From the Editor of Methods & Tools » Project Management

Lean Agile Software Development

The Editor — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:58:27 +0000

The goal of this book is to propose a vision of Agile software development that goes behind the current practices, more specifically Scrum, to integrate the principles of Lean development. To achieve this objective, the authors draw on their own experience in Agile consulting.

The book starts with a presentation of Agile and Lean principles. The second part explains how Lean adoption can improve the usage of Scrum with an interesting table comparing Scrum and Lean accompanied by a list of practices to avoid. It devotes specific chapters to topics like release planning, visual control, quality assurance, product coordination and architecture. A final part is dedicated to more insight in the Lean approach. The book is pleasant to read. Each chapter has an abstract and the beginning and a summary at the end with some questions and further reading recommendations.

Besides the sometimes-annoying references to the authors consulting firm, this book provides interesting material on specific aspects of Agile software development projects at an enterprise level. Its main difference with other books on the same topic is for me the treatment of the management aspects of software development as the authors make their point for a stronger management role and intervention in Agile projects. This book will therefore bring more benefits to project and development managers that work for large organizations where the control aspect is important and the words “self-organizing teams” could be a serious “career limitation” move.

Reference

“Lean-Agile Software Development”, Alan Shalloway, Guy Beaver and James R. Trott, Addison-Wesley, 262 pages, IBSN 978-0-321-53289-3

Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.com
Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.co.uk

Quotes

“What we need is a new attitude about process and how to manage process. Processes must be designed to assist the team in achieving management’s goal. Processes help the team get its job done: they represent accountability among team members about how they will work. [...] Is this possible? Yes! Lean provides the principles we need to do this. And we will not follow these principles blindly.”

“We often think of software as the end goal. But it is not. Software is a means to an end – a way of getting value to the customer.”

“Agile project management done in isolation violates the Lean principle of optimizing the whole. [...] There are other alternatives to Scrum, including Crystal, Feature-Driven Development and Kanban software development. They are good and they address specific challenges for teams. However, they, like Scrum, do not entirely address the bigger picture. By themselves, they do not address the entire value stream, which is what is needed.”

“While Scrum works well at the team level, using it as the primary method to guide Agility at the enterprise level has severe challenges.”

“Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle define the Daily Meeting as composed only of team members, explicitly removing management from it – and subtly implying management is not accountable for deliverables.”

“Scrum works by exposing inadequacies or dysfunctions within an organization’s product and development practices. [...] The Scrum community generally concedes that about three in four of organizations implementing Scrum will not succeed in getting the benefits from it that they hoped for. The explanation is that many organizations change Scrum in order to accommodate the inadequacies or dysfunctions of the organization rather than solving their organizational problems. The implication is that Scrum gives them the tools to see but not to change.”

Linkopedia May 2010

The Editor — Wed, 12 May 2010 11:06:28 +0000

Blog: How to make Scrum fail

Blog: New Programming Jargon

Blog: The 9 Capabilities of Communicators

Article: Test Driven Development using Flash Builder 4 and FlexUnit

Article: Common Product Owner Traps

Article: The Busy Developer’s Guide to SQL Server Modeling

Tool: Instant Django is a portable Django development environment for Windows

Tool: theSCRUM is a free solution for teams using Scrum

Tool: Tattletale gets you an overview of your project or a product.

Video: Continuous Integration and the “Cup of Coffee” Test

Video: Using FireBug to Debug JavaScript

Video: Selenium + FitNesse – A QA Multiplier Effect

Find more interesting links on the software development links directory, the software development tools directory, the software development articles directory, the software development blogs aggregator or the software development videos directory.

Agile Project Management

The Editor — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 08:47:06 +0000

The fact that this book is already at his second edition after a first publication in 2004 says something about its value. In one of his definition of Agile, Jim Highsmith says, “Agility is the ability to balance flexibility and stability”. I will say that his book balances nicely high level thinking and a pragmatic approach. The book provides a framework for running agile projects and gives also insight in some more neglected related topics like managing projects portfolios or measuring the success of Agile projects.

