The Lock Complex

I have recently coined the term Lock Concept as a symptom of what many people call Fake Agile. Allow me to explain…

Waterfall development is often described with the Design, Development, and Testing phase structure. Many teams adopting Scrum tend to fall into one of two mistakes.

The first mistake is to split up these into sprints. So Sprint 1 is for design. Sprints 2, 3, and 4 are for development and testing and bug fixing will go into Sprints 5 and 6. This isn’t Scrum. Clarke Ching uses a phrase I like in his book Rolling Rocks Downhill, he talks about GETS software. That’s Good Enough To Ship, at the end of each sprint the software must be production ready. By falling into the sprint phase trap you’re lowering quality between releases and not realising the value of scrum.

The second mistake teams make is to try and run each Sprint as a mini waterfall. This is what I now describe as The Lock Complex. Teams falling into this trap will design in the first few days, develop for a few more, and then test their work towards the end. Yes, the software is GETS at the end… but doesn’t this look like a waterfall on a smaller scale?

The main symptom with this approach is people twiddling their thumbs (testers at the start of the sprint and developers at the end). While wasted time is frustrating, the real problem is the lack of shared knowledge and by unlocking that you can quickly raise your game towards Continuous Delivery.

The way to solve this becomes quite apparent if you look at the DevOps utopia we’re all told about. In a world of Continuous Delivery and automated approvals we create automated acceptance tests to ensure that our code functions as expected. If the feature doesn’t meet these automated tests then it will not be merged in, or if it has been then the deployment pipeline will stop.

In this world, not only are we deploying faster and achieving single piece flow but we’re breaking that Lock Complex. People are busy all the time and pair and mob programming becomes the norm. Instead of having a testing phase where it’s our QA’s engineers’ time to shine we have continuous collaboration and our quality specialists advising on the best tests and mechanisms to be implemented. Testers no longer run manual tests, we get computers to do that. Testers work to ensure that the automated tests give us a coherent test strategy.

If we can help our teams to break the Lock Complex and stop working in mini-waterfall sprints then we’ll see the benefits as people collaborate more and achieve better velocities and higher qualities as a result.