Agile Design and Development
So that you can get feedback on it and make it better
The most rewarding iterations
Building is never a straight line
Product owner vs. product manager
A Product Owner is focused on output i.e. how quickly can we build these features?
Product Management, on the other hand, is focused on outcomes i.e. why are we building these features in the first place?
Good design is redesign
Good design is redesign. It's rare to get things right the first time. Experts expect to throw away some early work. They plan for plans to change.
It helps to have a medium that makes change easy. When oil paint replaced tempera in the fifteenth century, it helped painters to deal with difficult subjects like the human figure because, unlike tempera, oil can be blended and overpainted.
Finish designing as close to the end of a sprint as possible
The traditional process of delivering design, vs. delivering design just in time.
Designers are often working at least one sprint ahead of engineers. While one sprint might not seem like much of a lag, a typical product team learns a lot after the design hand-off. ...Instead of working ahead, we should finish designing as close to the end of a sprint as possible: just-in-time design.
We optimize what we measure
Scrum does not say âonly focus on outputâ, but, unfortunately, humans will optimize for what they measure.
If you worry about story points & hitting your estimations, thatâs what is going to consume your attention. That is what you and your team will optimize for.
And that is the core critique of Scrum as it is practiced: That it focuses a product teamâs attention so heavily on delivery â on building lots of features quickly & efficiently â that teams fail to focus on spending time to discover what the right thing to build is.
How we can do better
It actually doesn't matter whether you actually have a formal retrospective. It doesn't matter whether you have four or five labels of things on your retro board, or exactly how you do the retro. What does matter is the notion of thinking about what we're doing and how we can do better, and it is the team that's doing the work that does this, that is the central thing.
The 'date scrum' anti-pattern
Date Scrum is an R&D pattern where developers are asked to estimate software project requirements upfront for the entirety of the project. After the project is green lighted and the budget is set based on the final estimates, the team then holds daily scrums to status and manage risk as they âiterateâ the solution toward the release date. To some, this approach is described as doing Waterfall in sprints.
The fundamental problem with Date Scrum is that the team is de-focused from discovering the best solution. Instead they are heavily focused on delivering Something⢠by the Dateâ˘. Engineers are problem solvers, and if the primary problem becomes delivering Something⢠that will pass QA by the Dateâ˘, they will, with enough pressure, solve that exact problem.
That which requires caring
Today's real world of technology is characterized by the dominance of prescriptive technologies.
The temptation to design more or less everything according to prescriptive and broken-up technologies is so strong that it is even applied to those tasks that should be conducted in a holistic way. Any tasks that require caring, whether for people or nature, any tasks that require immediate feedback and adjustment, are best done holistically. Such tasks cannot be planed, coordinated, and controlled the way prescriptive tasks must be.
Prescriptive technologies eliminate the occasions for decision-making and judgment in general and especially for the making of principled decisions. Any goal of the technology is incorporated a priori in the design and is not negotiable.
Manifesto for Agile Software Development
AÂ DefinitionWe are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
Agile Scrum is not working
The Agile founders had it right, one size doesn't fit all. What the founders perhaps didnât foresee, or couldnât agree on, is that in order for the world to scale and consume their wisdom, it had to be packaged as concrete practices, not as abstract classes with virtual methods to be defined in context. And to the proponents of Agile Scrum, give them their due, for their part, they made it concrete â Agile Scrum has been packaged and delivered. Yet much work remains to realize the promise of Agile, which in summary is, the realization of wise use of lightweight development practices and workflows that flexibly adapt to the changing and evolving needs of customers.
Driving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroying mistake
An Article by Gandalf HudlowWhat happens when you apply date pressure to software engineers working on high value software projects? The engineers will focus on delivering Something⢠by the Dateâ˘! This fatal flaw results in delivery of a Something⢠full of chaos and features that nobody really wants or needs.
Beware SAFe, an Unholy Incarnation of Darkness
An Article by Sean DexterThe Lean Portfolio Management function that controls funding, are given sole authority to approve which Portfolio Epics move into each stream. Epics are not explanations about a problem that needs to be solved. They are pre-formed ideas about how best to solve those problems.
