cette discussion ne fait pas l’objet du billet d’aujourd’hui mais j’y reviendrai éventuellement (au sens québécois du terme ) dans un prochain billet.

L'allure générale du burndown va varier en fonction de votre façon de gérer les stories échouées à la fin d'un sprint

Aujourd’hui je souhaite principalement partager ma pratique actuelle. Je dis actuelle car ma réflexion et ma préconisation ont évolué au cours du temps.

Actuellement, au moment de la planification d’un sprint, je préconise à l’équipe de réestimer les stories et de mettre à jour le backlog pour refléter l’effort nouvellement évalué. Cette façon de faire à les effets  suivants :

• lisser la vélocité,
• réduire le volume global du backlog, (sur l’instant bien entendu car j’exclus ici la création de story ou la réévaluation de story précédemment estimées, etc),
• perdre l’historique de l’effort initialement estimé pour la story.

Dans le passé, je ne réestimais pas les stories au moment du sprint, l’équipe évaluait ou plutôt devrais-je dire pariait, comme pour un premier sprint, sur le ‘volume’ des stories qu’elle pensait être capable de réaliser. Cette façon de faire avait les effets suivants :

• générer des fluctuations parfois importantes de la vélocité, pour finalement calculer une moyenne sur le long terme,
• rendre l’engagement très aléatoire, l’équipe n’avait pas de repère (vélocité précédente) et pariait sur un engagement, comme lors d’un tout premier sprint,
• conserver le volume du backlog tel qu’initialement estimé (sans faire entrer ici d’autres considérations telles que la réestimation des stories déjà estimées au cours des planifications de release précédentes, la division d’une story en plusieurs, la création de stories,…),
• maintenir l’historique de l’effort estimé pour la story.

J’ai aussi vu une troisième méthode qui consistait à réestimer ‘oralement’ le reste-à-faire (en story points), mais sans mettre à jour le backlog. Cela permettait de prendre un engagement raisonnable car il incluait le nouvel effort estimé, mais l’engagement affiché était lui très généreux, reprenant l’effort estimé au sprint passé et non mis à jour!

Comme je vous le disais plus tôt la discussion autour de la notion de vélocité était intéressante. Pourquoi réestimer sans mettre le backlog à jour? Mystère! Un bon sujet pour un prochain billet.

Afin de partager vos pratiques, je vous propose de répondre au sondage suivant. Et surtout n’hésitez pas à partager votre expérience en laissant un commentaire.

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Like most of you, I’ve had my fair (or unfair) share of meetings.  Some were great and a lot of them were just ok. But a few weeks ago a

What he said was: “Am I my really obtaining value from this activity or am I just having a good time?”

My jaw dropped!

How can such a simple statement stir up so many issues in my mind? It not only forced me to re-evaluate the specific activity he was referring to, but everything else I’d done and was about to do!

Leaving aside the fact that fun has value in itself, why not challenge an initial assessment with a Fun vs. Value Evaluation?  A meeting might have been fun, but did we reach our objectives?  As an Agile coach (or ScrumMaster), if I suspect a misinterpretation of the true value of a meeting or an activity, I might try to validate it by whipping out a Fun/Value graph:

No fun and No value

If the meeting had low value, there’s a good chance that fun is also on the low side.  Those situations are usually easy to detect and numerous corrective actions can be put in place.

No Fun and High Value

Now here’s an interesting situation! We managed to reach our objectives but getting there was about as much fun as a root canal.  This situation might hurt in the long run as valuable contributors conveniently forget to attend.

A Scrum example:

The recurrent Product Backlog estimation meeting (Backlog maintenance) is essential and the team is able to reach its goal with a two-hour meeting…but for most it feels like a five-hour meeting.  The team sits in a large conference room, the projector is humming and item by item, one or two members shoot out some “man days”.

Why not estimate using Poker or Wall planning? Maybe every two weeks, we hold this meeting in a local café or bar. Everyone contributes, estimates increase in value and…IT’LL BE FUN! We might even save time, making it still more fun!

Lots of Fun and High Value

This is good situation to be in!  Some might say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.  I’m more of a “Good is the enemy of great” kind of guy.  But trying to make it even better can be tricky.  If such attempts are made, make sure the team buys in to it or better yet, get the team to come up with new and innovative ways to reach their objectives more efficiently.

Lots of Fun but No Value

Now here’s the situation that motivated me to write this blog.  Is it possible to be blinded by fun?  Of course! The meeting might have been called to shed some light on a problematic issue, but ended being little more than a laugh-fest. We walk out of there feeling pretty good but the real issue is nowhere near being resolved.

Where I work, we have bi-monthly meetings to explore various situations when coaching individuals.  We do this through role playing; two individuals acting as coach and coached.  As you can imagine, some scenarios are quite hilarious.  Fun and laughter is guaranteed!  It was so much fun that I had a (false) sense that we were accomplishing something of substance – that is, until my colleague casually questioned himself and stated, “Am I my really obtaining value, or am I just having a good time?”

Once I filtered out the laughing and that great feeling associated with being with my colleagues, nothing much was left.  There was some value but not nearly as much as I initially thought. It looked something like this: With that new information in hand, we restructured the activity in order to increase its value, all while maintaining The “Fun”.

Value or Just Fun?

It pays to be aware of what zone we are in, especially when in the “Misinterpretation Zone”.  High levels of fun are beneficial to any activity, but reaching clear objectives remains the ultimate goal.

I’m looking forward to applying this in the real world and seeing what happens!  I’ll let you know how it goes.