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! 🙂
When you notice that the quality of your product isn’t a high as you’d like, what can you do?
It’s useful to start by understanding what quality means for your product: how is it defined, how is it measured, and what level is desirable.
For example, if your indicator is the number of “escaped defects” (i.e. bugs found in the customer-accessible environment) you probably want a very low number; zero is ideal but probably isn’t realistic – no matter how tight the controls are, some defects will escape. In fact, in a safe (non-life-threatening) environment, a few escapes may actually be desirable as an indicator that the controls are not excessive (i.e. wasteful).
But if you only have one metric, then you could end up focusing on that at the expense of everything else. If you only focus on preventing bugs you could spend a lot of time “gold-plating”, building far more than the customer really wants.
There needs to be one or two other metrics for balance, e.g. delivering on time (or improving the cycle time), automating as much as possible, reducing technical debt – again, it needs to make sense in your environment.
Once you have those complementary metrics in place, the question may arise: who is responsible for achieving them? In “traditional” software development there used to be a Quality Assurance team that were meant to catch all the bugs before the product was released.
The obvious problems with this are that it puts too much onus on the QA team and it’s too late in the dev process … oh, and anyone who has worked on a waterfall project will have seen that QA always gets squeezed by deadlines, so the all-important “final line of defence” has to make compromises.
It’s unfair to make the QA team solely responsible for quality when they only see the product when it’s finished – at that point, it’s very expensive to rectify a defect. Sometimes the escalating cost of fixes can lead to their prioritisation, delaying “cosmetic” defects, resulting in a bug backlog.
A better approach is to identify and tackle quality problems sooner in the development process. For an agile team, that means continuous testing, frequent feedback from the intended users, as well as code review, pair programming and other feedback loops. Quality is something the team “builds in” throughout their process; they seek to constantly improve the product they create as well as how they create it.
As far as bugs are concerned, I like the approach recommended by Yassal & Daniel Sundman: Fix It Now Or Delete It! If the bug has to be fixed now, then fix it; if not, then delete it.
I tend to believe there’s room for a little leeway: if it needs to be fixed ASAP but without disturbing the current sprint, then bring it to the next sprint planning… but if it doesn’t make it into that sprint then it should be deleted.
But quality is more than just removing (or better yet, avoiding) defects. If the team get feedback earlier then any changes needed in the design can be incorporated sooner changing direction to meet the users’ needs. The team should also be constantly looking for ways to improve how they work, i.e. retrospectives and/or kaizen. If the team can identify bottlenecks or waste in their process, then they can increase their throughput and maybe make their work more enjoyable.
Quality can mean many things; once you’ve defined it for your circumstances and identified how you’ll measure it, then ensure that everyone understands not only what quality is but also how everyone is involved in contributing it. (Ideally, the whole team have been part of those previous steps!) That could include writing automated tests for more than just the happy path, involving real users in providing feedback early and often, or participating in retrospectives to improve the way in which the team work.
But you’re not done yet – quality is a moving target. Once hitting the current target consistently has become a habit, then it’s time to expand your definition. If you start simply with just counting escaped bugs, then consider inspecting how long it takes to go from idea to released feature (“concept-to-cash”) – how can you go faster without the bug count creeping up? Hopefully, the answer will involve removing impediments, bureaucracy and other wastes but that’s a topic for another day.
As I wrote in an earlier post, The first of the Manifesto’s principles is “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software”. It is our highest priority, but it’s not our only priority.
If we only focus on delivery, then we become a production line that does the same thing over and over again. That wouldn’t be so bad if what we did was the absolute best possible thing, but that’s not realistic – that’s why we have feedback loops and strive for continuous improvement. (Incidentally, even production lines aren’t focused solely on delivery!)
Not only do we need to collect feedback but we also need to be able to act on it, and to do that we must have room to make changes. If we are always rushing because of deadlines or other pressure, then we don’t have time to improve; in fact, we’re probably on a downward spiral which will result in frustration, mistakes, burnout and eventually people will quit. Warning signs of this slippery slope include perfunctory demos and sprint reviews (because there’s no time to improve the product), and ineffective or even skipped retrospectives (there’s no time to think about how to improve the way we work, but even if we did discuss it we can’t address the biggest problem which is lack of time so instead let’s spend that time cranking out more code).
But it’s not just time that’s needed – there must be room to grow, both personally and as a team. This is one of the biggest things a manager can do for a team – ensure that the team members are getting the training, mentoring, coaching and support they need. (If your organisation doesn’t have managers then hopefully there’s a similar role to support everyone’s development. If you don’t have managers because the Scrum Guide doesn’t mention them then consider that the Guide also doesn’t mention payroll but everyone still expects to get paid!)
