Month: May 2017

Scrum vs Scrumban

~ Adam ~ Leave a comment

I wonder how many companies out there genuinely believe that they’re “Agile” because they have daily standups? I’m also curious how many people could explain the difference between Scrum and Agile? Before talking about all the merits of Scrum vs Scrumban I’m just going to reiterate a few of the basics.

Agile is a set of principles and ideas which signatories of the manifesto believe will help development of software (or actually almost businesses but for the sake of simplicity I’m going to stick to development teams).

Scrum is a process teams can follow to help them follow these principles.

Scrumban is another process which aims to uphold the Agile principles but in a slightly different way.

Most people are familiar with Scrum’s iterative approach. Software is completed every Sprint (usually every two weeks) and the upcoming work is ranked in order of priority and the team commits to delivering a certain number of those tasks in their next Sprint.

Scrumban is a little different, upcoming work is continuously reprioritised and team members pick items off the top of the list. There are no planning meetings because there’s no sprint commitment.

A few years ago we were struggling with the amount of support time our customers required. Ticket priorities were constantly changing and expecting the operations side of the business to wait for the next sprint planning session was unreasonable.

I wrote about our two team system a few weeks ago. Once we were free of trying to design a process to accommodate both Planned and Unplanned work we realised that for a ticket driven environment Scrum was no longer the approach for us.

Using Scrumban for our Support Developers means the operations team can continuously repriorise tickets in our queue as customer’s priorities change. As soon as a problem is escalated it moves to the top of the prioritised list, can you imagine the benefits after continuously breaking sprint?

We have a Kanban board in Trello, on the left are the prioritised tickets, next we have tickets a developer is actively working on, next are tickets ready to test, and finally a list of recently solved ones.

At any point I can send out the board and say “this is what we’re looking at, this is where your problem is”. Various stakeholders can negotiate with the PO to adjust priorities as required.

What’s key here is visibility, when your stakeholders can see the ordered list and can negotiate their position on it they feel far more empowered than sitting waiting for an endless queue. However in my experience it’s worth triaging this list as issues come in and letting quick win issues jump the queue to avoid long, pointless wait times.

We believe that this approach makes our Support Developers far more flexible and (hopefully) helps us provide a better customer service – that’s certainly what our numbers imply!

Have you tried Scrumban? How do you plan your Support Developers work?

What Makes Me Hire A Developer?

~ Adam ~ Leave a comment

I’m going into a new round of interviewing developers for my team so I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what I look for when I’m interviewing people to work with.

Joel Spolsky says that you need to look for two things, brains and the ability to get things done. His reasoning is that developers who are smart but never finish jobs belong in never ending research projects, developers who get things done but aren’t smart end up causing you more work and if your candidate has neither then you should run a mile!

While I like his logic I have a few other criteria.

Joel doesn’t mention the candidate’s passion, their ability to learn, to form relationships with their team, or to empathise with the customer. In my eyes a developer who doesn’t have these qualities will negatively impact your team’s dynamic and product just as much as someone who produces bugs for a living.

So why an ability to learn? I hope this one fairly obvious. In our fast paced development world a developer’s ability to learn new technologies, absorb ideas and keep up with current trends is (in my opinion) more valuable than whether they have an in depth understanding of bitwise operators or lambda expressions. I’m not saying don’t ask about the technical side, but make sure your candidate can learn your code, your technologies and whatever comes along next!

Relationships? How many times have you worked alongside someone who can’t work in a team? They’re territorial, overly sensitive and horde knowledge with the misguided belief it makes them invulnerable. Look for people who enjoy the camaraderie and take time to teach and learn from their colleagues.

Empathy for the customer? This is, in my view one of the most important. Can your candidate put themselves in the shoes of your clients? Can they envisage how a bad release will impact your reputation? Do they understand the consequences to people’s working day when your code doesn’t work as expected? Find someone who understands the frustrations of bad software and poor customer service and you’ll find someone who will strive to prevent it!

Passion? Simply put I want a developer who wants to develop software! I don’t mean you have to spend every evening and weekend writing code or contributing to open source projects but demonstrate to me that you enjoy what you do. Tell me about what you’re working on, explain that bug fix you’re really proud of but please prove to me that you’re there’s something about the job you actually enjoy (other than just the £££s).

