Tag Archives: pattern

Cracking Big Rocks

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Bramber castle (side perspective view)

Things have been rather busy over the last couple of months. I’ve joined a new division at my current company and have the basis for another dozen articles slowly developing but that’s just the start. I have some really exciting news!

After over a year of development with the exceptionally talented Johanna Hunt (@joh) through field testing, workshops, paper prototypes, conferences, conversations, and peer reviews I’m very pleased to announce the launch of crackingbigrocks.com.

The Concept

In trying to solve problems of our own, we found challenges that we now identify as “Big Rock” problems – those things that when faced alone cause us sleepless nights and illogical stress. The mental load associated with Big Rock problems can be so taxing that every time we go to tackle them we find ourselves procrastinating and avoiding or exhausted through trying. A deep breath, a step back, a few pointers, a second brain and some support can help us get back on track.

We’ve faced these problems in both our personal lives and professional careers. For example the series of articles I wrote on “The Oubliette” describes the multiple strategies I used for reducing a major defect backlog.

(I’ve spent the last 2 weeks reusing the oubliette strategies along with a few new ones to help my new team get our quality back under control and keep the motivation to improve high.)

 

Simple Patterns & Coaching Cards

Between us we’ve taken the “Simple Patterns” concept and our combined experiences  of solving large, difficult problems and developed a set of over 50 simple problem solving patterns. In particular, we’ve captured the essence of big mental hurdles and how these can be overcome in ways that have resonated with almost everyone we’ve shared with. (Of the 150 or so people who’ve explored the concepts so far, only two didn’t find they had “Big Rock” problems of their own.)

We’ve produced a limited first edition set (only 50 decks) of  high quality coaching cards containing 45 patterns.  (Within a week of the box being delivered, with no marketing at all we’re already down to just 35 decks left!)

As of about June 2013, the first edition has sold out however the expanded second edition is now available on amazon.

It turns out the ideas and concepts we’ve captured and the formats we’ve chosen are significantly more popular than we expected. Back in August 2012 after a weekend of hand-trimming and cutting (causing a few injuries and RSI) we produced nearly 40 paper prototype decks with unedited wording and far fewer patterns. We gave all of these away and left a few attendees disappointed after running a hugely successful workshop to a packed-out room of nearly 80 attendees at Agile 2012. A month later we had to produce a few extras for a re-run at Agile Cambridge (and took the opportunity for some edits whilst we were at it).

We delivered our first bulk-order for nearly 200 decks for attendees at Agile Cambridge in 2013 and ran another packed-out session. Our good friend Olaf regularly takes a few sets out with him to Play4Agile in Germany.

Even whilst developing and trimming the original prototype decks, we actually used the patterns within the decks to “keep rolling” – the idea of having to manually cut out and collate over 1500 paper playing cards is quite a “Big Rock” in itself. We measured our throughput rate, adjusted our cutting process, optimised our flow and working practices, banked our results in suitable sized batches and made sure our pace was (mostly) sustainable!

Here’s a quick preview of what’s in the box…

Photo of cracking big rocks cards

The majority of patterns in the deck are unique to us but there’s a couple that are better known (such as the “Rubber Duck” shown above). What’s unique here is the format, approach, style and most intriguingly, the community we’re aiming to build. We want to share the ideas and experiences everyone has using these cards as coaching and problem-solving tools.

If you’d like to find out more, head on over to crackingbigrocks.com and take a look.

OK. Marketing over – I generally find selling or marketing what we do a little crass so I hope you as readers don’t mind too much!

Black Holes & Revelations

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Have you ever had to deal with a black hole on your team?

“As predicted by general relativity, the presence of a large mass deforms spacetime in such a way that the paths taken by particles bend towards the mass. At the event horizon of a black hole, this deformation becomes so strong that there are no paths that lead away from the black hole” – Wikipedia

I’m not a physicist so here’s a simplified view that I can fit in my smaller brain:

Black holes are like huge “gravity traps” sucking in all energy from the surrounding area. Energy and mass are drawn toward the event horizon, sucked in and lost forever. The more they take in, the larger or denser they get.

