A nice overview of the path that has been taken for Agile to arrive in our daily thinking…
David Ordal mused, back in 2008, about what would be necessary to write the functional requirements for the humble paper-clip.
He feels that it should be an easy task, and promotes the idea of “keeping it simple”. The less detail there was the more creative the developers could be.
While I find the idea of writing functional requirements for a paper-clip amusingly fascinating, it’s interesting to take a look at the “short-form’ requirements for this “paper binding device”. Is it really enough? Or is what David describes an “agile” way of looking at it?
Go read David’s article now, and then come back and tell me what you think. The comments at the bottom of his post are also rewarding to read.
…is balance.
There are so many Agile books, articles, and posts that do one of two things:
I like the idea of Agile, but I also believe something should be able to stand by itself, without resorting to slagging off any alternatives. Let the good points of the methodology/ideology/whatever-ology be seen, and leave the reader to convince themselves, rather than trying to do it for them.
At the same time, don’t just rant, and rave, about the fact that I “just have to” adopt Agile, or I’ll be considered a Luddite, a caveman, or just a person who is not willing to “see the truth”. Give me good, sensible, reasons, and I’m likely to keep reading.
A good example of something that doesn’t do either of the two things mentioned above, is something that I am reading at the moment – “Agile Estimating and Planning” by Mike Cohn. He steps you through the idea of Agile, with regards to planning, without once talking about Waterfall.
It’s a strange experience for me. With regards Agile I have wanted to believe. The problem was that every time I tried to learn more I met glazed eyed enthusiasts that just told me “Agile is good…Waterfall is evil”. Agile Estimating and Planning, however, has me nodding my head with every chapter I read.
Do you agree? Or am I just talking out of a hole in my head…?
According to VersionOne’s 2013 State of Agile survey, Business Analysts rank as the least knowledgeable about Agile.
Agile: a set of software development principles in which requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams.
Agile software development is very popular at the moment. It offers a responsive way of developing, and companies are adopting it at a rapid rate.
I’m not going to talk about the benefits of agile – a simple Google search will tell you more than you need to know.
What I do want to touch upon is a comment that someone made to me – “Agile is too much like a cult“.
So, let’s have a look … is Agile a cult?
Continue reading
In this post, based on a LinkedIn discussion, I describe a meeting of some of the key players in Search who get into a great discussion about how running an Enterprise Search project…
It was Friday evening, and Charlie was meeting his friends for a drink. They all worked in IT and had, between them, years of experience, especially in enterprises and enterprise search, and liked to get together to catch up with what each was doing.
After a few pints and small talk, Charlie said “Guys, what do you all reckon would be the best way to build a large-scale enterprise search project?”
Martin, who had a lot of experience in this area, looked up and said, “The main thing is that you should never underestimate what is required to get the best from a search investment.”
Charlie nodded in agreement. “But how can we help the client understand what sort of a commitment is needed?”
Ken suggested using an Agile/Scrum approach for the analysis of what the client needed as well as the development of the search UI.
“Hear hear” called out the others. Otis took the chance to follow that up with “you need someone who really understands what search is all about”. Martin glanced at him and nodded. Otis carried on. “Someone who cares about search metrics, and knows what changes need to be made to improve them.”
Jan chimed in “I agree with you on some points. You‘ve got to make sure that you include all the stakeholders, and also, educate the customer. Get everyone in the same room, and start with a big picture, narrowing it down to what is actually required. And, yes, create demo’s of the search system using “real data”. It helps the customer understand the solution better.” “However,” he continued. “I’m still careful about forcing a Scrum approach on a customer that might be unfamiliar with it.”
Stephanus put down his glass. “I’ve just finished a Phase I implementation at a client. The critical thing is to make sure you is that you set the client’s expectations and get buy-in from their technical people. Especially in security and surfacing. And I agree with Jan. There are still a lot of companies that don’t use Agile, or Scrum, at the moment.”
Sitting next to Stephanus was Helge. He began to speak. “There are a few important things. Make sure you’ve got Ambassadors – people who really care and promote the project. And ask the important question – ‘How can the search solution support the business so that they can become more competitive?’ It might be necessary to tackle this department by department. Get the business users and content owners together, but as Stephanus just said, don’t forget IT. And make sure that the governance of the system is considered.
