Agile was originally founded by a bunch of programmers over a decade ago. The aim (from Kent Beck) was to devise a system that eliminated the trust divide between programmers and managers (them and us). Transparency was the aim of the game. Programmers would record velocity using story points. Managers would track number of story points per sprint and produce burn-down charts. Everyone is happy.
Unfortunately, burndown and velocity charts track only one part of software development, features. There's a hidden part of software development that isn't captured by these charts, ability to change. If there's one thing for certain in software development it's that people will change their mind and features will need to adapt. It's no good having your software with the correct features today, if it can't have the correct features tomorrow. Arguably, a code bases ability to respond to change is the primary responsibility of the developers.
In the original light-weight process, XP, this was kept in check by Ron Jefferies concentric circles.
This, again, is part of transparency and trust. At the inner-level, TDD, pair-programming and simple design keep the software honest. A suite of tests gives transparency on the system functionality. Moving further out we reinforce these practices with collective ownership (transparency again, no siloed development). And so on, and so forth.
Fast-forward a decade or so, and where are we now? Agile is the domain of the manager. There are no developers at agile conferences any more, it's all about the secondary value of a software product (shipping features) rather than the primary ability (reacting to change).
The XP Practices have been forgotten. Scrum empowers teams to take ownership of their practices and opt out of ones that don't work. Of course, it's easier (in the short run!) to forget about TDD, simple design and refactoring. However, in the long run productivity grinds to a halt (see Design Stamina Hypothesis).
Bob argues (The Corruption of Agile) that agile doesn't exist without the practices that support it. I agree; most agile teams aren't agile in their ability to react to change. Martin Fowler has a term for it "Flaccid Scrum" where we adopt the project management side of it, but not the underlying practices for ensuring that the code base becomes malleable and responsive to change.
With all this in mind, the trust issues have reemerged. Dropping the velocity (number of story points per sprint) is a bad idea, so developers have rebelled. Let's just make the stories smaller. The points counted are the same, but the size of the stories is much smaller. Teams are wading through custard, developing features just as slowly as ever.
The thrust against this has come in the form "software craftsmanship". This is trying to reimagine the circles from the inside out, but it's failed. It's failed because it doesn't attempt to bridge the divide between the managers and the coders. It might help the engineers to "do the right thing" more often, but it doesn't show transparency.
And the talk ended there, no answers for the future and a little depressing. I've definitely seen the scenarios Bob describes, but what's the solution? It's probably not "kill all the project managers" as someone suggested. I'd love to make the "ability to change" a tangible concept that teams can explore and understand. It's not an easily measured property, but I think taking data-driven decisions about code is part of the answer. Project managers need options to meet business constraints. Sometimes it's OK to go quick and dirty, to spike a feature that may not live longer than a week, but you have to accept that the remedial cost of recovering from that burst of activity exists and understand the remedial cost.
Right, now to finish off a few slides for this Haskell thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment