Sprint Heartbeat: Visual Task Tracking

Continuing to think about visually tracking the health of a sprint, I advocate tracking at the task level, rather than the story level. Recall that my goals for a successful solution include:

• Radiate information.
• Clearly communicate whether the sprint is on track and likely to conclude successfully.
• Alert us to lurking risks, so that the team can react and adapt proactively.
• Tell a story about the sprint from which we can learn during our retrospective.

Instead of moving user stories through phases (development, review, testing...), list their tasks. Tasks for a story could include testing and reviewing pieces, merging code into previous versions, meeting with a product owner to review the UI and clarify requirements, or convening a design session. You can add tasks to the list as they are discovered, which can signal that a story is ballooning or that a technical problem is thornier than originally estimated. If there are certain steps the team is trying to get more rigorous about (like writing unit tests before writing code), you can list them as explicit tasks until they become second nature.

Each day, estimate the number of hours remaining in each task. Not the hours spent, and not a comparison of estimates to actuals. This is not about "metricking estimation accuracy" or some other useless bean counting; it is about ascertaining right now, today, how many hours' worth of work is there left to do, and will that fit in the time we have left.

The hours remaining on a task might go up. (Ever peel back the wainscoting on a piece of code and find it's all termites underneath?) New tasks might get added during the sprint. The reason to track the hours remaining is so that you can adjust when you spot a potential problem—perhaps a team member is getting pulled away with other work, or is stuck in a mess of code that your expertise could alleviate, or maybe it's time to negotiate a trade-off with your product owner. To deal with any of these effectively, you need to know, if you'll pardon the vernacular: Where we at?



In the sample task list above, you can see that we're not only showing the hours remaining, but also tracking the movement of that number day after day. That allows us to make a graph, creating that visual heartbeat we're looking for.



At the end of the day (or completion of a task), update tomorrow’s column for the number of hours remaining for that task. If you finish a task on Day 4, then at the start of Day 5, there are zero hours remaining for that task. New tasks that crop up unexpectedly should show a zero until the day on which they were discovered, and then an hours-remaining estimate until finished.

The graph plots each day's sum of estimated hours remaining. It also shows an idealized burndown line, as if the team were completing [original hours estimate / number of days] worth of work each day. This makes the picture clearly communicate whether you're in fair weather or potential trouble.

If estimating hours remaining seems daunting, split the tasks into smaller pieces. A task should fit within a day, and the work you claim in the morning stand-up should fit within a day.

Time tracking is a sensitive topic, and suggesting it may not be well received by the team. Despite good intentions, many organizations use time accounting policies abusively. Superstitious beliefs, uncharacteristic vehemence, and irrational resistance are indicators of prior abuse. There is a tension between the two Agile tenants of transparency and self-organizing teams: I don’t want to hide data from you, but if I let you see the tools we’re using to track our progress, you’re liable to interfere, draw wrong conclusions, or base bonuses and promotions on them. These are not flaws in tracking sprint progress, though; they are deeper organizational issues, that are worth correcting and rehabilitating so that the team can take advantage of a burndown chart's benefits.

A graph tracking your team's completion of work gives you a picture of the state of the sprint, making it easy to see if you're on track to succeed, and alerting you to struggles early enough to react.

Visible Sprint Status: Maybe Not Corkboards?

I'm thinking about ways to track the activity—the status... progress... stuff—that happens within a development sprint.

You could conceive a user story as moving through a series of phases (e.g., development, code review, testing, accepted). You might set up your Scrum task board using this paradigm, where you move an actual piece of paper between different columns on a corkboard. Some project-management software packages I've evaluated encourage a workflow of phases.

I wonder if there's a better way. At the user-story level, the idea of "passing through phases" seems Waterfall-ish, which always snags my attention because so few human endeavors are that linear. Phases lead you into some non-Agile patterns of thought, and they obfuscate the current health of the sprint.

Mike Cohn's task boards (with pictures!) divide into rows as well as columns. A row corresponds to a user story, and the tasks that compose that story move through the columns, which correspond to statuses. I'd previously missed (or forgotten) this distinction, and I thought the cards on the board were stories. I finally noticed the difference while drafting up this blog post, because I went looking for corroboration about the disadvantages of moving user stories through phases on your task board. What follows is an analysis of those disadvantages: non-Agile patterns and obfuscated sprint status.