Right away we can see signs of the old-school mindset of viewing teams as a âdeliveryâ function instead of a strategic one. The high level thinkers come up with ideas, and the low level doers execute on those ideas. Ignored is the possibility that those closest to the work might be best equipped to make decisions about it. Escaping from this misguided mindset is a core goal of Agile thinking that SAFe fails to remotely accomplish.
Why Scrum is killing your product
An Article by Henry LathamDesign Systems, Agile, and Industrialization
An Article by Brad FrostIâve come to the conclusion that âenterprise web developmentâ is just regular web development, only stripped of any joy or creativity or autonomy. Itâs plugging a bunch of smart people into the matrix and forcing them to crank out widgets and move the little cards to the right.
In these structures, people are stripped of their humanity as theyâre fed into the machine. It becomes âa developer resource is neededâ rather than âOh, Samantha would be a great fit for this project.â And the effect of all this on individuals is depressing. When peopleâs primary motivation is to move tickets over a column, their ability to be creative or serve a higher purpose are almost completely quashed. Interaction with other humans seems to be relegated to yelling at others to tell them theyâre blocked.
Reading âAS PER THE REQUIREMENTSâ in tickets makes me dry heave. How did such sterile, shitty language seep into my everyday work?
The value-destroying effect of arbitrary date pressure on code
An Article by Gandalf HudlowThe mandate from above is clear, just get it done! Avoid everything that's in the way: all advice, all expertise, all discovery efforts that detract from hitting the Dateâ˘!
What these organizations don't realize is that all software change can be modeled as three components: Value, Filler and Chaos. Chaos destroys Value and Filler is just functionality that nobody wants. When date pressure is applied to software projects, the work needed to remove Chaos is subtly placed on the chopping block. Work like error handling, clear logging, chaos & load testing and other quality work is quietly deferred in favor of hitting the Dateâ˘.
Agile is Dead (Long Live Agility)
An Article by Dave ThomasThe word âagileâ has been subverted to the point where it is effectively meaningless, and what passes for an agile community seems to be largely an arena for consultants and vendors to hawk services and products.
âŚLetâs abandon the word agile to the people who donât do things. Instead, letâs use a word that describes what we do. Letâs develop with agility.
- You arenât an agile programmerâyouâre a programmer who programs with agility.
- You donât work on an agile teamâyour team exhibits agility.
- You donât use agile toolsâyou use tools that enhance your agility.
/
Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools
Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation
Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation, and
Responding to Change over Following a PlanTraditional companies are losing because they mismanage software engineers
An Article by Emma WattersonInnovation is messy, and frankly Anti-Steve [Jobs] canât figure out why you wouldnât just tell people the right thing to build and skip all the trial and error that comes with innovation. Anti-Steve and his board of directors that keep him in place fundamentally believe that they know what needs to be built. Or at least that they can hire the messiah that will come down off the mountain and tell everyone what to build. There is no such messiah.
- ââSteve Jobsââ
Why we stopped breaking down stories into tasks
An Article by Adam SilverThe Scrum process says to break down stories into tasks to make estimation easier, encourage collaboration and to be able to show more granular progress during a sprint.
But after a few sprints, we decided to do the next sprint without creating tasks. As a result we drastically increased our velocity and never went back. Here I'll jot down some of the reasons we decided to do this:
- Breaking down stories into tasks is time consuming
- The tasks we came up with invariably would change as we worked on the stories
- Tasks are repetitive
- Tasks were often carried out in parallel
- Our estimates didn't improve
- It decluttered our task board
- It encouraged collaboration throughout the sprint
While we started our process by following Scrum to the letter, we soon realised that breaking down stories into tasks was something that wasnât worthwhile for us. In the end we realised that it was overplanning and poor use of our time. In the end we used that time to get on with the work and deliver at a significantly faster pace.
Why We Don't Do Daily Stand-Ups at Supercede
An Article by Jezen ThomasYesterday I worked on the widget.
Today I will work on the widget.
I have no blockers.Are you asleep yet? The developers are. You promise them an intellectually stimulating work environment and what they end up with is drudgery.
What value can be had from these meetings anyway? Using âalignmentâ for justification is so nebulous that it is essentially meaningless. Engineers align themselves. They talk. Especially if you hire good ones (which, you know, youâll struggle to if you have a culture of coercing them into this kind of busywork). Where does the real discussion happen? Itâs written down.
