Certified Scrum Master

I had been thinking about taking the 2-day Certified Scrum Master (CSM) training for couple of years. Last week I finally got to the course with a colleague. My concern was that since I mainly develop firmware, I would not benefit that much from the course. I could not have been more wrong. I highly recommend CSM course to anyone involved with project work. Even if you do not believe in agile development, this course can still give you pointers on where to improve your work.

We got our training from Boris Oestergard and Jens Gloger. They have been giving in-house training in finland earlier, at least at Nokia Networks, Sulake and Accenture. We had also Bas Vadde from Nokia Networks giving an interesting guest speak about scaling Scrum to larger programs of hundreds of developers.

You can see our group photo at www.scrum.dk (photos).

Just Nail That One Thing

I have become to value that the team should be imposed to only one new thing at the time. For example bringing in team room, pair development or TDD should not happen in a huge bang but a transformation time is needed. However when I had a chance to run an agile day with senior management I forgot this important lesson. I got over ambitios and tried to achieve too many things at the time.

1. I started with presentation covering agile development philosophy, results from our experiment and also the needs for more advanced future adaptation. All this in 1.5 hours with active discussion. Try to keep your presentations focused.

2. We then applied Open Space Technology and went through three sessions. This went fairly well considering we were only 6 people and all new to this way of working. Some difficulties in coming to a conclusion, but time-boxing still helped to cover the issues.

3. At the end I tried to run a 58 minute agile simulation. I combined XP Game and Scrum Simulation and run a preparation phase with vision creation, then two sprints 10min each and finaly a closure phase. This is OK and could be done again with some slight improvements, but where I made a huge mistake, was that I wanted to wrap up the results from Open Space within simulation. Time pressure from the simulation, new practices coming at fast pace, and meaningfull work at the same time. Not likely.

So my lesson; if you have some very important issue at your hand, do not try to be too clever. Just focus on nailing the one task with the highest priority/value and make sure it gets DONE (aka implemented, tested and documented). If you chose the wrong issue, well buhuu, that's tough.

On the bright side it at least wasn't anything like Dave Nicolette described happening during Jon Kern's presentation. So maybe it was ok from the learning point of view, and at least the journey still continues.

Head up. Reflect. Repeat.

We Are not Alone

This post by Simon Baker really, really, made my day. It's good to know that the situation I'm currently in is by far not unique.

Can our agility bring about a wider culture change, at least in the program office? Maybe. It depends on the willingness of people to move beyond the comfort zone provided by a command and control environment.

Next week is going to been an interesting one.

Not So Naive Change Model

Agile methodology is not visible. I do not know what my team is doing. These are complaints often heard from project manager. Ops, I of course mean persons that understand that they are project Managers. Managing is translated into command and control. When saying "not visible" they mean "I can not command", "I can not control", or "I do not understand prototypes, show me paper".

What is described above is the impact of change, and it follows the satir change model. After a smooth start of agile pilot enabling more effective team work, all new kinds of problems start to emerge. Team learns about the actual effort needed in disciplined incremental development versus hacking, but also people who have evaluated their status by how much power they have to command and control (project Managers) may fear loosing their status. All of a sudden product gets developed without screaming, hair pulling and jumping up and down like a freaked out kangaroo. There is no room for the blame game, what is going on here? What is my role in this? A paradigm shift from command and control into trusting and facilitating causes fear among this dying specie of command and control type knowledge-work managers.

One needs to be very carefull not to interpret this new state of chaos as failure in agile intervention. This is excatly what was expected, but fear is a powerfull emotion and when in panic we do irrational things. I on my part fear what happens to a project Manager who in panic starts to act even more irrationaly (compared to my understanding of rational). As we remember from the theory of complex adaptive systems this emerging behavior is of course totally unpredictable...

...fingers crossed everyone, stop-think-act, maybe she gets agile.

Taming the Big Animal - Agile Intervention in a Large Organization

I made an academic paper about our first larger scale agile experiment available. You can find it via this link (pdf), and it can be found also from the sidebar. Also see the analysis that started this experiment.

Abstract— New Product Development (NPD) today is mainly
managed with plan-driven, relay race type, processes. Today’s
dynamic markets and new technology used in NPD result in a
possibility of benefiting from more adaptive, rugby style,
methods. In the software community methods applying this
approach are commonly called agile methods. In this study I
present experiences from a bottom-up initiative to apply agile
methods for embedded system development in a large
organization using the Stage-Gate® project management
framework. The purpose of the study was to find out whether
agile methods have a chance and how much this type of
organization could benefit from agile methods. Study supported
the earlier research showing that implementing incrementally
some agile practices the project organization was able to improve
the team spirit, motivation level, and additionally to increase
productivity. The affect of agile practices to the Stage-Gate®
framework was minimal. Through wider buy-in and
commitment, the agile development increments could be
synchronized seamlessly to the Stage-Gate® milestones. However
as described earlier in literature, top-down commitment and
changes in organization culture are needed in order to succeed in
process change. The philosophy of agile development is quite
contrary to so called traditional NPD approaches. These changes
in organization culture are also needed in order to fully harness
the power of agile development.

