From the Editor of Methods & Tools » scrum

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.”

Defining “Done” Completely in Scrum

The Editor — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 14:21:10 +0000

I have published on DevAgile.com another report from the Jazoon conference in Zurich. Ken Schwaber talked about the importance of having a good definition of the concept of “done” and the lack of technical practices in Scrum projects that lead to technical debt.

Read this report here

Agile + Software Testing & Quality in Methods & Tools Spring 2010

The Editor — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 09:19:19 +0000

Methods & Tools is a free e-magazine for software developers, testers and project managers. Spring 2010 issue has just been published with the following articles:
* Using WatiN to Leverage Common Elements in Web Testing – structure your Web testing efforts
* Five Symptoms of Mechanical Agile- detect agile adoption issues
* Writing Testable Code – testable code is better code
* Model-Based Testing Adds Value – a quicker way to functional testing plans
* Tool: Sonar – monitor code and project quality
* Tool: Express Agile Project Management – a simple tool for Scrum
* Tool: Apache JMeter – for load and functional testing

60 pages of software development knowledge that you can download from http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.php?spring10

XP Day Switzerland, Geneva, March 29 2010

The Editor — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:27:36 +0000

Registration is now open for the second edition of the XP Day in Geneva. Building on the success of the first edition, the organizers have scheduled a program that should satisfy both people that want to discover what Agile is and practitioners that want to improve their agile practices. For the second year, the conference will host the Agile magicians duo composed of Portia Tung and Pascal Van Cauvenberghe that will present the “Coaching with the Wizard of Oz” Agile Fairytale.

This year the conference will also mix French- and English-speaking sessions, an improvement that should please people working for the multinational corporations and international organizations in the Lake of Geneva area.

Attendance is limited to 100 people, so be quick to register on http://www.xpday.ch/

Scrum Meet-up with Jeff Sutherland, 25 January, Zurich

The Editor — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:16:59 +0000

Jeff Sutherland visits Switzerland on 25 January 2010. At the meetup, he will give a talk on a state of the art Scrum topic and you will have the opportunity to ask questions and mingle with other Scrum users. Please find the details of the event below.

Language: English
Place: Technopark Zürich, Seminarraum Fortran
Date: 25 January 2010 at 7.30 pm
Price: Free
Max seats: 60 (First come – first served) sandwiches aand drinks will be served

Please note that due to limited seats, registration is required and could be made via sec @ trifork [dot] com.

Report on the Agile Tour in Geneva

The Editor — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:41:38 +0000

I participated on October 12 to the Geneva stage of the Agile Tour which was a great success. There were more than 100 participants announced to this free event. Here is a small feedback for three interesting presentations that I attended.

Yves Hanoulle presented about the tips for creating a self-organizing team. In the part that I followed, Yves explained how to build trust, giving examples from his business and family experience. Here are the main points of his presentation:
- be straight: 60% of the people think that their bosses are lying to them
- respect: observe how people handle waiters in restaurant
- acknowledge your mistakes
- face reality: accept to be afraid
- perfection game (from the core protocols): analyze situation with an improvement view
- clarify expectations: using an hourglass for scrum meetings for instance
- listen first

Freddy Mallet and Rémy Sanlaville made a presentation about the technical debt. Technical debt is defined as the bad practices that make it more expensive to add a new functionality. These practices could be for instance code duplication, the lack of comments, standards or automated tests. These elements are not bad by themselves as we all have to make some trade-off during development. However, if the amount of such issues get to high, they could completely paralyzed the evolution of an application. Freddy showed how Sonar could help to deal with this by making visible automatically the amount of these issues on its dashboard. Then Rémy Sanlaville explained that the technical debt could be located outside the code. You can find them in the build process, in configuration management if you commit not often enough or in the management and prioritization of backlogs. The presenters insisted also that it is the teams that have to find solutions for technical debts problems, the tools exist only to make them more obvious to spot.