The author starts by defining what Agility is and emphasizes that Agile is about “delivering value over meeting constraints”. The book describes the Agile Project Management (APM) framework, discussing its values and presenting the phases (Envision, Speculate, Explore, Adapt, and Close). The core values of the APM are:
* Delivering Value over Meeting Constraints
* Leading the Team over Managing Tasks
* Adapting to Change over Conforming to Plans.
All these aspects are covered with both a high level vision (after all values are values), but also by describing daily project activities: Key points that will help you understand the author message are put in evidence. Example: A coaching leader’s attitude is reflected in the question “How can I help you deliver results?” The micro-manager’s attitude is reflected in the question, “Why isn’t task 412 done yet?”

The final parts of the book deal with topics related to Agile project management: scaling, project portfolio management, measuring performance and fostering innovation. This is definitely a book that I will recommend to every people involved in project management, agile or not. I always think that learning Agile practices should be preceded by understanding Agile values. This book provides insightful material for values and practices.

Related web sites:
* Jim Highsmith Web site
* Agile Project Leadership Network

Reference: “Agile Project Management”, Second Edition, Jim Highsmith, Addison-Wesley, 392 pages

Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.com
Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.co.uk

Winter 2009 issue of Methods & Tools

The Editor — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 08:33:26 +0000

Winter 2009 issue has just been published with the following articles:
* Refactoring Large Software Systems
* An Introduction to Domain Driven Design
* Agile Coaching Tips
* Are Enterprise AJAX Applications Doomed…Or Are We?
* Does Process Improvement Really Pay Off?
* SQuirreL SQL Client

60 pages of software development knowledge that you can download from
http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.php?winter09

Agile Project Management Insights

The Editor — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 08:39:34 +0000

I am currently reading the book “Agile Project Management” from Jim Highsmith. I will publish a review later on this blog, but in the meantime I would like to share some of the interesting quotes that I have found in the book. I am sure they will make sense to software project managers… and developers ;o)

About adding value

“When Ward asked Toyota’s American engineering and managers how much time they spend adding value (i.e., actually doing engineering work), their response averages 80%. The same question asked of engineers and managers at American automobile companies averages 20%. How can you compete with companies that are getting four times as much value-adding work from their development engineers.” (referenced from “Product Development for the Lean Enterprise”, Michael Kennedy, the Oaklea Press, 2003)

About technical knowledge

“As a software development consultant, I’ve never encountered a successful software company (although my sample size is limited) in which the team and project leaders were not technically savvy. [...] Championing technical excellence requires that the project leader, and team members in general, understand what technical excellence means – in the product, the technology, and in the skills of the people doing the work.”

About leading or managing

“Agile leaders lead teams, non-agile ones manage tasks. How many project managers spend hours detailing tasks into Microsoft Project and then spend more hours ticking off task completions? Unfortunately, many project managers like this task oriented-approach because it is concrete, definable, and completion seems finite. Leading teams, on the other hand, seems fuzzy, messy, un-definable, and never complete. So naturally some people gravitate to the easier – managing tasks.”

About self-organization and anarchy

“Self-organizing teams are at the core of the agile management, but the concepts have become corrupted – and counterproductive – in parts of the agile community. Although self-organizing is a good term, it has, unfortunately, contingent within the agile community who encourage an anarchistic management style and have latched onto the term self-organizing because it sounds better than anarchy. As larger and larger organizations are implementing agile methods and practices, the core of what it means to be agile – an empowering organizational culture – may be lost because large organizations will reject the cultural piece of agile.”

About the value of a plan

“When we “plan”, we expect the actual project result to conform to that plan, and then deviations become team mistakes or sign of the team’s failure to work enough. When we “speculate”, we take the opposite perspective – it’s the plan we suspect was wrong. The plan, or speculation, is a piece of information, but it is only one piece that we will examine to determine our course of action in the next iteration.”