Can RUP Be Like Switzerland?

At one point debate on agile and more waterfall like sequential process models was claimed to be like religious war. This impression might still be seen in an large organization when agile methods are piloted for the first time. What if the Rational Unified Process (RUP) is the legitimate model for software development in this organization? RUP, being (in my and some others opinion) extremely abstract framework, could easily adapt to pretty much any methodology.

I do not hold a guru status on RUP. I have read the introduction by Kruchten, browsed the net, some papers and that's about it. Yet I propose that RUP could be seen as neutral territory for getting the advocants from both camps to work on common framework in order to let all the flowers bloom.

I know that if I was running a small start-up, and obviously using agile methods full a head, I would not concern my self with RUP because it would not offer me enough. However in an large global organization some level of legitimate system and standardization can be seen necessary, and thus I do not see RUP as bad option. Especially if RUP is already in the house.

RUP has been adopted to agile methods and vice versa starting from the early days, but some major effort has been put to this just lately. Check out:

1. Agile Unified Process (AUP) by Scott Ambler
2. Eclipse Process Framework (EPF) and OpenUP by Eclipse Community

...About Team Rooms and Pairing

Mishkin Berteig pointed to this web page about setting up a team room. This page pretty much covers everything I have in mind about the subject, especially with the links it has. Pros and cons of the team room are handled. These guys also share my philosophy about forcing these things. If you should force people to do anything, team room and pairing are definately NOT among such things. I believe these issues are automatically brought in when (if) the team jells and learns to work together.

Our Version of Primetime Emmy Award

It's been awfully quiet around here. It's just because I've been lazy busy.

During the previous Sprint we experimented a practice we called Primetime. Primetime means that immediately after the daily Scrum work was continued in the team room and by pairing for couple of hours. Of course in embedded system development pairing means pair development, not just pair programming.
Yes, yes, we all know that this should be a full day practice. But ... there is lots of other emergent responsibilities, for example maintenance and things like that. At the moment Primetime is the best we can achieve in our environment.

Tom DeMarco highlights the importance of uninterrupted work in his book. The cost of reimmersion time to flow (state of mind when developer "gets her design") is extremely high, and our experiment manifested this.

In our retrospective we easily identified five observations:

1. People got enthusiast about the design when pairing, and continued way beyond the agreed Primetime
2. Two people pairing blocks other people from interrupting
3. Emails, phone calls etc. got postponed
4. Learning was accelerated because of osmotic communication, and active collaboration
5. Defects got detected as in review process, thus improving the quality

Within this experiment the team easily achieved Sprint goals, which were set based on earlier velocity. It is too early to make a conclusion, but we decided to keep this practice.

Plans, Planning and Speculation - There's Time for Everything

It has been funny to me from the very beginning that agile methods are often claimed to lack the planning activity while the opposite holds. The difference lies in the fact that planning for the unknown becomes speculation. Prolonged speculation period brings very little added value and is thus kept to minimum in agile projects until better knowledge is achieved by active learning. Simon Baker in AGILE IN ACTION reminded about the two great early agilists believing in planning instead of plans.

Life in a Cubicle

Are you working in a sorry ass company that forces people to work in cubicles in order to foster communication and effectivity? It's sad, but turn on your speakers, pump up the volume, and check out this James Blundt remix.

Hope it helps.

Portfolio Through The Grapewine

Many agile methods miss to address the issue of portfolio management. This is not such a surprise as many organizations miss to address the issue all together. Agile thinking pretty much assumes that the only intelligent way is to work on a single project at the time, and that projects should face delivery or cancellation as soon as possible. After all having too many projects in the inventory is one of the main sources of waste. While all this is very much true, the life on planet earth is sometimes somewhat different. The impression "I heard it through the grapewine" is made famous by Marvin Gaye. The impression means information traveling through gossip and rumor. In some organizations this seems to be the primary channel for portfolio management.

Team is defined as group of people with shared objectives and goals (term "team" is misused a lot!). Teams become superior over individuals when they share these goals and thus have a common direction. Agile methods take advantage of this phenomenon by planning for short enough increments and gaining commitment by having estimates given by the people doing the actual work. This is called time-boxing.

