Month: January 2017

Continuous Delivery at the Supermarket Checkout

~ Adam ~ Leave a comment

To explain the reason for this post I should probably take a step back and explain that I’m currently fascinated with system design and the idea of workflow as described in The Phoenix Project and The Goal. I should also add (in case there’s any doubt) I hate shopping! So as Lucy and I were stood waiting in line on a particularly busy Saturday morning I had an epiphany.

Because I didn’t have anything better to do I mapped out the process in my head. The boxes on the left represent the customer, the ones on the right the cashier – at the end of the process they would tell me how much I owed and I’d dutifully hand over my money.

supermarket_flow

You’ve probably been involved in this process firsthand!

As I was loading my shopping onto the conveyor belt I couldn’t help noticing that the process wasn’t smooth. For a few minutes the belt would keep going, I was adding more and more groceries into the queue – then, for no reason I’d have to wait until more space became available.

I became convinced that if I wasn’t forced to endure this wait then the whole system would balance nicely, after all – the checkout assistant seemed to be able to scan groceries as quickly as I could load them (input and output were reasonably balanced). Then suddenly, frustratingly he would stop and complete the transaction with the customer and I had to wait for more space to become available.

In my mind the entire system mirrored a typical release schedule – features are requested, created, and released. The last part, the creation of a signed off build is often what holds up the process (either through bug fixing or code freezes) and that was exactly what I was seeing here.

Scrum practitioners advocate having a build which is good enough to ship at the end of your Sprint, this prevents large delays being caused in your process and helps make your deployments routine and safe. I’ve written previously about the quality benefits this can bring.

As I looked around me in the supermarket I began to wonder why there wasn’t a second person on the till. One could scan the items and the second would complete the transaction to ensure the workflow continued uninterrupted. That was when I realised that many have introduced something far more revolutionary!

Consider the new Scan as you Shop processes popping up around the country. These hand held devices let you scan your purchases as you work around the shop, this reduces the over complicated process above to this much simpler one:

kiosk

This simplified process reduces the need for staff and makes the entire end to end process far more efficient, there are even customer benefits such as being able to keep track of your trolley’s value as you shop. The supermarkets are so keen that they’re even willing to take financial risk on you not to steal their stock!

Tesco, by reworking their system have simplified their process and hugely increased bandwidth – I wonder if there are any similar process changes can we make in software development which will have such drastic effect our productivity?

*Thanks to draw.io for the flowchart software I used to create these images.

Scrum in a Remote Team

~ Adam ~ Leave a comment

If you find yourself reading the Agile Manifesto (as for some reason I do from time to time) you may notice this:

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

I don’t think anyone would disagree with this. However in these days of satellite offices, home working, and outsourcing your team members are often scattered across cities, countries, and time zones you may not have the luxury of every team member sitting in the same room.

So what can you do?

There are a few tricks and tips I’ve found help you keep a high level of communication between team members.

  1. Ensure your daily standup times suit everyone. Make sure it doesn’t force people to start early or stay late, consider people’s lunch and prayer times. There’s no golden rule saying you must meet at 9am!
  2. Use tools like Trello to move post-it notes online.
  3. Keep a running channel open for informal chat (such as Skype or Slack) and switch important notifications onto email so people don’t miss important information.
  4. Work from home yourself, experience any pain points of your remote colleagues your are describing and aim to resolve them.
  5. Use video calling. We were a little reluctant to start this but after years of Skype the difference was noticeable, remote team members were more engaged and banter was at an all time high.

These are a few of the tips and tricks which have worked for us, what do you do to help your distributed team thrive?

Driving Technical Change Book Review

~ Adam ~ Leave a comment

Driving Technical Change is a great little book who wants to understand how to influence different people in a technology organisation.

If you’re expecting a book on mind control then you’ll be disappointed. If you’re looking for a book which will explain why people react in particular ways to new ideas and technologies then that’s exactly what you’ll get.

Terrence Ryan discusses a series of personality caricatures. These are a little extreme, but you’ll be amazed at how closely they match up with people you know!

Then, the book discusses why these people may resist change or disagree with your proposals and how you can help to win them around.

For example, one of the characters in the book is “The Overworked”, this guy has far too much to do and never enough time. They can’t spare the time to pick up your idea, so how do you convince them? Show them how your project or proposal will save their time and help them complete their neverending pile of work.

I don’t want to plagiarise Terrence work, I’d much rather you picked up a copy and let him explain them first hand.

Would I recommend this book to someone working in a development team? Absolutely! Not just to help them drive powerful ideas forward, but also to help them appreciate other points of view – understand why The Boss, The Overworked, and The Burned may not necessarily agree with every suggestion.