By non-Agile patterns, I mean that columns on a board draw boundaries (literal and metaphorical) between collaborators. Do you intend to tell your testers that they can't think about a story until it lands in their column? Are you keeping your product owner from looking at a feature until all the code is built and blessed (and you've run out of time in the sprint)? Are you throwing code over the wall at people who might as well be in a different department?

"Heck no!" you cry. But doesn't a task board with indivisible user stories, sitting inertly in discrete statuses, imply that's what you're doing? Well, it could. And the metaphor subtly seeps into your thoughts and behavior, constraining your team's responsiveness, creativity, and collaboration.

How does a story-oriented task board obfuscate the status of your sprint? After all, it is tangible, visible, large-as-life where everybody can see it. But what is it telling you? Here are some challenges I've observed.

The pieces of paper representing user stories are the same physical size, but the effort required for different stories can vary dramatically. You glance at the board for a gut check, but you'll draw the wrong conclusion from lots of little stories (unnecessary worry) or few big stories (misplaced complacency). You could ameliorate this by making the pieces of paper represent component tasks instead of whole stories, but does a mere task move into the testing phase? Does your product owner evaluate a task? Can your customers use one? No, they need complete user stories. Once you've made the papers represent similar-sized chunks of work, the moving-through-phases metaphor gets in the way again.

Phases are liable to proliferate, until you want more columns than is practical for an actual corkboard. For any given phase, you might want to distinguish between "Ready to be picked up" and "In progress." Even if you're tracking virtually in a project-management tool, having too many phases is still annoying; you spend your time clicking dropdown lists instead of creating software. If you're in this mode, though, one solution for distinguishing between "ready" and "in-progress" is to write your name (or set the "Assigned To" field) on an item when you claim it.

Some items visit a phase more than once—like when a tester discovers a bug and gives the story back to a developer. (See that hand-off? That's the non-Agile-ness rearing its head again.) So when you see an item in the development column, is that its first trip through, meaning a lot of work remains, or a subsequent trip and it's nearly finished? You can't tell by looking at the board.

A communicative tracking tool would show you where bottlenecks or wasteful idleness is occurring. Using phases obfuscates this as well, because it implies that your testers aren't even looking at a user story until the coding is complete. (Can you call a piece of coding complete if it hasn't been tested or shown to the product owner? I'd say not. So read "complete" as a different word that represents "passed from the Development phase to the Testing phase.") But testers at the beginning of a sprint are creating test plans and collaborating with developers and product owners on the acceptance criteria; their "Testing" column looks empty, but they are in fact very busy with useful work. Someone outside the team might look at the board, conclude that the testers are idle, and be tempted to distract them with other tasks.

What a list. It's strange to me to write it. At my old job, my team had to have a virtual task list so that we could share it across continents. I was always jealous of the kids who got to have real live note cards on real live corkboards. Oh, how wistful I was, to have such an elegantly simple solution.

But now that I've used a task board, I can see its limitations, and I wonder about alternatives. I still want to cling to the belief that a tangible solution is better than a software tool, but I might have to let that go. Software is much better, for example, at turning points of information into a communicative picture. It is also better at searching, archiving, sharing with out-of-town stakeholders, and scaling.

The right solution will radiate information. It will clearly communicate whether the sprint is on track and likely to conclude successfully. It will alert you to lurking risks, so that the team can react and adapt proactively. It will tell a story about the sprint from which you can learn during your retrospective. These are the requirements by which I'm evaluating tracking techniques. The right method will show the heartbeat of the sprint.

You're too kind. Tip yer waitress.

There's a "Pho King Coming Soon" sign near my house, which means there will soon be another Pho King restaurant. I wonder what their Pho King food will be like. I hope they have good Pho King service, and a nice Pho King ambiance.

Oh, why get excited? It's just Pho King noodles.

Yes, Jon and I can amuse ourselves for miles with this gag.

Market Research

Your opinion, please: What are the qualities of a conference that attracts a sparkling diversity of attendees?