Here’s some cool stuff I learned from Karl Schoemer a few years ago.

A team undergoing change can be coarsely divided into 3 behaviors: Design, Default and Defiant/Detractor.

• The “Design” population are your role models; your supporters & change agents – but be aware, some may have short attention spans or become zealots. This is up to 20% of your population.
• Those following the “Default” behavior will sit on the fence; “What.. …ever”, “it doesn’t apply to me”, “I’ll carry on as I am thank you” are all common “default” responses. Typically this is 70% of your population!
• “Defiant/Detractor” behavior exhibits extreme symptoms including shouting, arguments, tantrums, sabotage, threatening to leave and pulling everyone else down with them. Less extreme responses include focusing on the minutiae, public cynicism and endless debate without action. In many cases, whilst this may seem prevalent, often this is actually as little as 10% of your population!

Now let’s return to the Black Hole. In space, black holes are invisible – only their effects can be seen. In change management, we simply fail to recognize and identify them.

Human black holes must be understood and handled with extreme caution.

For those inexperienced with black holes, your instinct will be to try and defuse them. You must spot when you are feeding a metaphorical black hole, rewarding negative behavior by pouring your finite energy and resources in. Feeding black holes provides them additional credibility in front of their peers – their gravity trap grows ever-larger.

Lean values time… Eliminate waste! – Where are you wasting your energy?
If you removed the energy feeding a black hole would it eventually burn out?
In human change, detractors usually either get with the program or leave.

If you’ve read some of my prior articles you’ll know that whilst I appreciate good people; if your behavior and attitude isn’t up to scratch, all the technical prowess in the world is unlikely to make me want you on my team.

Some black holes may be an almost permanent rift in space. Work to minimize their impact and sphere of influence rather than offering more fuel. Consider using them as your “professional cynic” – your sounding board for the detractor response – but be aware this is a lot like playing dodgeball with a burning coal. It’s usually safer to move them away from the powder magazine instead.

Where could your wasted energy be better spent?
Simple! Use it to shift the center of gravity on your team away from the black hole.
Partner with your “design” members as a team and swing your population of defaulters toward your chosen direction. Some may be pulled toward or into the black hole but work on the overall gravity shift to bring the team around.

If you don’t have sufficient design weight to adjust the center of gravity right now, go digging for more – one person at a time if needed. At some point you will be able to tip the balance.

(Oh – a nod to Muse for inspiring the title of this post)

Escaping the Oubliette (Part 4) – The Litter Patrol

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As promised in my last installment on oubliettes…

Your team might not be fully ready for the merciless refactoring encouraged by some agile approaches but this will help you stay heading in the right direction whilst keeping the delivery vs refactoring impacts balanced out.

The cost of change has a (roughly) logarithmic relationship to debt. I’ve seen first-hand how high-debt systems become almost impossible to change and it’s not pretty.

In a debt-ridden system we are eventually faced with a choice; refactor or replace. Eventually even once-newly-replaced systems build up debt and the refactor/replace choice returns. Craig Larman & Bas Vodde’s most recent book covers the debt/cost relationship brilliantly in the section on “legacy code”. They also describe the oubliette strategy of “Do No Harm” or as I call it – “The Litter Patrol“.

This is a particularly powerful debt management approach as it’s both a prevention and reduction strategy.

Here’s the basic concept…

When working with an area of legacy code, you’re working in a particular “neighbourhood“. If that neighbourhood is untidy your care and attention to that neighbourhood is diminished. Much like the “broken windows” principle; once the damage seal is broken, neglect and further damage follow and overall code quality deteriorates rapidly.

So (without going overboard), every time you’re working in a particular neighbourhood, what can you do to clean up a few pieces of litter?

Not the run-down shopping district between lines 904 and 2897 but more the abandoned classic car between lines 857 and 892 or the overflowing trashcan on the corner between 780 and 804.

If you introduce a litter patrol in your teams and encourage a hygiene cycle with every change to your code, your debt load and future cost of change will rapidly reduce for the areas you hit most frequently.

