Home Renovation & Agile Software Development
First of all, let me say that I’ve had it up to here with comparisons between building great software and building a house, or any physical building. They’re different industries, and building something a house is not the same as building custom software. Without dwelling (unintended pun) on this, it’s not the point of this post. Maybe I’ll write that post some time. But for now, let’s move on. There is an element where there is indeed a parallel. It’s not found in just custom software and construction, but in any venture where there’s a desire to build or create something new. It’s found in marketing, in advertising, in sales, in finance. And that’s that they all required interpersonal skills, communication, and coordination. But it’s more than just active listening, and this is what caught my interest and inspired this bit of writing.
About a year and a half ago, I started interviewing General Contractors to complete a renovation of my unfinished basement. My wife & I decided there would be a lot of benefits in having my mother-in-law come live with us; benefits for her, as well as for us.
I don’t know a heck of a lot about construction or renovations, but as a true generalist, I know a bit about everything. Including construction. And, I like to learn and know what’s going on. But I also have a full time job working at a job I quite enjoy. And while I like what I do, I tend to work a lot of hours – nothing excessive, but I do like to get into whatever project it is that I happen to be working on. So, I wanted to find a General Contract who would manage the entire basement renovation for me. Call me up when they had a question, talk to me about my needs & requirements, and come to me with creative options and ideas for decisions on what the end product will look like.
I contacted and interviewed nine potential general contractors. After narrowing my choices down, and having some fun with a weighted factor scoring model, narrowed it down to two, and from there, with some additional conversations and reference checking, selected one.
Quality was my one non-negotiable. Cost was on the table, as was the schedule. But I wanted to do this once, and do it right. My contractor started off really well, with getting things done, and getting them done right. As you can imagine, somewhere along the way, things started to not go so well. The schedule really started to slip, but I’d accounted for that. But it began to slip even more, and more… Eventually, he stopped working on my job all together and I was forced to terminate him, with the job far from complete.
I was in quite a bind. We’re at the point now where my mother-in-law’s house had sold, we had a fixed closing date where she was moving in, ready or not.
Here I was, in the exact situation I was trying to avoid – managing the project and coordinating things myself.
But this isn’t about my woes. Or at least it wasn’t meant to be. If you’ve made it this far, I’m hoping you’ll keep reading, as so far all I’ve done is set the stage for what happened next. As you can likely guess, I ended up managing this project, getting involved in all of the daily details, coordinating various trades (well, first finding the trades, and then coordinating them), and even making trips to my local home improvement stores to buy things that my original General Contractor was to supply. Things like a toilet, shower door, bathroom floor tiles, doors, and kitchen cabinets.
I turned my kitchen wall into a Kanban board with two colours of post-it notes (one for things I needed to do: find a plumber; and one for things someone else needed to do: install the toilet). I prioritized the tasks so that those items that needed to get done in order to allow my mother-in-law to move in would be done (finishing the flooring in her bedroom is a higher priority than installing the phone line). With limited time to get her moved in, things needed to be prioritized though – there was no way everything was going to get done in the time before her house closing.
Now I did a pretty good job, if I do say so myself, in finding the people I needed to move this job forward. I found a new General Contractor, but limited his scope of work to drywall, doors, trim, and painting. I found a plumber, and limited his scope of work to the bathroom and laundry room. I managed to keep my original electrician. I found a flooring company to finish the stairs. And, without any real knowledge of how to renovate anything, I managed to coordinate all of these different people. I didn’t do anything special, I just communicated. And communicated. And communicated. And when one trade would ask a question, I would connect people, bringing them together to solve the problems themselves.
My plumber asked when he could have power for his reciprocating saw to cut a drain pipe that was too long. I had no idea – I knew my electrician was going to be done in four days from now, but I had no idea when he was going to do the bathroom. I brought them together, and something interesting happened… My electrician explained that he’d be getting to the bathroom at the end – not so good for my plumber – but once the electrician realized someone else needed power in that room, he change his plan, and the bathroom had power the next day. It actually required extra work – the bathroom power was being fed from a line that – you know, never mind the details of where the power was coming from: it’s not important.
The point is that the interaction and communication of others working on the same project helped things get done faster, and in an organic way. Sure, I was filling the role of Project Manager, but there was no management, just coordination, and communication. It’s interesting to reflect on what I did to make everything happen, and I’m pretty pleased and proud of the final result. This is what I do at work on a daily basis. And I like to think I’m pretty good at my job. I bring people together, facilitate conversations and understanding, and allow the experts to work together. They know their crafts far better than I could ever hope to. All I can do is enable and empower them to do their best, and then help move things out of their way that are preventing them doing what they do. There are many times when I look at the work that’s going on, and wish I could contribute directly. But then I reflect on my ability to set the stage for the experts, and enable them to flourish. That’s a pretty good job.
Gathering Requirements for Agile Development
The company I work for is a Professional Services company. We develop great software for companies. Just so we’re clear, what follows is entirely my own perspective, and my own thoughts. No reflection of the company I work for, nor for the company I happened to be working for at the time. As long as you understand that, keep reading. If you don’t, try reading it again.
We were asked to develop a new application to streamline an existing paper-based workflow. There are huge benefits for doing this, saving time, expediting responses, improving the data integrity… Great. The company, as with so many that I have the opportunity to work for, like to gather and build all their requirements up front. You see, Agile is something the development team does to deliver faster, once the requirements are all collected in a BRD, spec, or whatever it’s being called. But this time, we had an opportunity to develop this product along side the end users and business stakeholders. There was no requirement document, and we were still being allowed to develop.
As a development team with four really great developers with some domain knowledge & experience, we estimated the length of time we what we thought it might take. At this point, we knew the high level objective. We also knew the date that we wanted to get it in the hands of a pilot group. We were pretty sure we could deliver it faster than this target date, and said so. But, we were careful not to over promise, especially since no one knew exactly what we’d need to build. But we had a good idea.
Now, this organization uses Scrum. And by Scrum, I mean that they have planning sessions, daily stand-ups, and iterations. But basically, they take their requirements document and break it into user stories (which really are just broken down requirements). Then, they develop for a number of three-week-sprints, and deliver the requirements as laid-out in the documentation. Wanting to fit in, we tried to follow their process, but quickly realized that without a spec document, their business stakeholders were forced to become more involved with the development. We were writing user stories on the fly, refining them during our one-week sprints, and then delivering them a week later, getting feedback, and building upon what we’d developed. It became obvious that we weren’t following much of the scrum process, but were working in Kanban. It was great. The business stakeholders were getting working software on a regular basis, the development team was working bloody hard, but at a sustainable pace, and feeling really proud as they saw their ideas and suggestions being rolled into this application.
About six weeks into development, we’d been asked to build something a certain way. Which we did. A couple of the developers asked me if I liked what they’d built. I didn’t. I didn’t think it addressed the end-user’s needs, and neither did the developers. But, it’s what we were asked for. Because we were so tightly coupled with the business stakeholders, we showed it to them right away. Once they saw it, they too realized it wasn’t what they wanted. It was what they’d asked for, but upon seeing it, realized it wasn’t right. So they asked us to tweak it. We did. Still not quite right. Tweak a bit more. Hm. Something’s not working quite right. So, rather than continue developing and demoing, we got the Business Analyst and UX Designer to sit with the developers working on this feature and work it out together. I’ll say that again: they worked it out together. It was fantastic. Together, they’d worked out exactly how it should function, behave, and look. Over the course of two days, they’d gone through six iterations of how it could work before landing on the one that actually did work.
At eight weeks, we had a fully functioning product, ready to ship to pilot. We were off with our original estimate as to how long we thought it would take. We’d estimated seven weeks. That’s right. Without doing huge amounts of estimation, breaking the functionality into themes, epics, stories, without a specification document or BRD, we’d estimated and delivered the application with a variance of five days.
Along the way, we’d learnt a whole pile of things, like what wouldn’t work, and what didn’t work, and we’d already made those changes. I guess I glossed over that – certainly worth mentioning… How did we learn what did & didn’t work? We got end user feedback. That’s right. We actually talked to our end users. Us. The UX designer, the developers, and the agile coach actually got to talk to end users. And we did it in five days more than we estimated.
It was a lot of work. Talking to, and working with people, takes a lot more effort than building something off a piece of paper. It means you don’t always know exactly what’s coming next. Or, in the case of the really undefined feature, working with multiple stakeholders to get it as right as possible. Someone told me that we got luckily in delivering it so close to our estimate, since we didn’t do a formal estimation with defined requirements, assumptions and constraints. I disagree. We had some domain knowledge, and an overall view of what we were going to need to do. The team’s estimate wasn’t a guess. It was an estimate. It just happened to be derived without a lot of up front work. And the entire team worked really hard to manage the scope while ensuring the quality of the code was never jeopardized. Adapting to changing requirements and feedback allowed a great application to be delivered. One that continues to have very minimal negative feedback.
I’ve read somewhere that working software is valued over comprehensive documentation. Score one for working software.
Retrospectives
During my last two projects, I’d run retrospectives at the end of each sprint. Nothing earth shattering there. But I got a lot of positive feedback from the team, and genuine excitement when it came time for each retrospective. I know I’m a slightly outgoing guy who likes to have a lot of fun, but something else was going on.
I asked the team what they liked about the retrospective formats I was using. You see, each week I ran it a slightly bit different.
One week, we’d follow The 4 L’s (http://retrospectivewiki.org/index.php?title=Four_L%27s_Retrospective).
Another week, we tried Turning The Table (http://www.scrumalliance.org/community/articles/2013/february/iteration-retrospective-activity-turn-the-tables).
And another week we used – what seems to be a default – More/Same/Less (also known as Start/Stop/Continue), in some variation.
There were others, too, but it hopefully gives you an idea. And the reason I say that the third one seems to be a standard, is that the team informed me that this was the only way they’d done a retrospective before, with other agile coaches or scrum masters. Ever.
So, when I was brought into the team, each retrospective was new, fresh, and engaging. It wasn’t the same thing over and over. There were some ‘games’ where the output wasn’t as good as others. I’m not sure if it was because of that sprint or because of the format. I know for sure that I’ll try them all at least once more. And I do believe that not every format is right for every team. But getting to know the team certainly helps.
There are lots of places to get ideas. Here are a couple of my favourite places for ideas I’ve used (there are lots of others):
My learning from working with that team? Mixing it up really made it engaging for them. The liked the variety, and liked thinking about the last iteration in different ways. Something I’ll certainly continue.