I’m sure most people will be happy to see the end of 2021 but also trying not to build up too much expectation for 2022. There won’t be a sudden end to COVID – it’s going to take a continued effort from everyone. It won’t go away just because we’re all tired of dealing with it. Stay strong; hang in there; support each other; and keep safe, please.
The New Year is a time when many people set Resolutions – things they want to improve, e.g. eating better, getting more exercise. It’s a handy reminder to review how happy we are with various things, but is doing it once a year really enough? It often leads to huge goals because it’s going to be so long until the new review… and, of course, huge goals aren’t usually achievable. That’s why most resolutions are abandoned within a few weeks. It probably helps to have a vision of how you would like things to be in a few months (even a year), but set smaller goals – what are the steps that you think will take you towards that vision?
Hopefully that sounds familiar: regular retrospection, identifying where you want to improve, deciding on small steps to go in that direction; take a step, then go back to retrospection, rinse and repeat.
Engineers and product owners should be well practised in this – retrospectives to look at how we work, and experiments to probe what to build. So how do we convince HR that annual appraisals should be replaced with frequent feedback, and Finance that regular (e.g. monthly) planning trumps attempting to predict six or even twelve months ahead? That’s a challenge I’d like to add to my backlog for next year. Suggestions are welcome!
p.s.
2014: Didn’t jog
2015: Didn’t jog
2016: Didn’t jog
2017: Didn’t jog
2018: Didn’t jog
2019: Didn’t jog
2020: Didn’t jog
2021: Still haven’t jogged
This is a running joke! 🙂
It’s twenty years since the Agile Manifesto was created in Snowbird, Utah. There’s obviously been lots of people posting about whether it’s still relevant, whether it should be revised, and so on, but I think it’s still important and applicable.
It starts with: “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.”
It doesn’t claim to be definitive; “We are uncovering” means we still have room to learn and improve how we do this. There are many “flavours” of agile, including Heart of Agile and Modern Agile, and some organisations develop their own take on agile (but “hybrid” agile-waterfall monstrosities don’t count in my book).
The next few lines (i.e. the rest of the manifesto) seem to be problematic for some people because they don’t fully understand “we value the items on the left more” – the manifesto’s authors even spell it out by saying “while there is value in the items on the right” and yet some people still think “Agile means we don’t do documentation”.
The first of these, “we have come to value: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” is one I’ve see many organisations fail to grasp. It’s a long-running joke in the community that “installing Jira” equals “adopting agile”. I’ll refrain from ranting about Jira because the point is that any tool is not the way to become agile – it’s about people. I remember another coach saying “If a company doesn’t understand that it’s all about people then they don’t deserve agile”! 🙂
The next line, “we have come to value: Working software over comprehensive documentation“, is the one I see people misunderstand most – I wonder if that’s because so many people hate writing documentation? If you think about the two extremes, neither is ideal: documentation without software is clearly not a useful product, but also software with no documentation is rarely desirable (a simple tool with no user interaction might just about be ok, but even then anyone trying to fix/enhance the code is likely to benefit from some docs). That’s why we value working software more than documentation but not instead of.
I think the third line is easier to appreciate if you’ve ever worked on a waterfall project where we’re expected to blindly follow the documented specifications and hit deadlines, even if it means delivering something we know to be wrong. By valuing “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation” it means we would rather work with our customer, e.g. show them demos (or better yet give them something they can use) and get feedback early and often. If you don’t work with your customer and respect them, then how can you expect to keep them as a customer? (Ignoring monopolies/cartels, obviously; add banks to the list of rants I’m avoiding in this post!)
The final line, “Responding to change over following a plan” is closely linked with the previous one – in an ever-changing environment like software development there is always going to be change, whether that’s feedback from the customer “course-correcting” the direction of the product, or how the team works together (e.g. coming out of a retrospective), or the tools/technology that we’re working with. To ignore those changes is to say that we can’t learn anything during a project; I can’t think of a single instance where that’s been true, even working on tightly constrained legislation/standards-based projects – there’s always something discovered along the way. However, just like documentation, that doesn’t mean we work without plans – we need to understand where we’re heading and how we think we can get there… but we also need to revise the plan when things change. We need a roadmap (i.e. a destination and options for getting there) rather than a single route set in stone … but that feels like a future post 🙂
Some recent conversations have included questions around whether small changes or large changes are “better”. Unsurprisingly my answer was “it depends” 🙂
Even though our goal might be to achieve a big change, I would recommend making a series of small changes to get there because we might learn all sorts of things along the way, including whether we’re actually going in the desired direction (it’s possible our small change has taken us down a side road) and whether the goal is still the goal.
OK, but what kind of changes does this apply to? All, I think. For example, if the aim is to change the users’ experience by adding a new feature (that sounds like a big change) we would usually break it down into epics and stories, and maybe think about multiple releases … but we probably want to start with some experiments to see if we’re building something the users want, i.e. get feedback early. So the large change is broken into smaller changes (releases, epics) and then into even smaller changes (stories, experiments).
But how does the team learn to do this decomposition? Well, learning a new skill can be a big change, so let’s break it down into small changes too. There are different techniques, so pick one, learn it (e.g. read about it, watch a video) and practice – ideally this includes getting feedback from someone with experience of the technique.
This principle can also be applied to coding: small, frequent check-ins make it easier to spot problems – when a test fails you’re only looking through a few lines of code, not pages and pages. It also reduces the chance of merge conflicts because there’s less time between pull and commit, which means a lower probability of someone else changing the file you’re working on.
So, back to the original question: are small changes or large changes are “better”? Well, I think the answer is small changes are what enable you to make large changes, so it depends on whether you’re looking at the end goal or how you’re going to achieve it.
One of the Product Owner’s key responsibilities is to ensure the backlog (well, the top of it, at least) reflects the stakeholders’ priorities. Of course, the certainty of those priorities decreases the further out you try to look: we ought to be pretty confident in the priorities for the next couple of weeks, but less so for a couple of months away, and if we’re thinking 6 months ahead then it’s quite a low certainty. (Your timescales may be different but the “funnel” model should still be applicable.)
The reason certainty decreases the further into the future you try to predict is that things change! Hopefully, you’re learning more about your customers over time, but also their needs change. There are also changes in technology which mean something you couldn’t build last year is now possible, or maybe the costs have dropped so now it’s worthwhile.
Like everything we do in Agile, it’s about feedback: we think the customer needs X so let’s build just enough so that we can test the market, i.e. a Minimal Viable Product. Based on the learning from that we should adjust the backlog, so putting too much effort into the details of a plan that’s likely to change is waste. No matter how much you believe you know what your customers need and spend time drawing up a 12-month plan, if your plan doesn’t change then either (a) you’re a genius, (b) you’re really lucky and should play the lottery, or (c) you’re not listening to your customers.
Even in a tightly regulated market, things change – if your product is constrained by legislation, there can be changes resulting from interpretations of the law or even changes in the law itself. If your plan is unable to reflect those changes in a timely manner, don’t be surprised when someone beats you to the release of a “fully compliant” version.
The key is to have a plan which gives enough context for the current/imminent work but which is flexible enough to react to changing information, as well as to have people who understand that a plan could (and should) change when circumstances change.
Maybe that’s the most important piece: having people who ask why when a plan doesn’t change?