Unfortunately although this is easier than a complete refactoring of a poorly designed class-hierarchy or monolithic god-class, in order to perform the litter patrol in safety on your code you need good unit tests or small functional tests for that neighbourhood and ideally some refactoring support (I like to call these your gloves, garbage bag and litter picker).

This challenge doesn’t mean don’t do it. In fact if you don’t have tests already, maybe your next patrol isn’t changing the code at all but to write just a couple of small, independent tests to demonstrate how that area is expected to behave. (You might even need to make some tweaks to make it testable)

If it’s hard, don’t avoid the problem, focus on making life easier one bite or constraint at a time.

Every time we successfully deliver a small clean-up task, the future cost of change to that area is reduced and our incentive to keep it clean is improved.

Look out for part 5 – sponsorship – coming soon.

Priority Fatigue

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This came to me at 5am after a bout of insomnia…

In the last few years the concept of technical debt has really taken root. Teams discuss it and use it to ensure important leftovers get cleared, not just business-critical priorities.

Here’s a fresh verbal anchor…

“Priority Fatigue” – The wear that sets in if you do nothing but focus on the priorities of your products or leaders all the time.

If you’re using Scrum or Kanban; chances are you’re working through some kind of prioritized backlog of work. Most Scrum practitioners are aware that despite iterations being called sprints the team are actually running a marathon. Every now and again your team needs to take a breather and at the end of a release they need proper recovery time.

Clearing technical debt is a common way of recovering. Another approach used by forward-thinking organizations is to have periodic innovation days or weeks where everyone “downs tools” and does something interesting instead. Good team-building days or activities are a third option.

These are all ways of addressing priority fatigue on a team.

Weekends and holidays are the personal slack that we use to pay off some of our individual priority fatigue however many of us don’t actually rest any more.

Our lives are so full we don’t have time to recover. In fact, many people now continue (at least partially) working even whilst on holiday – it’s frequently expected these days.

In the same way we relieve priority fatigue for teams, consider taking time to step back reward ourselves as individuals in innovative ways. If nothing else; take some regular time out to do something interesting even if it’s not important. **

**Caveat: don’t overdo it! Strike a balance with your priorities.

Patterns For Collective Code Ownership

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Following the somewhat schizophrenic challenges of dealing with person issues on collective code ownership, here we focus on the practices and practical aspects. How do we technically achieve collective ownership within teams?

We’re using the “simple pattern” approach again. For each pattern we have a suitable “anchor name”, a brief description and nothing more. This should be plenty to get moving  but feel free to expand on these and provide feedback.

Here’s the basic set of patterns to consider:

Code Caretaker

Let’s make it a bit less personal, encourage the team to understand what the caretaker role for code entails. It’s not a single person’s code – in fact the company paid us to write it for them. Code does still need occasional care and feeding – Enter the “Caretaker”.  Be wary though that caretakers may become owners.

Apprenticeship

Have your expert spend time teaching & explaining. An apprentice learns by doing – the old-fashioned way under the tutelage of a master craftsman guiding them full-time. This is time and effort-intensive for the pair involved but (unless you have a personality or performance problem) is a sure-fire way to get the knowledge shared.

If you need to expand to multiple team members in parallel,  skip forward to feature lead & tour of duty.

Ping-Pong Pairing

Try pair programming with an expert and novice together. Develop tests, then code, swap places. One person writes tests, the other codes. Depending on the confidence of the learner, they may focus more on writing the tests and understanding the code rather than coding solutions. Unequal pairing is quite tricky so monitor this carefully, your expert will need support in how to share, teach & coach.

Bug Squishing

Best with large backlogs of low-severity defects to start with. Cluster them into functional areas. Set a time-box to “learn by fixing” – delivery is not measured on volume fixed but by level of understanding (demonstrated by a high first-time pass rate on peer reviews). If someone needs help they learn to ask (or try, then ask) rather than hand over half-cut. This approach works with individuals having peer review support and successfully scales to multiple individuals operating on different areas in parallel.