About software malleability

“Software is the most malleable product. Companies need to use this characteristics to their competitive advantage, and sticking to traditional waterfall development negates this advantage.”

Reference: “Agile Project Management”, Jim Highsmith, Addison-Wesley, Second Edition

Stand Back and Deliver

The Editor — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:43:39 +0000

This is a book about leadership. This is not an easy topic to discuss in a book, but this one gives you some tools that will help you to assess situations and act on them. I think that the authors give a very good definition of leadership when they explain their title: “Standing back does not imply abdicating all responsibility, but rather requires leaders to perform a careful balancing act between stepping back to let the right people in the organization do their thing and stepping up to provide steering when the team has strayed off course”. The deliver part exists because the most important measure of success is defined as delivering value to the business.

The first chapter presents the key principles that will be discussed in the book: Purpose – Collaborate – Delivery – Decisions. The chapter about purpose presents a model that allows classifying activities or businesses function according to their market differentiation and mission critical dimensions. The chapter on collaboration emphasizes the importance of letting the people succeed. In the delivery part, the authors propose a model to assess projects using their uncertainty and complexity dimensions. The next chapter exposes ideas on how and when to make decisions. After discussing all these principles, the authors offer you some hints on how to start putting them in practice to change your organization. Finally, a last chapter offers a short summary of all the tools and models discussed in the book. All the concepts are supported by many cases that show how the issues and ideas discussed relate to practical situations.

Despite grouping material from four different authors, this book has a good cohesion and provides a very smooth reading experience. It is certainly recommended to everyone that has to solve business problems through projects in organizations. Reading it, I was even thinking that it contains a lot of very good material that you can apply to your own personal development and projects.

Reference: “Stand Back and Deliver”, Pollyanna Pixton, Niel Nickolaisen, Todd Little, Kent McDonald, Addison-Wesley, 162 pages

Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.com
Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.co.uk

Scrum Planet Looking for Scrum Blogs

The Editor — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:41:39 +0000

Scrum Planet is a web site that aggregates for RSS feeds focused on Scrum and agile project management. If you know about a good blog feed that is missing from the current roster, I would be please to add it. Thanks for your cooperation.

Should Developers Come Only from Mars but Project Managers from Venus?

The Editor — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 07:42:11 +0000

Once upon a time was the “software crisis” that persuaded people to “engineer” software in a 1968 NATO conference. Methods were created to structure the requirements and the software development process. They use models to define more precisely the requirements and the target system. They had a top-down approach that was aimed at increasing management control on projects. The object oriented revolution changed the perspective of the models with the subsequent creation of the UML, but not the industrial vision of the software development process. In 2001, 17 people signed an agile manifesto that tried to push back the balance more on the “people” side. Two of the main value preferences of the manifesto (“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” and “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”) are explicitly focused on people and their relationships.

This long introduction is there because in the Summer 2009 issue of Methods & Tools, I have three articles about Agile… and they are all written by women. As Methods & Tools had already received contributions from Agile women, I was wondering if, even if the manifesto first signatories are all men, Agile values were more on the “woman” side of the human being? I noticed also that you can find 6 women out of 13 members on the Agile Alliance Board. Women are a minority in software development. Checking if the relative importance of women was linked to Agile, I saw that the Project Management Institute board has also 6 women out of 15 members. This situation could then be more related to the project management aspect of software development than to Agile. Trying to find evidences of this difference of women/men proportion between project management and development, I checked the speakers’ list of major developer conferences like Jazoon or RailsConf. There I found a situation that was more inline with my experience in software development organizations: a lot of men and (very) few women.

The situation of women in software development organizations is not an easy one. They are a minority, have different values than their male colleagues and give more importance to their family life, this last point being in opposition with the overtime often required in badly managed software development project. The lack of women is also observed in the domain of open source development. Cultural bias could change in countries “new to IT”. A Swiss IT company with an outsourcing office in Vietnam reported that a majority of its employees there were women. The ratio of women in IT seems also higher in India. I know that men/women comparison is a “touchy” subject as gender behavior is a cultural topic with a lot of differences around the world. I am also not convinced that the Mars/Venus approach brings an answer to every question. It is generally accepted that men are more individualist and, especially in the IT field, introvert. Women are more caring and extravert, thus they should be more at ease with interactions and collaboration.