Finally, I assisted to the introduction of lean development in the webTVteam of Orange France presented by Régis Medina, Lean coach, and Antoine Cortal, scrummaster for Orange. The project team was already using Scrum with retrospectives but was getting the expected continuous improvement. The lean coach presented the Plan, Do, Check and Adjust process to the scrummaster. The goal was to increase velocity as it was considered the main problem by the customer. Lean encourages going the closer you can to the action, so the scrummaster had some sessions with his developers to find issues. Working on improvements could be difficult if a team is already under pressure to deliver. Negotiating an improvement time box could help to find solutions without disrupting project delivery. Lean also favors the creation of standards. Standards could be seen as “anti-agile”, but they can make things go faster and provide a basis for improvement. The team created its own standard for the daily meeting and the definition of done. After a first lean cycle, the measured velocity has not increased, but the team has adopted the lean principles to solve more problems. Lean doesn’t solve all your problems immediately, but it makes them visible and you have to deal with an increased level of lucidity.

Linkopedia October 2009

The Editor — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:25:12 +0000

Top 10 reasons why teams fail with Acceptance Testing

Software quality metrics and model

Comparing Open Source Agile Project Management Tools

Icon Search Engine

Refractor – Diagrammer for .Net Assemblies, also support for Javascript.

KanbanFX – A JavaFX implementation of a Kanban board

Article: The Clojure programming language

Article: Scrum in old fashioned software environments?

Video: The Myth of the Genius Programmer

Video: What are the Roles In Scrum

Video: Top 10 Things in Ruby that Every .NET Developer Needs to Know

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.

1500 Tools to Assist Software Developers

The Editor — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:48:03 +0000

Created in 2007, the Software Development Tools Directory has now more than 1500 references. It is one of the rare web sites where you can see on the same location both commercial and open source software development tools. Tools are categorized by programming language, license, operating system or software development function (software testing, project management, database, IDE, user interface, etc.). The Open Source category is the most important one with 770 tools.

The five most popular open source tools in the directory are:
* IceScrum – agile project management
* ERmodeller – a CASE tool for data modeling
* ArgoUML – UML modeling with Java code generation
* StarUML – UML modeling tool
* Arbiter – requirements gathering and acceptance testing tool

The Eleventh Commandment of Software Development

The Editor — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:41:58 +0000

During my software development career, I have seen many software development approaches or methodologies used in different organizations. When a new and supposedly better approach is promoted, some people tend to adopt it with an attitude that could sometimes be close to a religious zeal. Software companies have noticed this and they now employ “product evangelists”. As a consequence, new believers are often rejecting completely what has been done previously and adopting a “us against them” attitude, especially when the new approach is still a small movement fighting against an established methodology.

This has been the same for Agile, the latest approach on the block, even if the words of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (“while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”) try to avoid this “forget the past” situation. Most agile coaches agree also that it is more important to make choices according to the context than to apply a prescriptive checklist, but for some people it is easier to follow blindly a model than to absorb a philosophy. You know the proverb: “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he’ll eat forever”. It is however easier to learn how to work with JUnit than to create efficient unit testing cases. Pure agilists quickly fond their “enemy”: the Waterfall, a dinosaur of software process that should be lead to extinction, buried with fossilized Cobol programs in the mainframic stratum of the history of software development. Those with a little bit more of a software process culture will try to fight RUP or the CMMI, which are to Waterfall what tyrannosaurs are to dinosaurs: a more dangerous and ferocious evolution that kill entire forests to produce piles of project documentation.

The last issue of Methods & Tools contains an interesting article from an organization that mixes CMMI and Scrum. Is this an heretic position for adopters of both approaches? Maybe. Do this article tells us that everybody has to do the same things? No. It is just what the company thought is the best for their software development projects in their own context. Does it seem to be a successful approach for them? Yes. So, this is my eleventh commandment of software development: forget the first ten! If you could summarize software development definitively in a small number of rules, Methods & Tools would not exist. You should read everything you can about every approach with a critical but open mind and choose the good tools for your specific context. Nobody detains THE truth valid for all software development projects. We all make mistakes, which is good because you can learn from them.

