Category: Individuals and Interactions

Dysfunctional Commitment

Team commitment is a wonderful and sometimes fragile thing. Many responses to my description of it are indications of how frequently the word “commitment” is used in a dysfunctional manner. Indeed, the post was prompted by similar conversations.

Believe me, I’ve seen these dysfunctions many times. They are so numerous and varied that no catalog of them could be complete. It’s not the word, commitment, that causes the problems, however. And avoiding that word will not solve the problems. Instead, we have to look at the behavior and attitudes behind the problems in order to reliably recognize them and choose strategies for correcting them. Read More

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Categories: Individuals and Interactions

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Team Commitment

Most Scrum teams estimate their top priority stories, select those stories that add up to their historical velocity for their sprint backlog. Some teams simplify this by merely counting the stories, or using the mathematical reciprocal, cycle time. Others make it more complicated, calculating the effect of days off and other known distractions from the work.

However they calculate it, some people put a lot of faith in the historical data to guide the future. “It’s data,” they say, “it’s better than guesses and not subject to cognitive bias.” Not all data is easily measured and converted to numbers, though. Limiting yourself to this initial calculation is, itself, an example of anchoring bias. Read More

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Categories: Individuals and Interactions

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How do we estimate?

There have been some web posts and twitter comments lately that suggest some people have a very narrow view of what techniques constitute an estimate. I take a larger view, that any projection of human work into the future is necessarily an approximation, and therefore an estimate.

I often tell people that the abbreviation of “estimate” is “guess.” I do this to remind people that they’re just estimates, not data. When observations and estimates disagree, you’d be prudent to trust the observations. When you don’t yet have any confirming or disproving observations, you should think about how much trust you put into the estimate. And think about how much risk you have if the estimate does not predict reality.

This does not mean, however, that you have to estimate by guessing. There are lots of ways to make an estimate more trustworthy. Read More

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Categories: Individuals and Interactions Tools and Techniques

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What Decision Are We Supporting?

In business, we’re often asked for estimates with too little context to understand the request. When that happens, we’re likely to expect the worst–that our estimate will be treated as a “guarantee not to exceed” and we’ll likely be in trouble at some time in the future. Of course we think that; we’ve been burned too many times in the past. Our fear of the consequences will encourage us to spend far too much time and effort trying to get the estimate “right” so we won’t be blamed.

If an estimate is really an estimate, then we know that it’s “wrong” in the sense that the subsequent actual reality is unlikely to equal it. The estimate is a guess, perhaps an educated guess, predicting the future. Predictions are hard, especially about the future.

Given these problems with estimates, why do we bother to make them at all? Read More

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Categories: Individuals and Interactions Responding to Change

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Building Frameworks For Internal Use

Suppose you have a number of products, or a number of applications, that share some common functional needs. It seems obviously reasonable to create a separate team to build those functions in common. Often these grow to become known as a framework, and the product or application teams are expected to use it.

It’s a seductive concept, but don’t do it. Why not? I can think of several reasons. Read More

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Categories: Individuals and Interactions

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Adding a new team member

Adding a new team member to an existing team always introduces challenges. The introduction changes the makeup of the team, and if the team had jelled, it has to do so, again, with the new member.

Also, the new member has to learn about the team and its work. There are many tacit assumptions held within a team. It’s impossible to document them all and, even if you could, both reading such a document and keeping it up to date are daunting herculean tasks.

So how do you maximize the integration of a new team member with a minimum amount of work?  Read More

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Categories: Individuals and Interactions

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Avoiding Mini-Waterfalls

A lot of people and organizations, when transitioning from a serial software development lifecycle toward an Agile one, fall into the pattern of mini-waterfalls. They start doing iterations, but each iteration resembles the development lifecycle they already know. The programmers do some design work, then they write the code to implement the design, then unit test the code, and then they pass it to the testers for testing. To many people, this is the only way it can work. Their mental model only admits to this series of phases.

And they run into typical problems. Sometimes the design doesn’t fit the problem well, and patches are needed because there isn’t time to go back to design. The testers get squeezed for time at the end of the iteration, and no one knows how to accommodate the rework when a problem is found. More patches are added, because there isn’t time to redesign. And the next iteration starts the cycle over again.

Sure, doing this in two to four week cycles beats doing it in six to twelve month cycles. But only a little. Most of the time, it starts to fall apart if the team doesn’t learn to work differently.

But it’s inevitable, they say. Read More

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Categories: Individuals and Interactions

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