Scrum Is Not Enough!

~ Adam ~ Leave a comment

Let me start by saying I’m a big advocate of scrum (despite some of my posts in which I challenge it over and over again). Having said that it has it’s weaknesses (like any process), one I’m going to highlight in this post is the insular nature of some scrum teams.

The best way to explain this is to describe my own experience. When I started in the Scrum Master role I was very keen on continuous delivery and wanted the development team to produce a build every two weeks which could be supplied to the business to decide whether to deploy it or not.

We had a lot of projects on at the time and we were working very hard to meet the commitments my predecessor had signed us up to and get features out the door on time.

This went on for a month or two, we hit every deadline in the calendar and provided the builds to the deployment teams on the dates we’d agreed. So what happened? Nothing…

What I’d failed to realise was that despite our hard work over the last few months we’d failed to release a single new feature to a customer. The deployment teams had struggled to install our software into UAT and without any contingency (except when it was carefully planned for) we had no capacity to assist them or pick up any issues – until the next planning session of course (where usually the next feature was the most urgent due to “customer commitments”).

Development kept on working, features continued to be produced and deadlines were hit. But the customers were sat waiting, UATs couldn’t be completed (or in some cases even installed), and the business because frustrated with us because we weren’t available to help them get the product out the door.

So what went wrong?

This is where you may have to forgive my sleight of hand in the title. I don’t believe the problem was with the scrum methodology as such, merely the most common implementations of it. The first oversight was the handover, the second was the goals of the team. Let me explain…

Firstly the handover, the issue wasn’t that it was sloppy or that it we didn’t have consistent priorities across the business (although that certainly didn’t help). The issue was that we had one… A scrum team should contain all the skills and knowledge required to get a feature from concept to customer. Rather than handing builds over to the business to deploy we should have had someone from the deployment team working in the scrum team who would actually do the implementation. The team itself would then support the new feature through it’s UAT phases and out into the customer’s live environment.

The second failing I mentioned was the team goals. I have already alluded to this but the goal of the team was to “write this feature” whereas it should have been “deliver this feature to the customer”. Only once that goal has been met should they move onto the next one.

This continuity and accountability is a very powerful thing. Projects fail when departments don’t communicate with each other or their priorities are not aligned. Systems slow when there’s too much Work in Process (for example incomplete UATs) clogging up the pipeline and generating unplanned work. If you want to break out of this cycle you need to stop thinking about departments and handovers. Stop thinking of scrum teams as groups of developers delivering feature after feature and start thinking of projects being created and delivered by teams of people from all the disciplines you need.

If you can do that, then you can make your scrum team work for the business and not only for it’s own productivity.

New Years Resolutions

~ Adam ~ Leave a comment

I’ve never been much good at keeping resolutions, they start out strong but then quickly slide.

Let’s see if I can do better this year. Here are my New Years Resolutions:

Look at the Needs of the Business

Too often developers and development managers focus too much on the code and the features and not enough on the business they’re working within.

Mind blowing functionality is worthless if it’s not user friendly, performant, and deployed. I want to keep the goals of the business in mind and make sure that my (and my team’s) goals are aligned with them.

Dedicate Time Each Week to Learn

I’m a great believer in continuous learning, but it’s hard – particularly when there’s firefighting to be done or issues to resolve.

To help me continue to grow as a developer and a manager I want to allocate a little time each week to my CPD.

Get out the Office

I mentioned a few weeks ago The Importance of The Local Development Community so this year I want to make a real effort to attend Agile Yorkshire, Leeds Sharp and a DDD Conference!

I want to meet with clients, put in some face time, and understand how our system (both solution and business) works (or doesn’t) for them.

Find And Exploit Our Bottleneck 

If you’ve read The Goal or The Phoenix Project then you’ll have had this one drummed into you. People, teams, and businesses are systems… systems have constraints and bottlenecks, if you want your system to work optimally then you’ll need to find and exploit your bottleneck.

I want do do more work to analyse our Support System to identify the bottlenecks. It’s important for me to understand the big picture. Goldratt tells us that any improvement made anywhere other than the bottleneck is wasted effort, I need to make sure I’ve examined the whole system – customer to customer, if I want to add real value to the business!

The real challenge here will be what to do if the bottlenecks are not within the development team…

Scrutinise Our Signoff Process 

Your signoff process is your last chance to avoid walking into a crisis. Finding bugs is not about luck, it’s about procedure and diligence- I want to continue to give ourselves the best chance possible to find those those showstoppers before the customer!

 

So those are mine, what do you think? What are your professional New Years Resolutions?