Stephanus smiled. “Yes – the workshop idea is a definite must.”
Gaston, who was sitting next to Charlie, said “An Agile approach has worked for me in the past. Creating prototypes is important. Most clients don’t know what they want until they see something tangible.” “Ok,” said Charlie, “how has that worked?”
Gaston continued “Build a small team consisting of a UI designer, a developer, a search engineer, someone from the IA team, and no more than two of the business users. Having someone there from QA is also handy. Start with a couple of day-long workshops to go over project objectives, scoping and requirements gathering. Use one-week sprints, and then aim to produce workable prototypes. At the end of the week, schedule a time where the prototype can be demoed. The point is to get feedback about what is working, and what the goal for the next sprint should be.
Mike, the last one in the group, looked around at everyone, and then back at Charlie, and said. “Charlie – there’s a lot of great advice here. One important thing to remember is that you have to work with the client to ensure that the search solution is part of the strategy. As the others have already mentioned, work with the client and educate them. Getting all the stakeholders together for some common education, collaboration and planning can really go a long way towards getting the necessary buy-in and commitment needed for a successful project. It also is great for setting expectations and making sure everyone is on the same page.”
Charlie was impressed. He had some pretty smart friends. “Thank’s guys. You’ve all had some excellent points. Let me buy you all another round”.
Martin White (who was involved in this discussion) has written a book – Enterprise Search: Enhancing Business Performance. You can check it out on Amazon here.
Interesting Resources
Want to learn more?
(Important Disclosure)
In my earlier posts (here, here, or here) you can read how I have recently “discovered” Agile/Scrum
Having seen the challenges that can be encountered with the Waterfall, or PRINCE2, model, I am keen to learn more about this alternative approach. To that end, I sent myself off on a Scrum Master course.
In this post I want to give my impression of the training course – what was good about it, what worked, what didn’t, and what was wrong with the course.
Before I do, I need to clarify that these are my own opinions and not those of my anyone else that I have regular, or irregular contact with.
Also, please note that I won’t be going into the merits, or shortcomings of Scrum. I won’t be entering into the “discussion” taking place in the Project Management community surrounding the Scrum Master Certification. Nor will I be giving a blow-by-blow account of the 2 days.
Course Name: Certified Scrum Master Course
Course Provider: Collabnet – a reasonably large company that specializes in collaboration software development. Agile training is also part of their offerings, and they give courses in multiple locations in North America and Europe.
The training course was help in a conference room in a Marriott hotel. This meant that there were excellent refreshments, and a great lunch. (Always an important factor when attending such an event.)
For this course, the trainer was Rafael Sabbagh Armony.
I was very impressed with his style of teaching he used. The training material he gave us seemed to be merely a formality as not once did Rafael refer to it. His style was more an interactive one. Through a series of “group exercises” he created an environment of learning through exploration, questioning, and peer-learning.
Obviously, a group exercise is a very contrived event and has very little resemblance to a “real world” equivalent, but in the process of working through the exercise, it encourages one to relate it to other situations (perhaps ones that are based in the real-world). This fostered further questioning, and discussion (both within the group, and within the whole class.
Rafael seemed very knowledgeable in his subject (Agile) and drew upon real-life situations that he had been involved in, when discussing SCRUM, both in answering individual questions, or contributing to one of the many class discussions.
On the understanding that the course was focused on a Scrum Master, and was not an overview of Agile, or even Scrum itself, I did feel that, at the end of the course, I had a far-better understanding of this Framework.
One interesting thing was that, after registering for the course, I received access to a collection of on-line Scrum training material. This included a Scrum quick-reference guide, and a series of training videos, that took me through the fundamentals of Scrum.
Knowing very little about Scrum at this point, I found these resources to have a lot of value. It also meant that, during the training course itself, time was spent with “group exercises” (see above), and discussion, rather than going through the basics.
On the first day of the class, we were each given the course notes. These were in color (always helps), but had a thermal bind cover on them. While keeping the pages together in a very tidy fashion, it meant that for you to lay the “book” open fully, you had to damage the spine and binding material.
