Agile Buddha

Demystifying Agile, Getting to its Core

Story Point Mapping with Hours – Key Ingredient to Burnouts?

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This is based on a true story of a project I was involved in and that was also the first ever Agile projects I worked on. As I came from straight from waterfall background and didn’t have enough Agile experience, it made a lot of sense to us to map a story point with number of hours for obvious reasons. We mapped story point with ideal hours. Initially things went well. However after a few months, we started getting into difficult waters because of following problems:

We began to witness clashes among developers over estimations. As story point was mapped with number of hours, it directly mapped with the skill of a developer. For instance, a senior developer could finish a user-story in 2 hours. Another not-so-skilled developer or new-in-the-team developer could finish the same user-story in say 8 hours. That started causing planning meetings with clashes, disagreements and also spurts of indirect bullying from senior guys. As a result, not so experienced developers started spelling similar smaller estimates even though it caused them to work longer hours. As it was a distributed augmented team, we also started witnessing lack of trust within team because of those reasons.

Also customer didn’t see any significant change in team velocity even though productivity improved multi-fold. “YOU ARE NOT PRODUCTIVE GUYS…”
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When BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) may not work?

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For quite some time there have been talks on using BDD in order to have:
  1. Better collaboration between Business Analysts (BAs), developers and testers.
  2. A common domain language for functional testing and for defining functional acceptance criteria, which everybody in the team understands.

Why BDD?

BDD offers following advantages:

  • Ability to write test cases (scenarios) and acceptance criteria before performing any development. This whole idea is termed as Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD).
  • Provides a common domain language, which everybody across the board (developer, tester, BA and business) understands. As at the end it’s plain English, it’s simplest to learn compared to other DSLs (domain specific languages).BDD example
    bdd-sample
  • Helps in eliminating waste by minimizing handshakes. If you take a look at the above-mentioned example, testers and BAs can write a test or acceptance scenario using a BDD template (highlighted in Yellow) with plane English

Developer/tester can then fill in the blanks, i.e. implement the test case using programming language or script.

Writing text doesn’t require any IDE like Visual Studio or Eclipse. The test/acceptance scenario can be written in a Notepad too and then pushed to Version Control System, which is then picked up by developers/testers to implement.

As BAs, developers and testers work only one single source of truth (BDD test), it minimizes the handshakes and reduces waste. Also it is well understood by everyone as test-scenario is in plain English.

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Drive Innovation By Creating Communities of Practice

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In my last post, I discussed about sustainable pace and how nation and organisation culture comes in its way. One of the issues often found is people on scrum teams being too focussed and busy on the projects and having no time for their own research, self-study, upgrading themselves on new things etc.  This leads to lesser learnings from outside world and limits the growth of people.

community of practice

[pullquote]

don’t be afraid to fail.

be afraid not to try.

[/pullquote]

Introducing or rather planning slack time on the team gives free time for people to work on their pet projects. Different organisations have done it differently, like:

  1. Giving a break between sprints
  2. Following 80/20 principle, 20% free time for people to think and work on their interest
  3. One free day in a month
  4. Having a small time reserved every sprint

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Sustainable Pace: Does Culture Play Any Role At All ?

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Sustainable pace

Striving to bring agility into the organisation to adapt to changing business conditions is leading people to lose sleep and stretch more than before in some organisations. Agile thought leaders definitely envisioned this and hence recognised sustainability as one of the agile principles.

[pullquote] Agile processes promote sustainable development.  The sponsors, developers, and users should be able  to maintain a constant pace indefinitely. [/pullquote] 

To run a long distance you need to find a sustainable pace. But often, companies just don’t get this due to various reasons like:

  1. Pressure from business and management to get most work from least people
  2. Team not having an option to make their own decisions – command and control culture
  3. Teams inability to say NO for non-realistic goals. Service industry firms –  they just can’t say NO to unreasonable client demands
  4. Utilisation of people – Planning for 100% utilisation. This makes people work for more than required hours and hence getting burnout
  5. Unable to remove distractions to the team. Lot of unplanned, non-essential meetings taking people’s time. Questioning motives and saying NO is essential here.
  6. Allocating people on multiple projects with allocation distributed 20%,50%,30% etc. This does not work in reality. There is a switching time between two tasks and people take around 15 mins to achieve FLOW (high productive zone)

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