Category Archives: Agile & Scrum

Posts related to Agile/Scrum methodology

How we work with 2-week Sprints

Agile & Scrum, Kerika, Team Collaboration, Technology, Usability, , , ,

Here at Kerika, we often get asked how we do Scrum as a distributed team.

Here’s the model we have evolved, which works for us mainly because we are the very essence of a distributed Agile team: we have people working together on the same product from locations that are 10,000 miles apart!

And this means that we are the most enthusiastic consumers of our products: we use Kerika to manage every part of our business and we only build what we would ourselves love to use.

Here’s the basic outline of our Scrum model:

Kerika's model for 2-week Sprints
Kerika’s model for 2-week Sprints

Each Sprint is 2 weeks long: that that works well for us; other folks might find that 3 weeks or 4 weeks i better. Pick what works for you.

Each Sprint begins with Sprint Planning, where the Scrum Team gets together with the Product Owner to decide which cards will be pull from our main Product Backlog into the Sprint Backlog.

Each Sprint is organized as a separate Scrum Board: this makes it really easy for us to concentrate upon needs to get delivered in that particular Sprint, without getting distracted by what was done in the past or what remains to be done.

And Kerika makes it really easy to pull cards (literally!) from the Backlog onto a Scrum Board, and then hide the Backlog from view so it doesn’t distract the Team while the Sprint is underway.

Half-way the Sprint, at the end of the first week, we do a gut-check: does the Sprint look like it is going reasonably well? We don’t ask if it is going perfectly: almost no Sprint does; what we are looking for is any indication that the Sprint is going to severely under-deliver in terms of the Team’s commitments to the Product Owner.

We could do these gut-checks every day during our Daily Standups, but in the first part of a Sprint cycle these can often give us false positives: it’s easy to tell early on if a Sprint is going to be disastrous, but it’s hard to tell for sure that it is actually going to end well. But about midway through the Sprint we start to have a more reliable sense for how things may turn out.

In keeping with the Scrum model, our goal is to complete a potentially shippable set of features and bug fixes with each Sprint, although this doesn’t necessarily mean that we will always ship what gets built after each Sprint. (More on that later.)

For each feature or bug, however large or small, we make sure that we have design and testing baked into the process:

  • The document is often just a few paragraphs long, because we always take cards representing large features (or other big work items) and break them up into smaller cards, so that no card is likely to take more than a day’s work. Kerika makes it really easy to link cards together, so it’s easy to trace work across multiple cards.
  • For bugs, the attached document describes the expected behavior, the actual behavior, and the root cause analysis.  Very frequently, screenshots showing the bugs are attached to the cards.
  • For new features, several documents may be attached, all quite small: there may be a high-level analysis document and a separate low-level design document.
  • For all features and bugs, we do test planning at the time we take on the work: for back-end (server) work we rely primarily on JUnit for writing automated tests; for front-end (UI) work we have found that automated testing is not very cost-effective, and instead rely more on manual testing. The key is to be as “test-driven” in our development as possible.

There are several benefits from doing formal planning, which some folks seem to view as being antithetical to an Agile model:

  • It helps find holes in the original requirements or UI design: good technical analysis finds all the edge cases that are overlooked when a new feature is being conceptualized.
  • It helps ensure that requirements are properly interpreted by the Team: the back-and-forth of analysis and reviewing the requirement helps ensure that the Product Owner and the Team are in synch on what needs to get done, which is especially important for new features, of course, but can also be important to understand the severity and priority of bugs.
  • It deliberately slows down the development pace to the “true” pace, by ensuring that time and effort for testing, especially the development of automated tests, is properly accounted for. Without this, it’s easy for a team to quickly hack new features, which is great at first but leads to unmaintainable and unstable code very soon.

At the end of the 2-week cycle, the Team prepares to end the Sprint…

We like to talk about Sprints as “buses”: a bus comes by on a regular schedule, and if you are ready and waiting at the bus stop, you can get on the bus.

But if you are not ready when the bus comes along, you are going to have to wait for the next bus, which thankfully does come by on a regular 2-week schedule.

This metaphor helps the Team understand that Sprints are time-boxed, not feature-boxed: in other words, at the end of every 2 weeks a Sprint will end, regardless of whether a feature is complete or not.  If the feature is complete, it catches the bus; otherwise it will have to wait for the next bus.

