Speaking at Lean Software and Systems Conference

I am more than honored to have been selected to speak at the Lean Software and Systems Conference in Atlanta in April. I’ll be presenting an experience report on my projects using Kanban over the last year and a half.

The presentation will obviously focus on my experiences, so very little theory or how-to about Kanban here. Given the subject of the conference in general, there probably isn’t a big need for a how-to on Lean software, anyway. So I’ll share successes and failures, and the collaboration with other members of the team to improve the process for different projects.

If you’re in the greater Atlanta area April 21-23, try to get to this conference. Many of the innovators in Lean Software will be speaking and there will be a significant number of people applying this in the real world. I’m almost as excited to be attending it as I am to be speaking at it!

ASP.Net MVC v. WebForms

This question seems to come up a lot in discussions around these two ASP.Net frameworks. Just this past weekend in Cincy at the MVC Firestarter, it came up a number of times.

So, on the way to work this morning, I was listening to Hanselminutes 184, and the question was FINALLY given an answer by Scott Hunter.

If you care about separation of concerns, testability and tight control of your markup you should go with MVC. If you’re an enterprise developer and just want to get something out there quickly then use WebForms.

That’s paraphrased, I may have gotten the MVC reasons in a different order, but that was the point made.

Scary that “Just get it done,” is the main reason to use WebForms. I’ll stick with my “slow” TDD and long term maintainability in MVC and steer clear of WebForms where DDD apparently stands for Drag, Drop, Deploy.

CodeStock Recap and Kanban Talk Slides

I had a great time at Codestock this past weekend. I didn’t get to many sessions, but I did go to a number of open space sessions (have some work to do on my blog) and the normal “hallway” sessions that never disappoint.

My talk on Lean and Kanban went really well. There were only a couple seats left in the smallish room we had, but that lead to a much more interactive discussion. The slides are available to download, with some notes in the deck.

To answer a couple more questions from the group, here are a couple of the resources I mentioned in the talk:

• Core Ladas blog: http://leansoftwareengineering.com/
• Implementing Lean Software Development by Mary and Tom Poppendieck

Coming soon will be Agile Zen. I’ve taken a peek at the beta, and it’ll be quite a tool in helping people and teams do lean development. Sign up for their mailing list to get notified when it comes out.

Presenting in Findlay this Tuesday

I can’t believe I didn’t get this blogged sooner: I’m presenting “Care About Your Craft: Adventures in the Art of Software Development” in Findlay this coming Tuesday, May 19th.

I’m looking forward to heading up to Findlay for this. I met a few of the FANUG guys at Indy Code Camp this weekend, so I’ve got a few hecklers already primed.

What I'd Do Different

In my last post I mentioned a few things I'd like to do differently in my next new dev project where we utilize Kanban. I sat down with our PM, Elizabeth, and we did kind of a mini-project retrospective, and what we could do differently from the Kanban side of things to help things flow along better.

The first thing we thought would help would be to get better info on the cards, and to treat the cards as Minimal Marketable Features. Across the top of the card we'll put the feature number, name, and its time estimate. In the middle of the card, the description and any task breakout that's needed. Across the bottom we'll stick with the WIP start and end dates, and the cycle time will go between them once it's complete. The back of the card we'll put actual developer and tester times, and then once complete total that and put it on the front of the card under the estimated time.

This will accomplish a few things for us. First, on the dev side of things, it gets that task card breakout thing out of the way and allows us to track the features across the board as a single entity. Secondly, it gets more project management info clearly on the dev card, which makes it much easier for people not knee deep in the project daily to keep tabs on what's going on.

The second thing we thought should be implemented the next time around is an extension of the board, to the left. Our board for this one had a bullpen column where features were in holding waiting for the tasks to breakout. From there, they moved into the backlog, and into work in progress.

Our idea here is to break that bullpen column out into another Kanban section where discovery, design, and estimation takes place. Once that is complete the feature can wait in a "Ready for Dev" status and be pulled into the backlog column on the development Kanban board when the set trigger point is hit.

Elizabeth and I went back on forth a bit on where the bullpen board would reside. Initially I wanted to see it isolated from the dev team so they could concentrate solely on the dev tasks at hand. However, Elizabeth's persuasive abilities (strawberry cake with white icing may or may not have played a role here) led us to the conclusion that it should all be one board. This allows the developers to be aware of what's in the pipeline coming at them, lest they relax a bit too much at a critical point in the timeline. And, it allows the dev side of the board to pull from the bullpen as features are estimated and ready to go.

