Agile Practitioner IL – Fourth Meeting

I had much fun at yesterday meeting. I really liked the amount of questions and interest people showed. While they didn’t make my life easy, I really enjoyed the conversation and discussion.
for those who missed here are the slides

Agile in unfriendly territories

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Hope to see you all again net month and of course at the Agile Practitioners 2012 conference

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Posted in: Agile Practitioners IL,Scrum

Agile Contracts

Agile contracts is an interesting thing. one of the main push back against going agile I get in places is that while agile is nice and all there is no way we can convince our customer to work like this. “they want a fixed price fixed scope deal”. In any case this post is not going to talk about why Agile contracts are a good idea, or how to get buy-in from your clients to sign an agile contracts. This post is going to talk about:

The forces against an agile contract

The power of Inertia

People don’t change easily. The fact that our industry has been using a “Fixed …” contract for several decades now goes against trying anything else. Especially if that something else is substantially different. An agile Contract is exactly that. Different.

Risk

An agile contract puts the risk on the paying side (the customer), he is going to pay for the work done, even if that work is of lesser value. Naturally if its value is low enough  he can bail out. But still the risk is on him. While a “Fixed …” puts the risk on the development team. they need to fulfill their part before they get paid.

Trust

our industry has not been that great at delivering working software. (to say the least). Most software projects either fails completely or significantly does not meets expectation (either they miss the timeline, exceeds the budget or reduce scope)Potential Profit. An agile contract actually says exactly that. By going for a flexible scope (or time) we actually say we don’t know exactly what will happen, we don’t know what we can deliver (or when). That’s a hard message to tell the one who is paying.

Potential Profit

This one is a little elusive. One of thing we do as a development team when we go for a “fixed …” is add buffers to mitigate our risks. At one place I used to work I saw a two days chunk of actual work being priced as 11 weeks for the client. And he was willing to pay (there is a cost for putting the risk on the developers). For us as a development team this represent a significant potential profit. If we could just estimate accurately and actually finish the work in the time we say we can. The buffers just become easy money. No matter how many times we under estimate work, every time when we do a new estimate we are always sure that this time it will be different. This time we have considered everything. After all we are smart people.

As you can see there are strong forces affecting both side to resist going for an agile contract. Can you think of more?

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Posted in: Agile practices

Can you spot the Contradiction?

Here’s a job description I got over the mail (the original message was in Hebrew so I’ve translated):

Subject : Project manager – Control of Agile software

A project manage with control of Agile software is need for an international development company dealing in Wireless Electronics

• Must – BSC in engineering
• 1-2 years of experience in project management or in project scheduling and task tracking as part of the project team
• Experience in Configuration management – significant advantage.
• Experience in production processes, moving from research to production – an advantage
• Must have knowledge in Excel, Ms-project, Agile software
• Great interpersonal skills, teamwork, ability to work under pressure
• Fast learner of systems and processes, ability to dive into details
• Excellent English
• Willingness to travel

Can you see what’s wrong here?

(i.e. why does a real agile person will not get close to this job?)

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“I have a Legacy System” is a lame excuse

Q: “why have you not written any automated unit test until now?”
A: “ look, we have a and complex big system. no one has written automated tests for it. it will take me too long to do it just now. I know its important but we have XXXXXXX so we cant do it now”
This kind of excuse, which sadly I hear way too often,  rate high among the “list of most lamest excuses”.
Don’t believe me?
How about this?
Q: “when are you going to cut down on your expanses and start saving money?”
A: “Look, I’ve already have a big mortgage on my house, and the cost of living has risen lately. So now is definitely not a good time to start saving. In fact since I just need to replace my car with a new one I’m just on my way to the bank to get an additional loan.”
or maybe this?
Q: “you know that you were diagnosed with high cholesterol, when are you going to start a healthy diet?”
A: ”you know you are right. But we are just entering the holiday season so now is not a very good time to start. In fact I cant wait for the family dinners, Health is not high on my family priorities, I’m guessing that’s why its so good”.
and this?
Q: “why aren’t you using a source control system?”
A: “well we have this big batch of code and its kind of a big mess. We thought about starting to use a source control, but it will take us too long to port our code into such a tool, and train all the developers. And you know we need to do XXXXXXX, so now is not really a good time”
Its Never too early to start
I think you got the point.
It all boils down to accumulating debt, technical debt in case of software development. That is,  you know you need to do something now. ASAP! But since  the effort involved seems to be high, you delay. You decide to take on additional debt, and with it comes additional interest. Causing you to do more rework and have less time and the monster feeds itself.
Face it, like most necessities in life there will never be the perfect time to do it. Test automation on all levels (unit,integration acceptance E2E,…) is not an option.  More and more teams realize that and do something about it. To stay competitive you will have to do it also, later will only make it harder. 
The fact that your system is big and complex is the real problem, Test Automation is one proven way to tackle that problem.

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Posted in: AUT,Development Practices,TDD

Agile Practitioners IL– Fourth Meeting

Just wanted to let you know that the Agile Practitioner group will be meeting for the fourth time on November the 6th. This time I’ll be giving the first part of the session and I’ll be talking about how agile can be adopted by a small part (maybe a single team) inside a bigger organization that might be using other more traditional processes.
Like always entrance is free but registration is required. So please register here (SAP our hosts did ask that you will remember to bring your event ticket to the meeting)
You all are invited to attend and I also ask you to help us attract more people to the meeting. Please invite your friends, colleagues or anyone else you feel might be interested in coming. We really like to  grow up our relatively small community.
And last come if you haven’t already and join us at linkedin:  http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=81807&trk=hb_side_g

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