When a team in large organization is piloting agile methods it is usually working as a shadow system parallel to institutional system in the organization. In this case the above mentioned "I heard it through the grapewine" -effect can be very harmful. Each team member will have several inputs about the future of the current project, as well as information about the future projects. Along the current increment short notice invitations to future project meetings will arrive and so on. This makes agile planning unmotivating and even barking mad. Of course the same applies to any method of planning under these conditions. However time-boxing would be perfect tool against "I heard it through the grapewine" -effect, allowing organizations to harness the power of small teams with shared goals and direction. DeMarco calls these teams Jelled (DeMarco and Lister, 1999). If new announcements and meeting invitations are only made public in the same natural rhythm as the team already operates, their negative effect to Jell would be minimized. Who is responsible for this rhythm? Top management, middle management, project management, line management, team leadership? I think this needs to be considered independently for each case, but it is a joint responsibility and everyone should understand the reasoning.

"Increment duration depends on how long you can keep the change away". Allowing rumors and gossip make this a very short period.

The Uneducated Industry

In many cases professional embedded developer has never attended a single programming course at any level. Further she may have never opened a book on even the most fundamental programming practices. She does not read professional magazines. Embedded programmers are often electronics graduates. Even more scary is that the same applies to managers of embedded developers. They have never attended a single programming course at any level, NOR any managing course at any level. Embedded development department managers have just become managers because they have earlier been successful in programming (and designing the HW) with those 1kB micros solo virtuoso and ad-hoc.

Imagine that. In the past years we have reached an era where a light switch has more bit crunching power than Commodore 64. In few years a key chain, a pen or your T-shirt may out power the old 64. The complexity of these devices is exploded by the communication capabilities which enables distributed intelligence. These increasingly complex systems need to be developed within ever shorter time-to-market by team(s) of embedded software developers co-designing the system with teams from other disciplines. Members of such teams need to have proper skills for development, but even more challenging is that developers and their managers need to have social skills in order to keep the whole development ecosystem fit.

These skills are now been teached in programming and management departments, books and articles, and then tuned and learned within methodologies like agile development. However getting these next generation people into industry is a slow process.

It is essential to teach the existing people in the industry to learn.

Norm Day at the Office

Back at work, and running a orientation week before we begin a 3 month release plan, which aims at delivering the first possible release candidate for an embedded product family. We chose a meeting cabinet that we found out to be available.






Fist we checked it up. It seemed to be ok.









We could not find a projector in the premises, so we had to settle for Meeting Charts provided by our friends at 3M. Good news; no .PPT's.

Survey Shows: Agile Champions Live Higher

There has been survey results published at Agile 2006 conference. Pete Behrens has written a nice summary. The survey was about agile adaptation and was run by VersionOne. As VersionOne makes their business in agile scope, the data sample may be "a bit" biased. Even while I do not put much emphasis on the result that 75% of companies deploy agile methods I do see value in other finding:

"The internal agile champion is moving up in the organization to VP from team leader two years ago."

Agile methods have so far been largely deployed by a younger champion engineer in an organization that has gotten frustrated with the dysfunctioning methods. This data may show that agile development is moving directly higher from the trenches. I just hope that the values do not get twisted on their way up. The original ones work so nicely....

Agile Methods and Firmware Development

I made my paper "Agile Methods and Firmware Development" available. You can find a link to the paper from the sidebar, under "My Papers". This is my initial review and analysis of different software lifecycle models and their applicability to firmware development as part of Ph.D. studies. Paper is dated a few years back. One might say that the current journey started upon writing this paper.

Abstract— The size and complexity of software continues to grow
at a steady pace. This is also true for software embedded in our
everyday electronics, which we have called simple devices. The
term firmware is used to describe the low-level software in
embedded systems. It may even be hard to divide firmware and
actual hardware. Software development for such a target has
special characteristics such as a culture of hacking, small teams
and multiple hats, co-design issues, one-time designs, correctness
and robustness requirements, lack of tools and unconventional
customers. Software process models have been studied also in
this environment to ease the pain of developing more complex
systems. I introduce four currently used methods to develop
firmware; build-and-fix, waterfall, ROPES and RUP SE.

Agile methods are getting a lot of attention in the software
development community at the moment. I review the agile
methods which are most documented. The suitability of these to
firmware development is evaluated. It is also analyzed whether
firmware development could benefit from agile methods.

It is shown that agile methods are not the new cure-all solution
to firmware development, but they are applicable. Their full use
needs modification and innovative thinking. It is, however, shown
that firmware development can surely benefit from the usage of
agile methods.