A Third Pair of Eyes (Secondary Peer Review)

With either an “initiate” (new learner) or an experienced developer working on the coding, have both a learner and an expert participate in peer reviews on changes coming through – to learn and provide a safety net respectively. The newer developer should be encouraged to provide input and ask questions but has another expert as “backstop” for anything they might miss.

Sightseeing / Guided Tour

Run a guided walk-through for the team – typically a short round-table session. Tours are either led by the current SME (subject matter expert) or by a new learner (initiate). In the case of a new learner, the SME may wish to review their understanding first before encouraging them to lead a walk-through themselves.

Often an expert may fail to identify and share pieces of important but implicit information (tacit knowledge) whilst someone new to the code may spot these and emphasize different items or ask questions that an expert would not. Consider having your initiate lead a session with the expert as a backstop.

Feature Leads

The feature lead approach is one of my favourites. I’ve successfully acted as a feature lead on many areas with teams of all levels of experience where I needed to ramp up a large group on a functional area together.

By introducing a larger team, your expert will not have the capacity to remain hands-on and support the team at the same time. They must lead the team in a hands-off approach by providing review and subject/domain expertise only. This also addresses the single point of failure to “new” single point of failure risk seen with “apprenticeship”.

This is also a potential approach when an expert or prior owner steps in too frequently to undo or overwrite rather than coach other members activities. By ensuring they don’t have the bandwidth to get too involved you may be able to encourage some backing-off but use this approach with care in these situations to avoid personal flare-ups.

Cold Turkey

For extreme cases where “you can’t possibly survive” without a single point of failure, try cold turkey. Force yourself to work without them.

I read an article some years ago, (unfortunately I can’t track it down now) where the author explained how when he joined a project as manager, the leaders told him he must have “Dave” on the project as nobody else knew what Dave did. He spent a week of sleepless nights trying to figure out how to get Dave off the project. After removing Dave from the project, the team were forced to learn the bottleneck area themselves and delivered successfully.

(Apologies to any “Dave”s I know – this isn’t about any of you)

Business Rule Extraction

Get your initiate to study the code and write a short document, wiki article or blog defining the business rules in the order or hierarchy they’re hit. This is usually reserved for absolute new starters to learn the basics of an area and show they’ve understood it without damaging anything. It is however also a good precursor to a test retrofit.

Test Retrofit

A step up from business rule extraction whilst delivering some real value to the team. Encourage your learner to write a series of small functional tests for a specific functional area by prodding it, working out how to talk to it, what it does and what we believe it should do. Save the passing tests and get the results checked, peer reviewed and approved.

Chances are you might find some bugs too – decide whether to fix them now or later depending on your safety margin with your initiate.

Debt Payment

After a successful test retrofit, you can start refactoring and unit testing. As refactoring is not without risk this is generally an approach for a more experienced developer but offers a sound way of prizing out functionality and learning key areas in small parts.

This is also a natural point to start fixing any bugs found during a test retrofit.

National Service (also known as Jury Duty)

Have a couple of staff on short rotation (2-4 weeks) covering support & maintenance even on areas they don’t know. This is generally reserved for experienced team members who can assimilate new areas quickly but a great “leveller” in cross-training your team in hot areas.

Risks are generally around decision-making, customer responsiveness, turnaround time and overall lowering of performance but these are all short-term. I’ve often used this approach on mature teams to cross-train into small knowledge gaps or newly acquired legacy functional areas.

My preferred approach is to stagger allocation so that you have one member on “primary” support whilst another provides “backup” each sprint. For the member that covered primary in sprint one, they’re on backup in sprint 2. (expand this to meet your required capacity).

3-6 months of a national service approach should be enough to cover the most critical functional gaps on your team based on customer/user demand

Tour of Duty

Have your staff work on longer term rotations (1-6 months) working on a functional area or feature as part of a feature team. This couples up with the “feature lead” approach.

Again, this is an approach that is very useful for mature agile teams that understand and support working as feature teams but can be introduced on less-experienced teams without too much pain.