So there you have it, a few of the qualities I want my developer candidates to demonstrate for me. What do you look for when you’re interviewing? What personality traits do you try to show when you’re being interviewed?

Testing Atelier

~ Adam ~ Leave a comment

On Tuesday I was lucky enough to get tickets for one of my colleagues and I to go to the Leeds Testing Atelier. I’ve never been to one of these before but wow, the guys had worked extremely hard and created an amazing day!

There were two tracks (hipsters and nerds) throughout the day and it was action packed with different talks, topics, and workshops.

Before we got going however Clem led a group of us in a Lean Coffee session. I’ve never done one before (most likely because of my intense dislike of coffee!) but it’s definitely an idea I’ll be be trying out in team meetings at work!

I attended a couple of talks in the morning. The first was on Unit Testing best practices which I enjoyed, I got the chance to as a question on custom assertions which test multiple things (something I’ve been debating in my own head for a while). The answer by the way was “it’s ok, as long as your test continues to only test one thing” – a view I agree with!

Next up we’re a couple of short talks, one one using agile techniques to plan family life and other on website performance profiling. Both interesting and certainly talking points!

After a break Alex Carter spoke to us about the roles QAs can play in building the three ways of DevOps.

The three ways (in case you’ve not come across them are)

  1. Systems thinking
  2. Amplify feedback
  3. Continuous experimentation and improvement

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It turns out that a QA is key in making this work. They’re the quality gatekeepers, they challenge processes to build quality in at all stages and act as the team’s safety net when risky changes are made. If you’ve never run through this in your head (or even better your team) then I highly recommend you do!
Lunch was pizza, in fact huge amounts of pizza! Then we headed upstairs for some QA based fun and games (some seriously difficult interviewing and spot the differences).

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My final session of the day was a panel session on continuous delivery. The guys answered questions on everything from getting started to business challenges. There was a chance to ask questions at the end.

In summary the Leeds Testing Atelier was great. It was informal, informative, and had a great atmosphere with people willing to share experiences and ask questions. I’d like to thank the sponsors and organisers for all their hard work. If you’ve not been to one of these before then I’d highly recommend going to 2018 – I know I will be!

Measuring your Support Queue

~ Adam ~ Leave a comment

Last week I wrote about how we use a dedicated “SWAT Team” to handle the inevitable unplanned work which threatens to creep in and disrupt our sprints. This week I want to talk about how we measure our SWAT Team, what KPIs we use and how we know whether we are doing a good job.

There are hundreds of posts out there which discuss the merits of KPIs for developers and how the wrong ones encourage behaviour such as cherry picking or incorrect prioritisation. I agree with them entirely, that’s why it’s important that the measurements you do take should reflect the customer experience, rather than the team’s performance.

For example, counting the number of tickets solved would be a poor metric because only quick wins would be looked at. Equally timing how long was spent on each ticket would also encourage people to rush in order to get better stats. However, recording how long a customer waited (from raising a ticket to resolution) measures the customer experience – which is, after all what we should be more concerned about!

In my team we use two main statistics to measure how well we’re performing. The first is one I’ve mentioned before. Average Support Ticket Age is crucial for us because it places a numeric value on how long customers are currently waiting for our help.

The second metric we use is Cycle Time, this is the time between a Ticket being passed to the team and it being resolved. In other words, how long is it taking to solve tickets passed to us This is taken as an average of tickets closed over the last six weeks.

The reason we like these two values is not only that they give a customer’s perspective on our work, but because they balance each other nicely. If we measured Cycle Time alone then we’d get fantastic results by simply solving tickets as they come in but longer running and challenging tickets would be left behind. Equally by focusing only on the older tickets it’s likely we’re missing urgent tickets and quick wins which could be resolved quickly. It’s only by continuously improving both values do we provide a good service.

You’ll notice that we don’t worry too much about the volumes of tickets. I find this doesn’t actually matter, the number of tickets being raised varies from month to month, from customer to customer, and will change as customers leave and (much more ideally) join us. If the team is becoming overloaded with tickets then this will be highlighted in the metrics we already have (as we won’t solve the tickets as quickly). A measure of tasks in the queue is less import than whether the team is keeping up with the required workload.