And here’s where the Kerika team differs from many other Scrum teams, particularly those that don’t consume their own products:

  • At the end of each Sprint, we do the normal Sprint Retrospective and Show & Tell for the Product Owner.
  • But, we also then take the output of the Sprint and deploy it to our test environment.
  • Our test environment is the one we actually use on a daily basis: we don’t use the production environment as often, preferring to risk all of our work by taking the latest/greatest version of the software on the test environment.

This forces us to use our newest software for real: for actual business use, which is a much higher bar to pass than any ordinary testing or QA, because actual business use places a higher premium on usability than regular QA can achieve.

(And, in fact, there have been instances where we have built features that passed testing, but were rejected by the team as unusable and never released.)

Kerika's model for 2-week Sprints
Click on this image to see the actual Kerika Whiteboard

This is illustrated above: the version of Kerika that’s built in Sprint 1 is used by the team to work on Sprint 2.

This is where the rubber meets the road: the Kerika Team has to build Sprint 2, while using what was built in the previous Sprint. If it isn’t good enough, it gets rejected.

At the end of Sprint 2, we will release the output of Sprint 1 to production. By this time it will have been used in a real sense by the Kerika Team for at least 2 weeks, post regular QA, and we will have a high confidence that the new features and bug fixes are solid and truly usable.

We could summarize our model by saying that our production releases effectively lag our Sprint output by one Sprint, which gives us the change to “eat our own dogfood” before we offer it to anyone else.

You can see the actual Whiteboard project for this process flow here.

 

 

Using status indicators on Task Boards and Scrum Boards: Done!

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, , ,

(The sixth, and last, in a series of blog posts on how you can make use of the status indicators on cards, in Task Boards and Scrum Boards.)

In our last post we talked about how to use the “Is blocked” flag; today, let’s take a look at “Done”.

Setting status
Setting status

“Done” is where you want to get to: it’s a special column that’s always to the right edge of every Task Board and Scrum Board.

(You can always chose to hide the Done column, of course, just like you can hide every other column on the board.)

Marking a card as “Done” is simply a quick way of moving it to the Done column, which can be handy when you have a very elaborate workflow — and we have seen folks whose boards have up to 20 columns!

In the near future when we add Work-In-Progress (WIP) Limits for Task Boards and Scrum Boards, the Done column, of course, will not be subject to WIP.

We are also planning on adding more metrics to help Project Leaders and Account Owners understand how well their projects are going, and these will naturally make use of the Done count.

All posts in this series:

Using status indicators on Task Boards and Scrum Boards: Is Blocked

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, ,

(The fifth in a series of blog posts on how you can make use of the status indicators on cards, in Task Boards and Scrum Boards.)

In our last post we talked about how to use the “On Hold” flag; today, let’s take a look at “Is Blocked”

Setting status
Setting status

“Is blocked” sounds similar to “On hold”, but it should be used in a different context: Blocked is a red flag to the team — it indicates that you are unable to proceed with a task, and you need help.

The essential difference between Blocked and On Hold is that:

  • You, or perhaps your boss, chose to put something On Hold.
  • You were forced to mark something as Blocked.

For teams working in a Kanban or Scrum model, the highest priority for a Project Leader should be to unblock cards.

Unblocking cards (and hence, people) is the most useful thing that a Project Leader can do to help move work smoothly.

This is why “Is blocked” is shown in red on a card, so that you can literally raise a red flag!

All posts in this series:

Using Status Indicators on Task Boards and Scrum Boards: “Needs rework”

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, ,

(The third in a series of blog posts on how you can make use of the status indicators on cards, in Task Boards and Scrum Boards.)

In our last post we talked about how to use the “Needs review” flag; today, let’s take a look at “Needs rework”.

Setting status
Setting status

In an ideal world, cards would only move from left to right: starting off on the left-most column, e.g. the Backlog in a Scrum Board, and moving in stages to the Done column.

In the real world, however, work can sometimes need rework, and that’s what the “Needs rework” status indicator can be used for.

The amount of rework that’s needed will vary widely, depending upon the project and the team:

If someone new has just joined a well-established team, that person may need some time to understand exactly what’s expected of them at each stage of the project’s workflow: they may, for example, be too quick to move a card from “Planning” to “In Development”, without realizing what’s expected of a card that’s fit to exit the Planning stage.

This new person may find that her work gets pushed back to the left, marked as “Needs rework”.

It’s imperative that whoever pushes back work as “Needs rework” also provides some precise description of what rework is needed.

This is most often done using chat, but sometimes a marked up document, screenshot or other materials may be more useful, particularly if the task is complex.

But, simply marking a card as “Needs rework”, without providing a good explanation, is never a good idea: it will generate ill-will within the team, discourage the new person, and simply result in more work for everyone.

Some times of work will always require a lot of rework: e.g. design.

Mockups of new products or features, or copy for new advertising, will go through a lot of rework before it is considered ready to move along a workflow.

This is quite normal, which brings up another critical point: good Project Leaders will ensure that there is no stigma attached to cards being marked as “Needs rework”.

If people are made to feel, however subtly, that their work is of poor quality because many of their cards are frequently marked as “Needs rework”, this will have a very bad effect on individual and team morale.

It’s really incumbent on the Project Leaders to ensure that people understand that “Needs rework” is simply a status indicator, not a judgment of someone’s abilities!

All posts in this series:

Using status indicators on Task Boards and Scrum Boards: “Ready to Pull”

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, ,

(The first in a series of blog posts on how you can make use of the status indicators on cards, in Task Boards and Scrum Boards.)

Kerika makes it really easy to flag cards on a board, if you need to alert your team members; here’s an example:

Examples of status flags on cards
Examples of status flags on cards

There are several statuses that you can report on cards (in addition to “Normal”, the default setting), and we will try to provide some advice in these blog posts on how best to use them.

First up: “Ready to Pull”

Setting status
Setting status

Ready to Pull is great if your team works in a “pull” environment, rather than a “push” environment. Here’s the easiest way to differentiate between the two:

  • In a “push” environment, work gets pushed onto people — quite literally. For example, Project Leaders (or even Team Members) decide that a particular card should be handled by a particular person, and they assign that card to that person: in other words, they push that work onto people.
  • In a “pull” environment, people only assign work to themselves: as they get freed up from whatever they are working on, they look at the board and pick up whatever task is waiting to be pulled (i.e. done) — in other words, they pick up a card that is marked as “Ready to Pull”.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both models, and it’s really a question of how your team prefers to work.

Particularly in organizations that are still transitioning from traditional (Waterfall-style) project management, the push model can be the easiest way to adopt a tool like Kerika: it helps retain the traditional role of a Project Leader as someone who is responsible for the assignment of work among the team.

This is definitely the easiest pathway for organizations that are still in the process of transitioning to a Lean or Agile model — a process that can take months in most cases.

There are, however, some disadvantages to the push model:

  • It can delay the organization’s cultural transformation to Lean/Agile: people feel less empowered, and can be more passive if they wait for work to get pushed to them by others.
  • A less empowered team is often slower to take the initiative.
  • Someone who has had work pushed onto them may feel less ownership of the outcome.
  • It provides a misleading picture of what’s actually getting done: this, in our experience, is the biggest shortcoming of the pull model!

When work gets pushed onto people, you can find that individuals have 10 or more items currently assigned to them. There’s no way they could be working on all 10 items at the same time, so one of the biggest advantages of Kerika — providing an accurate, real-time view of what’s getting done, and by whom — is somewhat negated.

The pull model is truer to the spirit of Kanban: it allows people to work at their own (true) pace, and empowers them to pick up new work as they get freed up — or blocked.

The Kerika team itself has transitioned from push to pull: with push we never had a true sense of what’s getting done; with pull, we do!

There are disadvantages to the pull model:

  • It requires more training and cultural change up-front: even for a team that generally feels empowered, it is a big shift in thinking and process to move from push to pull.
  • It can require a more complex workflow: for example, here’s a partial (!) view of the workflow that we adopted as part of transitioning to Pull, to make it work within our constraints:
Understanding the Pull Model
Understanding the Pull Model

Pull is best implemented in conjunction with Work-In-Progress (WIP) Limits, which is a feature that we will be adding shortly to Kerika.

So, how should you use “Ready to Pull” as a status indicator?

If you are working in a push model, there’s nothing to do: you don’t need this feature.

If you are working in a pull model, whenever a user is done with a piece of work, she should mark it as “Ready to Pull”, and then take her name off the card.This will clearly signal the rest of the team that the work item is ready to be taken on by someone else.