The tour of duty can also work beyond an individual role. For example a developer taking a 3-6 month rotation through support or testing will provide greater empathy and understanding of tester and user needs than simply rotating through feature delivery. (My time spent providing customer support permanently changed my attitude toward cosmetic defects as a developer)

Adjacency

This takes a lot more planning and management than the other approaches described but is the most comprehensive.

From the areas each team member knows; identify where functional or technical adjacent areas lay and then use a subset of the approaches described here to build up skills in that adjacency.

Develop a knowledge growth plan for every team member sharing and leveraging their growth across areas with each other. Although this is an increase in coordination and planning, the value here is that your teams get to see the big picture on their growth and have clear direction.

All these patterns have a selection of merits and pitfalls. some won’t work in your situation and some may be more successful than others. There are undoubtedly more that could be applied.

Starting in your next sprint, try some of what’s provided here to developing shared ownership and knowledge transfer for your teams. Pick one or more patterns, figure out the impacts and give them a try.

(Coming soon “Building a Case for Collective Code Ownership” – when solving the technical side isn’t enough)

Escaping the Oubliette (Part 2) – Tailing

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Following my previous articles on topping and debt prevention, we’ll now focus on the easier parts. How to clear old defects and debt. we’ll cover 4 simple strategies; 2 for defects and 2 for debt. (there are paired similarities across these).

For defects, we’ll focus on:

For debt we’ll focus on:

Unlike prevention and stop the bleeding activities which often require significant effort and commitment to accomplish, defect and debt removal have some simple and relatively low effort options. There are some high-effort/impact alternatives that we’ll cover later.

Today we’ll look at…

Tailing & Ratcheting

When you have a build up of defects over time you tend to have a “tail” of really old defects and issues. These are usually low or medium severity/priority items (with the occasional blip) and are often in functionally gray areas requiring difficult decisions or significant rework.

They age because we don’t want to touch them and would rather forget about them (the oubliette again). A typical defect age distribution looks something like this:

right-skewed beta distribution

right-skewed beta distribution

It’s one of the most common statistical patterns I see in software development (and I’ll return to it in future) but for the purposes of this article, I want to look at the “tail” of this curve- that last 5-10% of your defect population – all your oldest items.

Addressing the tail is pretty straightforward. You can either set yourself a target “maximum defect age by a given date” or simply focus on continuous improvement. Whilst the target approach gives you a clear goal, you risk setting yourself up for failure or under-commitment. Defects are considered notoriously hard to size (I’ll cover this myth in future) but chances are if they’re old they’re probably a bit tricky too so being predictable about dates is something you might prefer to avoid for starters.

Whether you aim for a specific target or improving every day/week/month you’ll need the same stepped approach.

Identify your oldest defect, pick it off the end of the queue and commit to closing it quickly and fairly.

Here’s the first thing to accept… Closing doesn’t mean fix it in every case. Because you’ve not touched it for a while, chances are someone is expecting a solution so you’ll be looking at a difficult conversation if you don’t fix it but that might be far easier than “fixing” something that shouldn’t be changed or will derail your team and product. Make open, fair, honest decisions in each case.

  • If it is something you think you should be fixing, get on with it.
  • If it’s not – close it

Sound familiar?

Aim to close at least one of your oldest defects every week or every sprint.

If you have a lot of items that are considered old, consider increasing your capacity on these in the short term to get the ball rolling. (at the cost of other delivery activities)

If we look back to your distribution of defects over time, when you do close out your oldest defects, put a ratchet mechanism in place that sets a continuously reducing maximum age.  In very bad weeks the ratchet may not improve but don’t let the numbers get worse again or the effort and good faith from your teams and management will have been wasted.

With a ratchet, remember each “notch” is a step change from the last point. For example if your last point was 1000 days(!), clearing everything older than that should leave some defects nearly 1,000 days old. Set the next ratchet point to 950 days (rather than 997), determine what falls in that next block (950-999) and fix those. Ensure each ratchet point is a larger time window than your execution period otherwise you’ll end up stationary. (I usually go for a ratchet up of 50 days improvement per week or sprint).