Scrum, Java, Testing and UML in Methods & Tools Fall 2009

The Editor — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 06:37:25 +0000

Methods & Tools Fall 2009 issue has just been published with the following articles:
* Mature Scrum at Systematic: mixing CMMI and Scrum in the same company
* Implementing Automated Software Testing: metrics that help manage the transition to software testing automation
* The Spring Framework: an introduction to this java framework, aspect oriented programming and inversion of control
* The Learning View: how to improve your learning capabilities as a software developer
* Time and Synchronization in Executable UML

75 PDF pages of software development knowledge that you, your colleagues and friends can download freely from
http://www.methodsandtools.com/mt/download.php?fall09

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.

Agile Coaching

The Editor — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:25:37 +0000

There was a time when software developers worked with consultants that will do things for their company or teach some technical knowledge. Agile approaches have brought forward another type of people: coaches. According to Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley, a coach doesn’t tell you what to do, rather she shows you how she thinks you might do things and hope that it will help you to improve your situation. She leads by example. It is not easy to write a book on this type of topic. The authors recognize this situation and manage to achieve a good balance between general advice and practical usage reports.

The first part of the book is concentrated on the basics of coaching and communicating in software project. The software development curricula are often weak on “people” skills and you are not always lucky to find the right person as a supervisor when you get out of school. I think I was lucky, thank you Claude ;o) The second part goes through the different activities of a typical Agile project (daily meeting, user stories definition, planning, etc.) and discuss how coach can help a project team to achieve its goals. Each chapter has a final checklist and the book is also full of “personal stories” from the authors that enhance the theoretical advice, applying it on real situations.

Although the title of the book and some of its content might make you think that its value is limited to an agile context, I will recommend this book to every person that has some supervision function in software development organizations and to every developer who believe than acquiring additional “people” skill might improve its work environment. Just changing the way you talk with colleagues could lead to having more sunnier days at the office.

Disclaimer: Rachel Davies has been a (valuable) contributor to Methods & Tools since 2005

Reference: “Agile Coaching”, Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley, Pragmatic Bookshelf, 250 pages, to be released August 28, 2009

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

Linkopedia June 2009

The Editor — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:32:58 +0000

How TDD and Pairing Increase Production

Continuous Integration On A Real, Big Project

Agile is NOT a Project Management Methodology

SmartGWT is a GWT based framework that allows you to not only utilize its comprehensive widget library for your application UI.

Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.

Article: How Scrum Helped Our Team

Article: A multi-tier architecture for building RESTful Web services

Video: Applying User Testing During Development

Video: Practical Functional JavaScript

Video Interview: Bas Vodde on Large Scale Scrum

Video: Effective Java Reloaded

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.

ScrumBreakfast, April 9 2009, 8h30-9h45, Geneva

The Editor — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 14:40:04 +0000

Julien Piaser from SkyGuide will be speaking about SCRINCH, an open source application that helps managing your projects using the Scrum method. Julien Piaser came to SkyGuide in 2005 after having launched a startup in Mulhouse and having worked as en engineer in oil trading. He’s now in air traffic control, working with a team of 5 people in charge of software about environmental conditions & data for air traffic (weather, airspace occupation, and so on). In addition to being a ScrumMaster and Developer, he assists the project manager in analyzing, coordinating and negotiating with more than twenty stakeholders, from business to technical.

More information on http://genevagile.wordpress.com/2009/03/26/scrumbreakfast-2-in-geneva/

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

Looking for Agile Blogs

The Editor — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:30:45 +0000

I have recently created a new web site AgileVoices.com that aggregates for RSS feeds concerning agile software development. 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.

XP Day Switzerland, French Speaking Edition, March 30 2009, Geneva, Switzerland

The Editor — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 08:12:52 +0000

Methods & Tools is a proud media sponsor of the XP Day Switzerland, French Speaking Edition. This conference proposes an international vision of Agile approaches. During one day, twelve presentations will cover topics that interest both managers and developers. The variety of the content will allow beginners and experts to get the most out of the conference. in addition, you will get the extraordinary chance to get directly the wisdom from Pascal Van Cauwenberghe, one of Methods & Tools author and a very good conference presenter.

http://www.xpday.ch/

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