Software that nobody wants
An Article by Gandalf HudlowFinding value is the result of enabling individual and group-level discovery attempts. It's not the result of everyone following one leader's gut.
What just happened is a new software product/feature was created that no customer wanted. This happens way too often. In fact, most hyper important software projects that must be done by date certain or else, have deep flaws that cause some variation of this phenomenon, flaws that include:
- Not wanted - Company specified a solution to a problem that customers don't actually have
- No Rarity - Company is pursuing an iKnockoff of existing products. The market already has two scaled competitors with working solutions, customers naturally spend budget on products that are already successful to avoid risk
- Incorrect Packaging - Customers need a website, but the company created an iOS app instead
- Incorrect Pricing - Customers need SaaS pricing, but the company created a shrink wrapped, on-premise solution with CapEx and maintenance agreements instead
Making sense of MVP
An ArticleHenrik Kniberg:
The top scenario (delivering a front tire) sucks because we keep delivering stuff that the customer canât use at all. If you know what youâre doing â your product has very little complexity and risk, perhaps youâve built that type of thing hundreds of times before â then go ahead and just do big bang. Build the thing and deliver it when done.
Doing It Right
An Article by Brad FrostDoing it right requires a different pace of working and a much broader thought process than âok, letâs get this thing out the door.â Which is super tough because most workplaces place a huge emphasis on getting things out the door, and fast. Little agile tickets that are expected to be completed in micro sprints to me seem to be antithetical to doing it right.
Planning doesn't make for better software
AÂ Fragment by Robin RendleMy own time in a Silicon Valley startup has proved this much to be true; planning doesnât make for better software. In fact today our design systems team doesnât have sprints, we donât have tickets or a daily standup. Each day we come to work, figure out whatâs the most important thing that we could be doing, and then weâgasp!âactually do it.
Watching so many other teams slowly flail about whilst they plan for quarter 3.2 of subplan A, whilst our team produces more work in a week than they all do combined in a quarter has been shocking to me.
After four years of working in a large startup, I know what I always assumed was true: you donât need a plan to make a beautiful thing. You really donât. In fact, thereâs a point where overplanning can be a signal of inexperience and fear and bullshit. The scrum board and the sprints and the inane meetings each and every day are not how you build another Super Mario 64.
Instead all you have to do is hire smart people, trust them to do their best work, and then get the hell out of their way.
Agile as Trauma
An Essay by Dorian TaylorThe Agile Manifesto is an immune response on the part of programmers to bad management.
Yagni
AÂ Definition by Martin FowlerYagni originally is an acronym that stands for "You Aren't Gonna Need It". It is a mantra from Extreme Programming that's often used generally in agile software teams. It's a statement that some capability we presume our software needs in the future should not be built now because "you aren't gonna need it".
The State of Agile Software in 2018
AÂ Talk by Martin FowlerOn the surface, the world of agile software development is bright, since it is now mainstream. But the reality is troubling, because much of what is done is faux-agile, disregarding agile's values and principles. The three main challenges we should focus on are: fighting the Agile Industrial Complex and its habit of imposing process upon teams, raising the importance of technical excellence, and organizing our teams around products (rather than projects).
Product vs. Feature Teams
An Article by Marty CaganThis article is certain to upset many people.
Rationality: From AI to Zombies
- ââThe Tao of rationalityââ
- ââEveryone sees themselves as behaving normallyââ
- ââArgue against the bestââ
- ââLet the meaning choose the wordââ
- ââPeople can stand for what is true, for they are already enduring itââ
- ââDo not propose solutionsââ
- ââOne brickââ
- ââYour intention to cutââ
The Tao of rationality
If you would learn to think like reality, then here is the Tao:
Since the beginning
not one unusual thing
has ever happened.Everyone sees themselves as behaving normally
To understand why people act the way they do, we must first realize that everyone sees themselves as behaving normally.
Argue against the best
To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates.
Itâs all too easy to argue that someone is exhibiting Bias #182 in your repertoire of fully generic accusations, but you canât settle a factual issue without closer evidence. If there are biased reasons to say the sun is shining, that doesnât make it dark out.
Let the meaning choose the word
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.
Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get oneâs meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.
People can stand for what is true, for they are already enduring it
Knowing the design
Knowing the design can tell you much about the designer; and knowing the designer can tell you much about the design.
Cutting through to the truth
The essential thing in the art of epistemic rationality is to understand how every rule is cutting through to the truth in the same movement.
Your sword has no blade. It has only your intention. When that goes astray you have no weapon.
Joy in the merely attainable
But the really fundamental problem with desiring the unattainable is that as soon as you actually get it, it stops being unattainable. If we cannot take joy in the merely available, our lives will always be frustrated.
I have failed my art
The novice goes astray and says, âThe art has failed me.â
The master goes astray and says, âI have failed my art."Taboo your words
Albert says that people have âfree will.â Barry says that people donât have âfree will.â Well, that will certainly generate an apparent conflict. Most philosophers would advise Albert and Barry to try to define exactly what they mean by âfree will,â on which topic they will certainly be able to discourse at great length. I would advise Albert and Barry to describe what it is that they think people do, or do not have, without using the phrase âfree willâ at all.
Your map of reality
Reality is very largeâjust the part we can see is billions of lightyears across. But your map of reality is written on a few pounds of neurons, folded up to fit inside your skull. I donât mean to be insulting, but your skull is tiny. Comparatively speaking. Inevitably, then, certain things that are distinct in reality, will be compressed into the same point on your map. But what this feels like from inside is not that you say, âOh, look, Iâm compressing two things into one point on my map.â What it feels like from inside is that there is just one thing, and you are seeing it.
What you're trying to swim
There is an art to using words; even when definitions are not literally true or false, they are often wiser or more foolish. Dictionaries are mere histories of past usage; if you treat them as supreme arbiters of meaning, it binds you to the wisdom of the past, forbidding you to do better. Though do take care to ensure (if you must depart from the wisdom of the past) that people can figure out what youâre trying to swim.
Applause lights
Most applause lights are much more blatant, and can be detected by a simple reversal test.
For example, suppose someone says: We need to balance the risks and opportunities of AI.
If you reverse this statement, you get: We shouldnât balance the risks and opportunities of AI.Since the reversal sounds abnormal, the unreversed statement is probably normal, implying it does not convey new information. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for uttering a sentence that would be uninformative in isolation. âWe need to balance the risks and opportunities of AIâ can introduce a discussion topic; it can emphasize the importance of a specific proposal for balancing; it can criticize an unbalanced proposal. Linking to a normal assertion can convey new information to a bounded rationalistâthe link itself may not be obvious. But if no specifics follow, the sentence is probably an applause light.
Reality just seems to go on crunching
I once met a fellow who thought that if you used General Relativity to compute a low-velocity problem, like an artillery shell, General Relativity would give you the wrong answerânot just a slow answer, but an experimentally wrong answerâbecause at low velocities, artillery shells are governed by Newtonian mechanics, not General Relativity. This is exactly how physics does not work. Reality just seems to go on crunching through General Relativity, even when it only makes a difference at the fourteenth decimal place, which a human would regard as a huge waste of computing power. Physics does it with brute force. No one has ever caught physics simplifying its calculationsâor if someone did catch it, the Matrix Lords erased the memory afterward.
Mystery exists in the mind
Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. All the more so if it seems like no possible answer can exist: Confusion exists in the map, not in the territory. Unanswerable questions do not mark places where magic enters the universe. They mark places where your mind runs skew to reality.
Lost purposes
Thereâs chocolate at the supermarket, and you can get to the supermarket by driving, and driving requires that you be in the car, which means opening your car door, which needs keys. If you find thereâs no chocolate at the supermarket, you wonât stand around opening and slamming your car door because the car door still needs opening. I rarely notice people losing track of plans they devised themselves.
Itâs another matter when incentives must flow through large organizationsâor worse, many different organizations and interest groups, some of them governmental. Then you see behaviors that would mark literal insanity, if they were born from a single mind. Someone gets paid every time they open a car door, because thatâs whatâs measurable; and this person doesnât care whether the driver ever gets paid for arriving at the supermarket, let alone whether the buyer purchases the chocolate, or whether the eater is happy or starving.