I don’t think however that the Agile approach has a “woman” side only for its coaching part. Agile has also practices that encourage open work context (pair programming, retrospectives) and individual responsibility for quality (test driven development). These activities require the capacity of being able to call itself into question, which is a women quality that men will call “lack of confidence”. Have you never omitted to test some code, thinking: “this is only a small change and I don’t need to run tests again”, just to discover later that maybe the apparent simplicity could have lead to a lack of concentration? ;o)

By putting back the focus on people in the software development process, Agile can bring a different perspective on the human qualities of project participants. Whether you are a developer, a tester or a project manager, you can however not be just defined by your preference for Mars, Snickers or Bounty. It is important to know yourself, accept your own limits and work with your team to build better software.

References

Agile manifesto

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus — Brain and Behavior of the Sexes

Agile Alliance Board Of Directors

Software Engineering: Report of a conference sponsored by the NATO Science Committee

PMI Board of Directors

Women’s contribution to FOSS development : discussion notes, slides and recording from my speech at Oekonux Conf

Software development gender gap pondered

Ratio of women in IT industry rising steadily

The Work Situation in Software Development

Upcoming Software Development Conferences

The Editor — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 08:10:38 +0000

Methods & Tools is proud to be the media partner of many good software development conferences. Here is a list of the upcoming conferences that we support:

* Better Software Conference & Expo, June 8-12 2009, Las Vegas, USA

* Code Generation 2009, June 16-18 2009, Cambridge, UK

* Integrating Agile Conference, June 18 2009, Hoofddorp, The Netherlands

* International SPICE Days, June 22-24 2009, Stuttgart, Germany

* Jazoon’09, June 22-25 2009, Zurich, Switzerland

* Eclipse Time 2009, June 23-24 2009, Toulouse, France

* ProjectWorld & World Congress for Business Analysts, June 24-26 2009, Baltimore, USA

* Conference of the Association for Software Testing (CAST 2009), July 13-16 2009, Colorado Springs, USA

* Agile 2009, August 24-28 2009, Chicago, USA

* Software & Systems Quality Conference, September 14, Zurich, Switzerland

Find an expanded list of software development conferences on SoftDevConferences.com

Confessions of a Serial Product Owner

The Editor — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:51:38 +0000

Anna Fors gave me the opportunity to host “Confessions of a Serial Product Owner” on DevAgile.com. This free e-book is a short guide to a business person aiming for becoming an excellent Scrum product owner. A further iteration of the experiences of Anna as a product owner will be published in the next edition of Methods & Tools.

Linkopedia March 2009

The Editor — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 07:48:43 +0000

10 Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice)

Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship

Nine Habits You Must Break To Be Successful with Scrum.

Earned Value Management

Violet UML Editor

DrJava is a lightweight development environment for writing Java programs.

London Java Community: Maven. This video is a whistle stop tour of Maven.

JavaScript: The Good Parts. This video shows the good parts of JavaScript.

Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great! In this video, Esther Derby and Diana Larsen introduce a framework for effective retrospectives.

Find more interesting links on the software development links directory, the software development tools directory, the software development articles directory or the software development videos directory

Thinking Tools for Scaling Lean and Agile

The Editor — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 08:42:43 +0000

This book from Craig Larman and Bas Vodde is a classic example of the fact that it is better to teach somebody to fish than to give him fish. It emphasizes that it is important to “be agile” more than to “do agile”. Approaches like Scrum or Lean are more frameworks to think about continuous improvement than tools that should be applied blindly like cooking recipes. The book will therefore tell you that “large-scale Scrum is Scrum” or that lean is not just kanban or waste reduction. The first part of the book is focused on thinking tools (systems thinking, lean thinking, queueing theory) that are presented with software project management related examples. Those who are looking for practical advice should not believe that the book remains only at the conceptual level. The authors distill many “try…” and “avoid…” recommendations that will help you implement agile and lean ideas in your organization. The second part of the book is devoted to organizational tools and the final chapter proposes frameworks to adapt Scrum to larger contexts.

