Skip to main content

How to sneak Agile into a project

Being a consultant, the opportunities I get to do project management are quite few. Still I believe many of our customers can benefit from the advantages of doing some sort of agile method. Come riding in on a white horse yelling "You are old fashioned in-effective conservatives wasting loads of effort on your specs and docs! You will go over budget if you do not join the society of Agile developers!" won't necessarily convince management that this is the way to go.

So I take some small steps to build a small proof-of-concept, merely by applying it to my own daily routine. Most developers who like to organize their own personal work in some fashion, be it writing stuff down in a notebook or filing issues in an issue tracker, will recognize these steps as mere common sense.

It can be handy to note that these routines could also be absorbed into the project on a higher level, and that is essentially when your project becomes agile.

Step 1: Ask people what they are doing and tell them what you are doing
Each morning I take a round around the office and ask "So what are you doing today?". Most people answer "Same thing I was doing yesterday, of course. Otherwise I'm going to this and that meeting". This answer points to to some of the key issues agile methods try to address (task breakdown to easier track progress).

I'll answer back "Right. Just to let you know, yesterday I completed task X. Today I'm gonna do task Y.".


Step 2: Transparent progress
I track all my tasks on the wiki. Each time I discover some new task I think needs doing, I add another item to the task-list and grade it with a complexity rating from 1 to 5 (jelly beans, story points, etc). Each week I grab a handful of tasks from the list matching the sum of jelly beans I did the week before. If one task starts taking up more than one day, there probably is some problem or obstacle I want to address to the project manager.


Step 3: Expose your problems
The number one reason for projects going wrong is task-completion being held up by dependencies, or impedements. I can not do task X before task Y is completed. To relieve waiting-time as much as possible, I maintain a list of impedements my project manager is aware of, and as long as respective impedements have not been removed, I move my progress onwards with on another task that does not have the same dependency. If you are going to blame the lack of progress on something or someone, do it as soon as possible.

Step 4: Demand short- but concrete requirements, sorted by priority
The elements in the mentioned task-list have a couple of common traits. (1) They can be completed in less than a day, and (2) they are either completed or not, i.e. they are formulated in a concrete way that leaves no half-way completion. I've either done it or I have not.

The task-list is also prioritized. I initially just pop in new tasks at the bottom of the list, but the project manager is free to move things upwards to the top of the list as he sees fit. The only thing I demand in return is that I get to complete my current task before moving on to a new one.

In the end..

People will start to pick up on my routine. Management will notice the progress, and co-workers will copy parts of the routine when they see it is working. Hopefully the concept of jelly beans or story points will quickly be shared by the team, so we can start working together on improving our weekly jelly bean consumption.

It may be that other developers are doing leaps of progress way beyond my tiny tasks, but I will claim that we are more effective when we have smaller tasks to focus at one at a time. It forces focus into your development, and you spend less time switching back and forth between various tasks, meetings and lunch.

The biggest "issue" with agile methods is that is exposes the developers' progress to the project and embraces total honesty. Traditionally, developers sometimes end up in an evil circle of reporting progress while still not having completed previous tasks, thereby pushing more and more work into "last night shifts" that can have devestating effects on both the project and the developer's personal life.

Sucumbing to total honesty can be uncomfortable for developers, as they will have to admit lack of progress and their problems, but at the same time it will get easier for the team as a whole to discover and address these problems. In the long term this will lead to a better relationship between team-members and management, and increase efficiency as all problems are dealt with as early as possible.

One final note; I call it sneaking but still your intentions should be clear to everyone. If they ask where you your ideas, say it clear: "It's a really interesting method called XP/Lean/Scrum/etc".

Got a bit side-tracked here in the end, but hopefully this is enough to get you started. Happy sneaking!

Comments

  1. Anonymous17/4/07 14:30

    Thomas,

    Sorry for double posting. Just to ensure this message reaches you.

    I can see you have a great interest in CMS products. Is it your own one as a hobby, or it's a part of your engagement to Objectware? I know neither Dutch, nor Swedish, so I wonder if Objectware has its own CMS or would like to expand to have one. If the latter is true, I have some option to discuss. Just drop me a line to polonski.REMOVE@xitexsoftware.com

    Thank you.

    Alex Polonski

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant

Encrypting and Decrypting with Spring

I was recently working with protecting some sensitive data in a typical Java application with a database underneath. We convert the data on its way out of the application using Spring Security Crypto Utilities . It "was decided" that we'd be doing AES with a key-length of 256 , and this just happens to be the kind of encryption Spring crypto does out of the box. Sweet! The big aber is that whatever JRE is running the application has to be patched with Oracle's JCE  in order to do 256 bits. It's a fascinating story , the short version being that U.S. companies are restricted from exporting various encryption algorithms to certain countries, and some countries are restricted from importing them. Once I had patched my JRE with the JCE, I found it fascinating how straight forward it was to encrypt and decrypt using the Spring Encryptors. So just for fun at the weekend, I threw together a little desktop app that will encrypt and decrypt stuff for the given password

What I've Learned After a Month of Podcasting

So, it's been about a month since I launched   GitMinutes , and wow, it's been a fun ride. I have gotten a lot of feedback, and a lot more downloads/listeners than I had expected! Judging the numbers is hard, but a generous estimate is that somewhere around 2000-3000 have listened to the podcast, and about 500-1000 regularly download. Considering that only a percentage of my target audience actively listen to podcasts, these are some pretty good numbers. I've heard that 10% of the general population in the western world regularly listen to podcasts (probably a bit higher percentage among Git users), so I like to think I've reached a big chunk of the Git pros out there. GitMinutes has gathered 110 followers on Twitter, and 63, erm.. circlers on Google+, and it has received 117 +'es! And it's been flattr'ed twice :) Here are some of the things I learned during this last month: Conceptually.. Starting my own sandbox podcast for trying out everythin

The academical approach

Oops, seems I to published this post prematurely by hitting some Blogger keyboard shortcut. I've been sitting for some minutes trying to figure out how to approach the JavaZone talk mentioned in my previous blog-post. Note that I have already submitted an abstract to the comittee, and that I won't publish the abstract here in the blog. Now of course the abstract is pretty detailed on what the talk is going to be about, but I've still got some elbow room on how to "implement" the talk. I will use this blog as a tool to get my aim right on how to present the talk, what examples to include, what the slides should look like, and how to make it most straightforward and understandable for the audience. Now in lack of having done any presentations at a larger conference before, I'm gonna dig into what I learned at the University, which wasn't very much, but they did teach me how to write a research paper, a skill which I will adapt into creating my talk: The one

Git Stash Blooper (Could not restore untracked files from stash)

The other day I accidentally did a git stash -a , which means it stashes *everything*, including ignored output files (target, build, classes, etc). Ooooops.. What I meant to do was git stash -u , meaning stash modifications plus untracked new files. Anyhows, I ended up with a big fat stash I couldn't get back out. Each time I tried, I got something like this: .../target/temp/dozer.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/core.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/joda-time.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/foo.war already exists, no checkout Could not restore untracked files from stash No matter how I tried checking out different revisions (like the one where I actually made the stash), or using --force, I got the same error. Now these were one of those "keep cool for a second, there's a git way to fix this"situation. I figured: A stash is basically a commit. If we look at my recent commits using   git log --graph --