A warning sign that I watch for is when someone (often the Product Owner) tells the team there’s no capacity in the next few sprints to tackle technical debt or any improvement experiments because “we’ve just got to get this feature out”. Unless there is an ironclad guarantee that the sprint(s) following the release will be focused on those postponed items, then I would suspect that the same message will surface again and again. When the sole focus becomes delivery I’ve seen teams resort to hiding work (tech debt “goes dark”, i.e. disappears from the kanban board) or a rigid division of time is introduced (20% of every sprint is withheld for technical tasks) – neither is healthy but they are understandable.
So how do we make room? A key step is for people to stop saying “deadline” when they mean “target date”. There are some instances where there really is a deadline (e.g. if legislation requires compliance starting on a particular day, then that’s probably a valid deadline) but more often when a team is told “the release deadline is June 30th” that’s actually a target. If the date can slip, then it’s not really a deadline. If the date is tied to someone’s bonus, it’s not really a deadline. Artificial deadlines cause unwarranted pressure. [This is a pet peeve of mine so I’ll write a separate post just focused on deadlines.]
My other recommendation is to improve how plans are created. (Even if your team has adopted #NoEstimates, there’s probably still someone in Sales who has to create a plan.) Even when the dev team is adept at relative sizing for stories, it’s not uncommon for people outside the team to estimate features in days or weeks and that is where the problem begins. Ideally, when someone asks how big a future feature is, the answer should be in terms of “yesterday’s weather”, e.g. “it feels like feature X that we did a couple of months ago” and then inspecting the data for feature X will provide some rough estimates.
The big assumption is that past conditions (when the team delivered X) will be similar when they work on the future feature… but if tackling tech debt, having effective retrospectives and running the associated experiments, and other “non-delivery” activities were postponed because of pressure to deliver feature X, then don’t be surprised when you encounter the same problem in your next delivery.
It’s not all about delivery; work at a sustainable pace; pay attention to all your feedback loops (and act on that feedback); don’t introduce unnecessary pressure (e.g. artificial deadlines); nurture your team members; improve your product. If you care about your people and your product, and I assume that you do, then ensure there’s space. Without space, the ability to deliver a quality product will suffer.
I’m suffering from blogger’s block this weekend – I can’t think of a topic for a new post. I’ve jotted down lots of small things but nothing that I could write more than a paragraph on. But if I dig a bit deeper, I don’t think the topics are the problem – I just can’t conjure up enough excitement to give any of them enough attention. It’s a good thing I’m not getting paid to update this blog – a job comes with expectations and timelines, and trying to be creative under pressure is just not conducive to producing something worthwhile.
So how do developers cope when faced with a deadline? I remember when I was a developer that I often needed to leave a problem overnight before I could start to find potential solutions. But that was back in the bad old days of waterfall or plan-driven development – someone sets a deadline (usually an artificial one) and then we had to meet it.
How is an agile approach better? Here are a few things which spring to mind:
Deadlines are rare, but when there really is a deadline then the scope is variable. It ought to be obvious but I’ll spell it out because this should have been true in waterfall too but rarely was – if you fix all three sides of the iron triangle (time, cost & scope) then the only variable left is quality. Time is fixed because of the deadline; cost is the equivalent to the number of people working on it; so if you don’t allow scope to change then you’re basically forcing developers to cut corners. [I’m ignoring the argument for adding more people when the deadline looms – Fred Brooks covered this many years ago.]
Rather than adding people when it’s too late, why not start with two (or more) people working together from the beginning? Most companies require code changes be reviewed because they know having a second person look at a problem helps improve the quality … but collaborating on the design (when you’re tackling the problem) rather than reviewing the code (when you’ve picked a solution and gone down that route) results in an even better outcome. Having someone to discuss ideas with is so valuable that solo developers often use “rubber ducking” (yes, talking to a rubber duck!) as a way to clarify their thinking.
I find visualisation to be incredibly useful, for myself and when I’m sharing a concept with someone I’m coaching. When a team is discussing their confidence in meeting their sprint commitment, I find a burndown chart can challenge the overly-optimistic (“We’ll get it all done on the last day”) and lead to conversations with the product owner about relative priorities, expectations, etc. When discussing a new feature and how it will benefit the end-users, sketching the user interface may help build a common understanding, and story mapping can build empathy with the customer.
Frequent feedback can help too. Sometimes the enormity of a problem can be daunting, so break it down into more manageable pieces and take smaller steps towards the goal. Getting feedback on a small part of the challenge can be stimulating and provide inspiration for the next steps.
Please leave a comment: how do you cope when you hit a creative block?
