Fabio Pereira

My colleague Jason Yip posted some very interesting thoughts on roles and hand-offs and I thought perhaps I could express them with some images… As I really like images better than words.
Jason mentioned that usually this is what happens:

Waterfall Project

Some Agile projects

They miss the point by assuming this is enough:

Ideally, this is what we want

“We’re not just re-ordering hand-offs, we actually want to remove them.” (Jason Yip)

Technical Agile, Collaboration, Communication, Photo, ThoughtWorks

My colleague Dan North facilitated a session today at ThoughtWorks office in Sydney about estimation, creating an MSL (Master Story List), what Scrum calls Product Backlog and which level of granularity should it be.

Dan started the session with a very interesting metaphor: If we want to calculate the area of a country we can always approximate it by comparing it with something that we know how to calculate… A triangle, for example. Dan used the map of the UK, I’m sorry Dan, I couldn’t help myself… I changed it to Brazil…

Basically, the area is something in between the areas of MIN and MAX triangles. And it’s very easy to calculate the areas of the triangles, right? How accurate is that? Of course it’s not 100% accurate, but most of the time we don’t need 100% accuracy. We just need to understand the boundaries in order for us to mitigate risks, which have been described as our “fears”.

The estimated range also helps us to make decisions. If a client wants to build an application, for example, and after calculating his current operational manual costs and what the application would make him save, he is willing to pay 1 million. But the estimated range is between 4 and 6 millions, this already helps the client to make the decision of not to proceed with the project.
Always bear in mind what estimates are:

“Estimation is the calculated approximation of a result which is usable even if input data may be incomplete or uncertain.” (wikipedia)

Another pertinent topic during the session was that the Iteration Manager (Scrum Master or XP Coach) should not only be focused on the lower level stories (Product Backlog), but also on the high level project goals and outcomes as well as relating them to the client’s and organization’s needs and purposes.
Stories can be grouped at a A higher level, which we call a theme. Prioritisation and estimation could also be done at these levels.

Some other things that I learned:

• The Pomodoro Tecnique - Timebox of 25 minutes
• Enough to proceed - do exactly what’s needed and enough to proceed to the next step, make a decision for example.
• The Slacker’s Guide of Project Tracking
• BE CREATIVE!

Technical IterationMgmt, Photo, Prioritization, Scrum, ThoughtWorks

Ok… Ok… I know you don’t like UML…
But, if you need to draw a pretty quick Sequence Diagram, you should consider using site that Phillip showed me today.
It took me less than 15 seconds to draw this diagram:

It has a specific language to draw it:

Phillip->Fabio: showSequenceDiagramWebSite()
note right of Fabio: Thinks it's interesting
Fabio-->World: blogAboutIt()

Give it a go…

Technical Cool, Photo

Retrospectives are usually conducted in order to keep the continuous improvement engine wheels working properly on a project. It is present on most of the agile processes I have worked with, such as Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum.

The image below describes retrospective that most of us are used to:

On my last project at ThoughtWorks I had the opportunity to introduce to our client, together with Jason, a new type of retrospective, the Goal Driven Retrospective.

Goals and Actions

The Goal Driven Retrospective brings the idea that we should be much more focused on creating actions to achieve common goals shared and agreed within the team and also that will definitely add business value to the client.

Examples of goals:

• Zero bugs in UAT
• Productivity x 2: If a similar feature is required, the team should be able to implement it in at least half the time that they took at the first time
• Improve work environment

Examples of actions:

• Showcase and run selenium tests on IE to decrease number of browser dependency bugs in UAT
• Refactor JSP’s and create a DSL to specify exactly what varies from one story to the other
• Team lunch to improve work environment

It is essential that the person who is facilitating the retrospective, usually the Scrum Master, XP Coach, or Iteration Manager is aligned with the goals of the organization.

Values

In order to prevent conflict of interest, all the goals are defined based on values:

• Productivity
• Cost
• Quality
• Morale

By following these values the actions will make the team:

• Faster
• Cheaper
• Better
• Happier

All the actions must be aligned with all the values.

Some examples of actions that would not be acceptable because they go against values:

Where is morale?
What if someone suggests that in order for the team to be twice as productive they need to work 16 hours a day? If you just had that face and thought: “Come on, we know that this doesn’t work…” you are smart aligned with the values, but remember: this is not common sense.

Slow slow slow… what about productivity?
Or what if to achieve zero bugs in UAT we try to test and automate every single possible scenario in the whole application?

The picture below shows the output from the retrospective we had on the client:

I strongly encourage everyone to give it a go and try this new way of improving.

Technical Agile, AgileWall, IterationMgmt, Photo, Retro, Scrum, ThoughtWorks, XP

If you won the lottery and you saw 10 million dollars in your bank account tomorrow, what would you do? You would probably buy a lot of things… right? But actually you do not need everything you would buy, do you? Ok, you would have a lot of spare money, so there’s no problem.

But what if you had only a hundred dollars in your account? What would you buy? You would have to think about it more carefully and prioritize.

The product owner needs to define what is really important for him.
If you ask him what does he want for a 2 years project (10 million) he will say: “I want everything!”, but if you break down the project into small iterations (sprints) and ask him to prioritize what does he want for a small chunk of time, that’s when the important things come up.

A good way to show the product owner that he does not have 10 million available is making him buy features with a limited amount of money.

How does it work?

Before starting the poker chips session, we need a list of estimated user stories. We call it Master Story List (MSL), or Product Backlog. There are many ways of facilitating an estimation session, I like planning poker. But always remember: The team gives the estimates.

Basically you need to define how much a story point costs and give a certain amount of poker chips to the client according to the size of your iteration. And then ask him to buy what he wants for the next iteration.
It is interesting because from my experience as long as he has money, he buys everything, but then when he starts running out of chips, that’s when the real process takes place.

The output will be a list containing the most important user stories at that time.

Technical Agile, IterationMgmt, Photo, Prioritization, Scrum, ThoughtWorks

We had 8 user stories and we came up with this quick way of sorting them in the office. It was pretty quick… and simple.

Technical Agile, IterationMgmt, Photo, ThoughtWorks