A final point to make us where we start and finish timing. If you’ve ever read The Goal you’ll know that one of Eli Goldratt’s key points is whether you are measuring the right thing (he points out that efficiency increases do not necessarily produce an increase in profit). The decision you have to make with your KPIs (particularly when a ticket was opened) is whether to start your timer when the customer raises the ticket, or when it’s passed to your team. There is no perfect answer here, if you want to understand the entire customer journey then you need to look at Customer to Customer timings, however – if your team only plays a small part in that journey (as in our development team’s case as we have several support teams before us in the process) then your metrics will be less valuable if they include areas outside your control. Consider what you’re measuring, but never forget that you may only play a small part of the customer’s overall journey.

Hopefully I’ve given you a few ideas? Do you agree with my views? How do you measure the performance of your support teams?

The Four Types of Work in an Agile World

~ Adam ~ 4 Comments
NOTE: I’VE REVISTED THIS TOPIC MUCH MORE RECENTLY, IF YOU’RE INTERESTED ON HOW MY VIEWS HAVE CHANGED READ 4 TYPES OF WORK REVISTIED.

If you have read The Phoenix Project (which I highly recommend you do) you’ll be more than familiar with Eric who introduces us to the four types of work.

  • Planned Work – these are typically business projects or new features
  • Internal Projects – server migrations, software updates and so on
  • Changes – usually driven by feedback on already completed work
  • Unplanned Work – support escalations and emergency outages

In the book Eric talks about how Unplanned Work is unpredictable and destructive as it can often push out planned work. I can’t even begin to count how many times have I’ve planned in projects and tasks only for a crisis to arrive and my sprint to fail!

Managing a Product Backlog is an excellent way to handle three of the four types of work. After all, Agile Principles encourage us to collaborate with stakeholders, listen to feedback, and embrace change. The value of internal projects can be evaluated against other projects and then planned correspondingly and what is the backlog at all if not a prioritised list of Planned Work?

It’s the infamous Unplanned Work which continues to disrupt our Sprints, break our commitments and lower our productivity. Over a few years I’ve tried a number of different approaches to handling the inevitable Unplanned Work.

I’ve tried introducing slack into everyone’s sprint, only planning fifteen instead of twenty Story Points. I’ve tried allocating Support Tickets as they come in, assuming that the demand will cause our average sprint velocity to drop and the balance between Planned and Unplanned Work to find a happy equilibrium. It never does!

The only strategy I’ve found to work is to completely isolate the Unplanned Work from the other three types. Create a specific team (in our company we call this the SWAT team) who will react to all incoming unplanned work and “pitch in” with other work when there isn’t enough to do (Parkinson’s Law pretty much guarantee’s that this never happens).

The SWAT team handle the urgent, unplanned, and reactive work (often using a strategy like Kanban or Scrumban) while the rest of your team focus on delivering maximum value to the business (Sprints, commitments, and all the other wonderful concepts we hear about on Agile courses). That’s not to say they don’t fix bugs or take on internal projects, it’s that they work in a structured, planned environment in an effort to build solid releases and reduce the amount of Unplanned Work long term.

Speaking of Parkinson’s Law if you do decide to create this buffer between Planned and Unplanned Work (and I strongly suggest you do) you need to consider what happens when the work expands to fill the allocated time. What happens when the urgent support demands of the business exceed the capacity of your SWAT team? Hire extra people? That would be nice! But I can tell you what you must not do – DO NOT pass the extra work over into your Scrum team. I’ve made that mistake before and I can assure you that it’s a very slippery slope which is nearly impossible to come back from. Once you start roping in extra developers you undo your good work and Sprints start to fail once again. I mention it between I’ve seen it happen!

I hope I’ve given you some thoughts, I hope that my views on throttling the amount of damage your Unplanned Work can do help you safe your own commitments but I’d be delighted to hear your views – what do you to do safeguard your team’s productivity while meeting the urgent needs of the business? Post a comment below and let me know!