My programme’s Sponsoring Group asked me to send a weekly status report. This was to compensate for the fact they were at a remote site and hence couldn’t see the walls of our informative workspace. They were paying the bills so who was I to argue.
Luckily they don’t want a lot of detail. They want to know three things:
Common wisdom, and self help books, says that anyone who completes 10,000 hours (10 years) in their chosen discipline will excel. This is part of the rationale for Code Kata and Coding Dojos from the Software Craftsmanship movement. But the 10 years equals expert formula isn’t true.
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I value project managers and see an on-going need for them within a Lean-Agile context. Admittedly the role of the project manager changes when using an Lean-Agile approach, becoming more of a shepherd and less a military officer. In this, the first post of a new series, I thought I’d revisit my definition of the Agile Project Manager.
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So you are up and running with Lean-Agile but your team is still growing or there is some churn in the team. Either way new people arrive, often without an effective Lean-Agile background. What to do?
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Everybody has pet requirements and product owners, being human, are no different. Unfortunately pet requirements are a real risk to software projects. We should all resist these pet requirements and do everything possible to kill them off ASAP and avoid building them. So how do you spot pet requirements
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David shambles up to the Kanban board. He moves a card from “Dev In Progress” to “Dev Done”. No emotion cracks his blank facade. There is no celebration of a job well done. No acknowledgement from others in the room. David glances briefly to his left and then pulls another card from “Ready for Dev” into “Dev In Progress” before shambling back to this desk. Another burst of coding begins. This little scene has occurred four times already this week, 19 times this month, and 271 times since David joined the project 15 months earlier. Is David just a machine in the Lean-Agile software factory? A mindless development automaton?
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I was talking to Pedro Santos on the train the other day. Pedro is my technical lead, an expert in his field and a keen advocate of automated testing and software craftsmanship in general. We were talking about Gherkin and Pedro was saying he doesn’t see Gherkin tests adding value because it doesn’t help him as a developer. Of course I disagree. The way I look at it is the Gherkin tests are not for the developers. The Gherkin tests are for the organisation – they are for everybody.
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If the customer claims everything on the product backlog is top priority, and by implication must have, then you’ve a bit of an education job ahead of you. You have to get the customer to the point where only one thing is top priority and even “must haves” are sorted into a priority order. There is a good chance some of those “must haves” turn into “would like to have” and in time disappear.
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My product owner was upset when I told her she couldn’t have the widget that she had agreed with the User Experience (UX) Designer. The problem was the design was not technically feasible. To get a great solution to meet the business requirements three parties – business, user experience and technical – must agree on the approach. That negotiation is what I call “Solution Convergence”.
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Developers are different from other folk. Introverted is an understatement. My four days of silence really highlighted this.
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