This book is a must for those who believe that software development project management goes beyond the simple application of “silver bullet” recipes. It is a rich source of both thinking and practical content that is well suited for non-linear reading. A very good “Scrum primer” chapter at the end of the book will provide an introduction for those who are not familiar with this approach and a large number of “recommended readings” items will allow readers to explore more in details each concept.

Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.com

Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.co.uk

Three Thinking Gems for Software Development Projects

The Editor — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 08:32:13 +0000

I have just started reading the book “Scaling Lean & Agile Development – Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum” from Craig Larman and Bas Vodde. You will read the complete review later on this blog, but as the book is full of interesting wisdom from the beginning, I couldn’t resist to share some of them with you that you could apply quickly in you next project planning meeting.

“After working for some years in the domains of large, multisite, and offshore development, we have distilled our experience and advice down to the following: Don’t’ do it.”

“We regularly coach groups that ask, “How can we calculate how many people we will need?” Our suggestion is, “Start with a small group of great people, and only grow when it really starts to hurt.” That rarely happens.”

The last is taken from The Fifth Discipline: “Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants”

Sources:

“Scaling Lean & Agile Development – Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum”, Craig Larman & Bas Vodde, Addison -Wesley

“The Fifth Discipline”, Peter Senge, DoubleDay Business

From Finger in the Air Estimating to Finger Pointing Tracking

The Editor — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 08:10:03 +0000

As Giovanni Asproni says it “estimation is a fundamental activity of every project”. Or at least it should be. The meaning of “estimation” varies however often for the different participants to software development projects. For the customer, “estimation” means an almost accurate amount of money he will spend and time it will need before he gets what he wants. For the project manager, it is an early commitment to the customer and from the developer to do something for a deadline. For the developer, it is the amount of time that he thinks he could do the stuff, if everything goes right.

The experienced developer will often add a 50% cushion to his estimates, knowing that not everything goes right. You can have an additional meaning in the case of outsourcing. For the salesperson, the estimation is the maximum price he can ask, while still having a lot of chances to sign a deal. A lot of young engineers will remind with astonishment hearing in a pre-sales meeting a salesperson answering to the customer that everything he wants is indeed possible… and for a cheap price too ;o)

For a developer, estimation is often equaled to fixing deadlines. He could then feel trapped by the original commitment that created expectations for management and customers. Customers have often two fixed expectations: delivery date and functionalities. Therefore, the effort is the only variable left to adjust the project activity. You can often witness a poor transition from estimation to planning with project managers that dream to have a baby in one month, if only they could manage a team of nine women. Because initial expectations cannot be achieved in many projects, the finger in the air used for estimating get then pointed downwards for blaming people: first from customers to project managers, then from project managers to developers. So print Giovanni’s article and give it to your customer before your next project planning meeting.

Methods & Tools wishes to all its readers the very best for a healthy and successful 2009.

Winter 2008 Issue of Methods & Tools

The Editor — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 09:51:00 +0000

Methods & Tools is a free e-newsletter for software developers, testers and project managers. Winter 2008 issue’s content:

* Fingers in the Air: a Gentle Introduction to Software Estimation

* Behavior Driven Database Design

* Optimizing the Contribution of Testing to Project Success

* Service Components and Compositions

45 pages of software development knowledge that you can download from http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.php?winter08

My 10 Favorites Agile Project Management Articles

The Editor — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 09:49:00 +0000

This is a (personal) list of articles dealing with agile project management that I like. I have chosen to include material that is longer than the usual (short) blog posting. I encourage readers to give more objectivity to this subjective set by submitting in the comments what they preferred ;o)