While Collabnet describe themselves as “The Leader in Agile Development in the Cloud” they came across as a organization made up of business units that seemed to have absolutely no idea what the other business units were doing. They also didn’t appear to have a coördinated approach to dealing with customers.
My point in case is this: On the 6th of December, I registered, and paid, for this course, and immediately received a confirmation from the department that handles course registration. This was as expected. However, on the 12th of December (less than a week later) I received a promotional e-mail from Collabnet offering me a 40% discount if I “book now!”
I was furious. A 40% discount was quite a lot (especially when I was, indirectly, paying for the course myself). I contacted Collabnet and asked why I wasn’t told about this when I first registered, and requested the same discount. The response I got was a simple “Sorry – we can’t retroactively apply the discount”! Unbelievable! (Maybe I was asking the wrong person, but then I would have expected my e-mail to be forward to the correct person, and to get a response from them.)
And to make matters worse, I still receive “promotional” announcements on a regular basis.
One would expect any company that is involved with the “Cloud” to be socially aware. They do have a Twitter account (@Collabnet), but seem to use this merely as a “hey – look at us” type of account. I sent out a tweet about the 40% discount “complaint” I had, and even included “@Collabnet”. Did I get a reaction? No. This gave me the impression that Collabnet were not responsive to their customers.
The training notes were full of typographical errors.
At the time, this did not cause too much concern (My recommendation is to check out something that most businesses that provide material to customers, and the public – a spellchecker. It doesn’t take long to do it, and, in many cases can be initiated by just clicking on a menu item.
The fact that there were many, many spelling mistakes is, in this case, not of too much concern. As I mentioned above, Rafael delivered the course without referring to the notes, and did it in such a way that the real value came from what he was saying, rather than what we were reading.
However, having words incorrectly spelt (especially in your course material) does send a poor message. And it does not take long to run a spell check over the content before “publishing” it.
With regards “images” – I have only one small complaint – make sure the images used don’t cover up the text (especially when they are being used on a page that discusses “transparency”).
Overall, I was satisfied with the course.
Having the pre-course training material available was excellent. I was really happy with that.
The classroom training, as delivered by Rafael, was also very good. I did not walk away at the end it feeling unsatisfied. The method of delivery was great, Rafael didn’t just “read from the book”
However, the “Bad” points I mentioned are worth thinking about. Collabnet came across as a Big Company that didn’t really care about its little customers.
Matthias Marschall made a comment on my post “SCRUM – are there actually any rugby balls to be seen?” where suggested that there is a movement to replace SCRUM with Kanban.
there is a movement to replace SCRUM with Kanban
I plan to look into this more. In fact Matthias also shared a link with me titled “SCRUM vs. Kanban“. While it is still on my “to read” list, it certainly bought my attention to “Kanban“.
Then today, I saw this cartoon at the blog site of Crisp Consulting, a company that is really into Agile. (I recommend you check out their other blog articles.)
Having looked at this I’ve started wondering….
I’ve signed up for a SCRUM course. Yeah – I want to learn more about it…
There is some pre-course “reading” to be done (actually some training videos). Now, I actually like the whole idea of SCRUM. That is – you can’t get users to define all their requirements at the beginning of a project. In the cases of new technology, users don’t know what they want until they see it, so asking them for their “clearly defined” requirements at the beginning means a world of pain once you get further done the line.
So, it was with a lot of enthusiasm that I sat down, and watched the training videos.
While I still agree with the principle of SCRUM, the “names” given to “normal” things, made me smile.
In fact, it made me think of me think of Jordan Bortz’s excellent post “Howto: Create and Promote a new (but popular) Agile Methodology“. In this he takes a slightly irreverent look at this methodology.
Also Software Maestro hit the nail on the head with this one – “SCRUM Master Jar Jar“
Other useful links
Shoaib Ahmed has just written a post about Prince2 and Agile.
In it he describes how he uses Prince2 as the project management methodology with Agile practices to deliver each part of the project.
Shoaib lives in New Zealand, and is working with the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (the agency established to coordinate the recovery effort following the earthquakes of September 2010 and February 2011).
Can the two (Prince2 and Agile) be used to deliver a project in a time of crisis?
Read his post here.