Finally one last thing we thought we'd employ would be different sized cards for different sized features. If we can't get all features to breakout into a similar estimate range, which is a very real possibility, then maybe get two or three ranges and denote them with different sized cards on the board. This would allow for different cycles to be tracked based on feature size, and a quick look at the board would tell you what type of features are moving through the system at any given time.

I think these changes to our approach will help the next new dev project where we employ Kanban. We used it successfully before, but I think this will help get more features into done with less friction for the whole team. Which means cards will get put in the envelope above this lovely lady's picture in a shorter cycle. (Whiteboard drawing courtesy of Dan Shultz.)

Kanban Lessons Learned

After seeing success with Kanban in a production support environment (part 1, part 2), we decided to give it a try in a new development situation. This project was a mix of new development and working with an inherited code base to implement some existing features differently.

Because of this situation, we ended up with a mixed bag of features. At the onset, we decided to break these features out into tasks, and we would track both across our Kanban board, as shown here with a snapshot of our Work In Progress section.

Features were broken into tasks and grouped together in the backlog. Once a feature went into WIP, it's tasks moved below into the Task Breakout section and were worked there. Once all tasks were completed, they were once again compiled back into a feature and went into test as a whole.

What we tried to accomplish here was to keep the concept of a MMF while still breaking the work into smaller, more manageable units. What ended up happening was that features themselves became secondary to almost full task development, however we were tracking features through the system for our cycle time. Early, heavy task features that focused more on the business model skewed the cycle time higher, and later UI tweaking features sent it lower. As such, our cycle time diminished quickly as the deadline drew near...a good thing, but I don't think it was totally attributable to the team's momentum.

I think we failed here in poor estimation of what lie in front of us when we started. A good bit of this is the situation we were in at the onset where we were under pressure to start getting things moving right away, and we didn't give much credence to estimating later features very well. That wasn't really a Kanban issue, and we should have known better. The excuse is we had very little time to ramp up on the discovery side of things when we got the project, but it would just be an excuse...we should have known better.

One final area where we had some issues was in reporting where exactly we stood in features completed. We were fairly visible on this project, and had a lot of interest in our success by the due date. (OK, what project doesn't?) While you could look at the board and see what was being worked at any given point, due to the lack of good feature estimation up front, it was hard to see where we were in the big picture. In the latter half of the project we stole ourselves a project manager, and she did a bang up job of getting that information worked out, but she did struggle in figuring it out. Again, I think she had trouble due to the lack of good estimation up front.

It wasn't all pain and suffering as we moved our cards across the board.

One good thing we got out of the board was it was easily changed to fit our constantly changing team size and make up. We started out as three developers, and ended as four developers - two different than the original three, one PM, and one QA person. Being able to walk up to the board and change the queue limits on feature WIP, task development, and features in test made things flow quite smoothly as the project moved along. It did a good job of identifying a few roadblocks and getting them out of the way, as well.

As noted earlier, our cycle time did drop as we neared the due date. Part of that was due to the smaller features coming through later, but there was a good bit of momentum on the dev team, too. Morale stayed fairly good as we kept moving things into the done envelope at the right side of the board.

I still think we were successful with Kanban in this situation, but clearly I think we need some refinements around how we did it on this project. I'll save those ideas for my next post.

"Houston here. We're looking for somebody to blame for your problem, 13."

Fix the Problem, Not the Blame
It doesn't really matter whether the bug is your fault or someone else's—it is still your problem, and it still needs to be fixed.

--The Pragmatic Programmer

I highly doubt that was the response to Jim Lovell after the line, "Houston, we have a problem." However, in our world of software development it still seems to be the first reaction to any issue that comes up.

I know in projects past, I've been a huge offender of looking for, "It's not MY fault," rather than fixing the problem at hand. Todd even nicknamed me Blameosaurus on one project because I got so good at looking for the blame. So, I'm not exempt from my own post here.

I've been a consultant for one company or another for over ten years now, and we're constantly thrown into burning buildings to get something working. There are a plethora of issues on day 1, and all too often those of us on the team spend too much time bitching about the issues and not enough time rolling up our sleeves to get things squared away. So, day 2 rolls around and we're in the same boat, and the same problem still exists.

That said, sometimes there is a right time to track somebody down that created a problem. Don't do it as a way to shame them, but rather for more clarification. Who knows what the situation as like at the time they made the error, and maybe it's a good time to help somebody learn something new.

I feel I'm still an offender of whipping out the blame thrower a bit too often, but I'm making a conscious effort to quit and move on with the solution.