Agile, Multidisciplinary Teamwork by Gautam Ghosh

The Agile Customer’s Toolkit by Tom Poppendieck

Bridging Agile and Traditional Development Methods: A Project Management Perspective by Paul E. McMahon

Managing the Work in an Agile Project by Dan Rawsthorne

A Governance Model for Incremental, Concurrent, or Agile Projects by Alistair Cockburn

Measuring Integrated Progress on Agile Software Development Projects by Tamara Sulaiman & Hubert Smits

Visualizing Agile Projects using Kanban Boards by Kenji Hiranabe

The Pomodoro Technique (The Pomodoro) by Francesco Cirillo

Agile Fixed Price Projects part 1: “The Price Is Right” by Pascal Van Cauwenberghe
Agile Fixed Price Projects part 2: “Do you want agility with that?”

The Need for Agile Project Management by Mike Cohn and Ken Schwaber

Additional agile project management article resources

Agile Alliance Library
Scrum Alliance Library
Agile Journal
DZone Agile Zone
InfoQ Agile Section
Methods & Tools Articles Archive
Mountain Goat Articles
Software Development Articles, Agile Section
Agile Voices

Global Project Management

The Editor — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:32:44 +0000

In a global world, software development projects concern more and more people working in various locations or coming from different organizations and culture. Managing these projects requires thinking beyond the traditional project management techniques to integrate these additional global dimensions and deal with the new issues that they create. This book helps project managers to think about this situation by proposing a detailed framework dealing with the team, communication, organization, tools and techniques dimensions of global projects. Every chapter has a good balance between conceptual material and real life examples. Many checklists and models are proposed to help assessing the global aspects of specific situations. The author invites also the reader to think how the current topic is handled in his organization. Finally, the book provides many pointers to additional literature that could help a reader to get more knowledge on a particular topic. More information on the global project management framework can be obtained on http://www.globalprojectmanagement.org

The book has received in 2008 the Project Management Institute (PMI) David Cleland Project Management Literature Award that recognizes the best project management literature published during the previous calendar year.

Gower Publishing, ISBN: 978-0566087066, Hardcover: 308 pages

To get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.com

To get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.co.uk

Fall 2008 Issue of Methods & Tools

The Editor — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:18:17 +0000

Methods & Tools is a free e-newsletter for software developers, testers and project managers. Fall 2008 issue’s content:

* Controlling Project Risk by Design
* How to Choose Candidates for Large Agile Companies
* Outsourcing Software Testing
* Managing Scrum Meetings

35 pages of software development knowledge that you can download from
http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.php?fall08

Agile Development Teams: Scope and Scale with Mike Cohn

The Editor — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 08:11:58 +0000

Agile Estimating and Planning” author, and Agile Alliance co-founder, Mike Cohn, provides detailed, proven techniques for estimating and planning any Agile project.

Agile Estimating and Planning supports any agile, semiagile, or iterative process, including Scrum, XP, Feature-Driven Development, Crystal, Adaptive Software Development, DSDM, Unified Process, and many more. It will be an indispensable resource for every development manager, team leader, and team member.

Mike Cohn is the founder Mountain Goat Software, a process and project management consultancy that specializes in helping companies adopt and improve their use of agile processes and techniques. He is the author of Agile Estimating and Planning and User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development. Mike is a founding member of the Agile Alliance and serves on its board of directors.

Related material:

Agile, Multidisciplinary Teamwork

A Governance Model for Incremental, Concurrent, or Agile Projects

Managing the Pipeline

Selecting the Right Iteration Length for Your Software Development Process

Summer 2008 Issue of Methods & Tools

The Editor — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:17:24 +0000

Methods & Tools is a free e-newsletter for software developers, testers and project managers. Summer 2008 issue’s content:
* UML versus Domain-Specific Languages
* We Increment to Adapt, We Iterate to Improve
* Building Products with Acceptance TDD
* Getting and Keeping Control over your Project

60 pages of software development knowledge.

To download or read this issue go to http://www.methodsandtools.com/