Here’s what I mean…

Defects Tail

Ratcheting out the oldest defects each week

3 months of this tailing practice every week will dramatically reduce the average and maximum age of issues in your queue. It’ll make you all feel better and it usually helps to draw the heat off on escalations for a while. (Bear in mind you should be doing this in addition to your “topping” approaches).

Occasionally you’ll reopen some old wounds this way but paying these some attention now stops them coming back up when the timing isn’t under your control.

Keep this up for six months or a year and you’ll reach a stable point where nothing gets too old and your team becomes adept at having difficult conversations with your customers early and backs them up with some successes as well.

Eventually in order to keep the ratcheting improving you’ll have to commit more people. This probably means you’re approaching your natural level of control or entitlement where you have aging defects levelling off and others being addressed in a reasonably consistent manner. It’s up to you whether you aggressively pursue the numbers down further or sustain them at this level.

In case this sounds too obvious or simple to work, I’m working with a team right now that introduced this ratcheting approach less than a month ago. We’ve reduced our oldest defect age by over 25% and customer escalations are consistently lower already. Perhaps most important to the team; we’re no longer at the top of the charts when our leaders review the defect stats. Although harsh-sounding. Sometimes, having someone else drawing the heat for a while lets us get back to focusing on value and priorities.

In part 3 we’ll look at an old favourite – the “bug blitz” or feel free to skip to part 4 – “the litter patrol“.

Your Baby Might Be Ugly

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Everyone thinks their own babies are beautiful. Some probably are but there are plenty that really aren’t. In fact I remember one particularly interesting comment -“ugly people produce ugly babies”

This happens in code too.

Collective code ownership has many challenges. Here I focus on the person pitfalls.

Imagine you’ve just spent the last 3, 5, or even 10 years nurturing and grooming an insanely complex (and dare I say “clever”) functional area of a product. This has been your working heart and soul for years – apart from the occasional customer to distract you. It follows your own unique,  “perfect” coding style and conventions. You’re so damn good you don’t need unit tests, you instinctively know and understand every intricate tracery and element of logic in there.

Why then if it’s so perfect are you not willing to share?

This is where “Bad Captain” starts to kick in with me…

  • Do you believe that every other developer in the building is less capable than you?

(OK, sometimes it might be true but that’s very rare.)

– That’s fine, you can peer review and provide feedback if they don’t meet your standards right? It might be an emotional lurch to start with but seeing someone else succeed and recognize your greatness must surely be rewarding right? I’ll help you if you need.

  • It’ll always be quicker if you work on it. It’s just a waste of time and effort to train someone else up.

– Sure. Except if we had 3 or 4 people capable of working on it in parallel we might get everything that’s on the wish list for it done this year and you might be able to do that other interesting stuff that the rest of the team have been playing with. In fact, I’m willing to invest if it’s that important…

Bad Captain starts to twitch…

…and if it’s not, why do I have someone who believes they’re “one of the best” working on it – I want my “best” people on my priority tactical and strategic items.

  • You’ve been doing this as your own pet-project on the side and it’s not ready to share.

– If it’s important I want a team on it. I’ll happily lobby for some strategic investment. If it’s not as important as anything else we have committed right now I want you helping the rest of the team out…

Bad Captain…

– even if you’re good, you’re not “special”, don’t expect to be treated any differently than the rest of the team.

These first reasons are almost valid. But not good enough for me. The more of these I hear the more I start to twitch, the more terse I get and the more I start to frown and tense up.

Suddenly it’s too late! Captain Hyde takes the helm!