All posts in this series:

A case study in building an Agile PMO

Agile & Scrum, Team Collaboration, , ,

Will Treinen, founder and CEO of Treinen Associates gave a presentation at the 2014 IPMA Forum describing his experiences in building an “Agile PMO” to handle the extraordinary growth of his consulting business (600% in the past year!).

Will relied upon Kerika to create the perfect collaboration environment for his distributed teams of project managers, business analysts and business development staff:

How can you handle defects that are found after a user story has been accepted and released to Production?

Agile & Scrum, Technology

In a recent post on the Scrum Alliance forum at LinkedIn, a member asked this question:

How do teams handle defects that have been found after a user story has been accepted and released to Production?

My first thought was to just log a defect against the user story, but that screws up reporting as it removes the Accepted status. Executives do not want to see that. I am thinking we should just create a new user story and slate it for the next Sprint. ?

My answer:

Defects are bound to be found after a story has been accepted and released to production; that’s just a very normal part of software development, so it makes sense to add them to the Product Backlog to prioritize for a future Sprint.

There isn’t any need to take the “Accepted” status off a story that was already considered done within an older Sprint: “Accepted” doesn’t mean “super-excellent and done for all time”; it just means it was considered good enough by the Product Owner at the conclusion of the Sprint, and therefore accepted.

To “un-accept” stories post facto would not just screw up your reporting; it would start to create an unhealthy dynamic between the Scrum team and the Product Owner, where the Product Owner starts to believe he can reject stories post facto.

For Scrum to work well as a process, you need to get everyone to buy into the core idea that stuff gets done in iterations; new stuff gets done in new iterations; old stuff gets improved in future iterations.

On a more tactical level, Kerika lets you link together individual cards or even entire Scrum Boards, because every board, every card, every canvas has a unique URL that you can reference anywhere in the system to create dynamic links between stories and boards.

So, if we find a bug in a previously accepted story, we create a new card for that and simply reference the old card in the new card’s details.  Here’s a video that shows how that’s easy with Kerika.

Paying down technical debt when working with a Scrum team

Agile & Scrum, Kerika, Technology,

Another question answered on LinkedIn’s Scale Agile group: The team is facing a high Technical debt before adopting Scrum. Now, they want to fix this. How could they include this in the Sprint?

If you already have a lot of technical debt, I would recommend that the first few Sprints do nothing but clear the most expensive debt.

The trick is to persuade the Product Owner that this is necessary, because it means deferring any delivery of “real features” while the debt is paid down.

Note that I say “paid down” rather than “paid off”: in my experience, there is rarely an opportunity to completely pay off technical debt and have a clean Product Backlog with nothing in it but nice user stories that deliver tons of end-user functionality.

At Kerika, we have found that we accumulate some debt almost continuously, and that this is unavoidable even though we are using Scrum.

Purists might argue that a true Scrum model eliminates technical debt, but this is unrealistic when you are dealing with a fast moving market and are focused on rapidly improving your product.

Periodically, we devote an entire Sprint to paying down technical debt. We did one fairly recently because we are in the process of adding some substantial new functionality: Kerika will now become the first Scrum/Kanban/Scrumban tool that has full integration with both Google Drive and Box for sharing project files within distributed team ;-)

Because this was a major platform enhancement, we took a 3-week Sprint to pay down our technical debt by clearing a bunch of bugs and server exceptions that individually were never going to make it to the top of the Product Backlog.

The Kerika tool makes it really easy to tag items, so it was easy for us to find all the bugs that were in our (rather large) Product Backlog and we cleared nearly 50 items.

Actually, this was our second debt payoff Sprint this year: in April, the Heartbleed scare prompted us to do a full internal review of our security processes, which morphed into a full review/overhaul of our QA and other software development infrastructure/process stuff, and we spent an entire Sprint to significantly clean up a bunch of stuff that had been moldering a while.

For what it’s worth, we generally do an all-hands-on-deck Sprint to pay down debt: we don’t try to sneak in any new product features because I find that it sends a confusing message to the team about the importance of paying down the debt.

I said earlier that often the big challenge is convincing the Product Owner of the need to devote a Sprint or two to pay down debt; in our case that’s relatively easy because I am the founder/CEO and buy into the idea ;-) but I do believe that if you are going to pay down debt, you need to do it with serious intent and get everyone focused on that, which means the Sprint is all about debt, not new goodies.