Here’s why Captain Hyde thinks you’re not sharing…

  1. You’re lazy, you’re only any good at this one area and don’t want to have the responsibility of teaching it or learning something new that you’re not so good at. – Time for you to learn a bit about intellectual humility.
  2. If you relinquish control of this code, you relinquish your seat of power, you’ll make yourself dispensable and that can’t possibly happen, you think you’re far too important for that. – I believe in good people, if you’re one of them I’ll fight to keep you. If there’s a squeeze, even the indispensable will get the push. In fact in my experience, the all-rounders are more likely to find new homes.
  3. Secretly in your heart you know it’s loaded with technical debt, years of warts strapped onto the sides, a catalogue of compromises and mud that doesn’t mirror the patterns of the outside world in the 21st century. – In fact I could probably find something open source that does the same thing. Quite frankly it’s an ugly baby that should have been put up for adoption or surgery years ago but your professional pride won’t admit it.

Captain Hyde can’t think of any good reason other than personal self-preservation or embarrassment that someone who is a single code owner would be unwilling for other people to work on and learn their code.

Maybe I’ve just been in management too long but I distinctly remember in my early coding years a call with a colleague in San Francisco where he said:

“Damn, you’re the only guy in the world that knows this stuff man”.

– at which point I felt that little clench inside that said. “I need to find and train my replacements up as soon as I can!”

A similar counterpart of mine in the US at the same time got thrown another pile of stock options every time he threatened to leave – that wasn’t my style as a developer and it’s not my style as a manager either.

Now despite all this ranting, there is another very real problem.

Developing collective code ownership from single points of failure on complex products is time-consuming, expensive and probably not what my business stakeholders want my team “wasting” their time on when we already have experts who are “perfectly capable of maintaining this themselves”.

It’s a fair point.

With a team who are willing to share but have no slack, if I want collective code ownership to succeed I’ve got to be able to market it properly.

Escaping the Oubliette (Part 1) – Topping

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As promised, how to Escape The Oubliette…

So here you are, part of a team at the bottom of the defect & debt pit. What now?

The simple fact is, there’s no one answer but there are a selection of tools and there is a key.

The key comes courtesy of a comment from Jim Highsmith during one of his sessions at Agile 2010 – my paraphrasing below…

“Teams facing technical debt need both debt reduction and debt prevention strategies.”

When teams face technical debt they pick away, removing it piecemeal. After all, you have to eat an elephant one bite at a time right?

Trouble is, that only works if the elephant isn’t growing as fast as you’re chewing.

You need a two-pronged attack – what I like to call “topping and tailing”. The “top” is all the incoming issues and build-up of new debt. This is where you need to stop the bleeding. The “tail” is the backlog of existing debt. It’s already there – gently rotting in the corner of your product.

Topping

If you’ve read my post on stopping the bleeding, this is the crux of “topping”. You may have a variety of strategies for this but here’s the fundamentals.

Incoming Customer Defects

Ringfence enough capacity to address defects as soon as they come in. Make sure your burn rate matches your incoming rate. If you’re strapped, it’s your call whether you only cover high severity issues but for my money, I’d hit them all. A multi-year build-up of low severity issues makes products ugly, no pleasure for the users and a series of minor problems rapidly becomes a major burden and a big debt buildup.

Addressing every incoming defect doesn’t mean fixing every one. Whilst I generally recommend you do, when trying to dig yourself out of an oubliette the bigger issue is how to keep your goal achievable.

Be critical. The big, nasty bugs are usually pretty obvious but what about the rest?

    • Is it low severity and not important?
      • Is it quick & cheap to fix? – Just fix it.
      • If it’s not – Can you put a safety rail around it? Document it as a limitation or even ignore it?

Negotiate with your customers and make an explicit decision to fix now or never. Once decisions are made, communicated and agreed, close the defects in your backlog.

Getting these conversations happening immediately makes customers far happier than pretending they’ll just go away and never making a decision. (but not quite as happy as fixing their issues).

Incoming Internal Defects

The story here is the same. I’ve called it out independently as many companies and teams do.

Those incoming internal defects speak volumes about your approach to quality.

Get the discipline in place to fix them when you find them or be brutal and admit which ones will never be fixed but don’t pussyfoot around!

  • If you provide a service to other internal teams, treat them as customer defects.
  • If they’re raised by your own team, are they on new code or exposing existing issues?
    • On new code, fix them! – No excuses .
    • On existing code, the problems are already there. You need to decide if what you’ve done has made it more visible or harder to work with than before and make a judgement call. Fix now or never, resolve or close.

In the next article in this series I’ll cover debt prevention…

Stop The Bleeding

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One of my favourite verbal patterns is “Stop The Bleeding”. I heard the term come back to me in a management meeting last week in the right context and with the right response – Success!

I’m not exactly sure where I heard this first but it was sometime in the last 4 years. Mike Cohn references it in the context of agile testing but until I searched for the term just now I’d never read that particular article so I’m sure it’s also used elsewhere…

Name: “Stop The Bleeding” or “Plug The Hole”.

Concept: Consider the “flow” of work and issues. Many software activities generate or receive some sort of flow. Whilst you can use a Kanban approach to manage the flow, you need to address the site of the problem first to prevent it getting any worse and look upstream to consider prevention activites.

Analogies: You have a patient on a stretcher with a series of broken bones and a torn major artery, where do you focus your attention first? – or- You’re in a boat with a leak in the hull. You either stop rowing and start bailing or start rowing and start sinking. Maybe it’s time to fix the leak?  Once you’ve fixed the leak, how about staying away from the rocks?

Usage: The most common times I’ve used this term are in test automation and defect management.

I’ve seen major investments in writing automated regression test suites for existing functionality or old manual tests. Skilled testers are usually in limited supply. Why are we using their valuable capacity on a static problem?

We need to take that capacity and apply it to the issues we continue to create every day – the ones where we’re still bleeding. Write automated tests for our new functionality and changes that we’re introducing right now. These become your regression tests as soon as they start passing!

In defect management a common challenge is customer escalations. These usually happen because we failed to act on a problem in a timely manner. Stopping the bleeding here means addressing new incoming defects promptly and properly. For example; try replicating issues immediately and then negotiating when your customers want a solution rather than just focusing on traditional severity / impact numbers.

Once your flow is under control and you’re working to when customers want a fix, escalations for delinquent issues will trail off fast. Now you can start addressing your other priorities.  Note: The “bleeding” in this second example is customer escalations, not incoming defects – Stopping incoming defects is a subject in itself!

Breaking The Seal (Part 2)

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In my first article on “breaking the seal” I described how this pattern applies to managing WIP on teams. There’s also a work/social concept that fits the same name with a different pattern…

Name: “Breaking the Seal”, “The Lid is Off” etc.

Analogy: When you open a new pack of good coffee there’s that great smell that comes out – suddenly everyone wants a brew.

Concept: Socially, many people are unwilling to speak up in a crowd or be the exception either in positive or negative situations. Fortunately for experienced agile teams, the social norm of staying silent has often become disrupted but you’ll need to break it back open once in a while and as a coach you’ll need to find ways to introduce it.

Being the first to speak up triggers team inertia; suddenly others’ voices will also be found.

How many times have you sat in a meeting where someone uses a term or concept you have no idea what they mean but you don’t speak up? How many other people in the room also have no clue but stay silent? This might be inertia, it might be fear or just an unwillingness to appear stupid. Particularly with technical teams where your career goal may be “technical guru” – being seen as wrong or not clued up may be a sign of weakness. Having a “wise fool” on the team breaks the seal on this but needs some caution applied.

In some organizational cultures it may not be socially acceptable to question more senior staff. This really gets to me. In fact, I’ll write another post dedicated to this.

Occasionally speaking up might be risky, particularly if there’s obvious management issues. (Nobody likes to speak about the elephant in the room when the elephant is in the room) In these cases arrange with a few like-thinking peers to take it in turns to be the one to raise issues so it’s not always you. This will also ensure that you’re not speaking alone with others relying on you to take the risks up every time.

On the more positive side, the “red cards” tool relies on this same concept for group self-facilitation. Where once it becomes socially acceptable to halt a problem or challenge others the team’s self-organizing capability steps up another notch.

Practice this in your own teams – challenge yourself and your peers to ask a dumb question or plug a rat-hole at least once a week.