I'd like to gather our collective observations and apply them to increasing the variety of ideas that are brought to our conferences and the variety of people we reach with our ideas. My first practical applications will be software-oriented conferences, but I think the best suggestions may come from non-software events. Think broadly; where have you been amongst a bunch of people who differ from you, where you benefited, learned, and taught?

The question usually comes to me regarding women, but I'm interested in other kinds of diversity, too:

• interaction style
• culture
• experience level
• type of experience
• project methodology preference
• age
• outlook
• interests
• worries
• ...

So please, think about gatherings you've attended where a lot of different people harmoniously shared and challenged ideas. What gave those gatherings the opportunity to bring those people together? Once they were there, what made the space safe for them to contribute, to speak up, to risk being different?

If you don't mind, ask this question around. I'm looking for a bunch of contributions that are, well, diverse.

Workstation Hack: Visual Studio on 2 monitors

Having two monitors is an obvious improvement to any development workstation, but are there tricks for really effectively using all that extra acreage? I learned a great strategy from a co-worker for a two-monitor setup for Microsoft Visual Studio.

Hack Summary
Maximize the editor on one screen, and pull out all the floating windows (Solution Explorer, Error List, etc.) onto the second screen—which is great until you want to look at your database or your wiki or your work-in-progress app while also typing code. (If you're typing in the editor, Visual Studio is in front, which means all those little windows are in front of any other app you want to look at while coding.) The solution is to set up some shortcut keys that switch you from "Sprawl across two screens" mode to "Pull everything into one screen, dock the little windows, and make the second monitor available for other stuff" mode, and back.

Export Two Sets of Window Settings
You can save Visual Studio settings (such as window layout) to a file, and later import that settings file. For this hack, we'll export two settings files (one for two-screen, sprawl mode; one for one-screen, compact mode). Then, we can switch from one mode to the other by importing the appropriate settings file.

Get your windows how you like them in one-screen mode. For example, my Solution Explorer is a docked pane on the right, unpinned so that it auto-hides; and so on, for the handy windows I want at my fingertips. So, set those up.

Go to Tools > Import and Export Settings... > select the radio button for Export > click Next > uncheck All Settings > expand General Settings > check Window Layouts > click Next. Name the file (e.g., OneScreen.vssettings) and give it a location. Click Finish.

Now set up your windows in two-screen mode. Unhide a window by hovering over it, pin it, right-click on its title bar, and pick Floating. Drag it where you want. This is the artistic phase.

As above, export those settings, with a different name (e.g., TwoScreens.vssettings).

Create Two Switcher Macros
Add a macro module in the Macros IDE (Tools > Macros > Macros IDE), and create two macros, one to import each settings file. Here's my module, called WindowsSettingsSwitcher, which gets my settings files from C:\VSSettings\.

Imports System.IO
Imports EnvDTE
Imports EnvDTE80
Imports System.Diagnostics

Public Module WindowsSettingsSwitcher
    Public Sub SwitchToWinLayoutTwoScreens()
        DTE.ExecuteCommand("Tools.ImportandExportSettings", "-import:C:\VSSettings\TwoScreens.vssettings")
    End Sub

    Public Sub SwitchToWinLayoutOneScreen()
        DTE.ExecuteCommand("Tools.ImportandExportSettings", "-import:C:\VSSettings\OneScreen.vssettings")
    End Sub
End Module

You can test the macros from the Macro Explorer by double-clicking their names.

Assign Shortcut Keys to the Macros
Create some shortcuts that execute those macros. Tools > Options > expand Environment > click Keyboard. In the "Show commands containing" box, enter some text that will find your macros, e.g., "switchtowin" if you used my names above. Highlight a macro, put your cursor in the "Press shortcut keys" box, and type your shortcut. (Mine are Ctrl+Alt+1 for one-screen, and Ctrl+Alt+2 for two-screen, since those weren't in use by anything else.) I left the "Use new shortcut in" set to "Global." Click OK.

At this point, you can use your shortcut keys to switch modes. I added them to my View menu, too, mostly to give me a visual reminder of the shortcuts.

Add Switcher Commands to the View Menu
Tools > Customize > Commands tab > select the "Macros" category. Click and drag your macro from the Commands list in the dialog up to your toolbar. When you hover over View, the View menu will appear, showing the insertion point for your new command. Drop it in place. Right-click on the command in its new location, click on the Name box, and edit that down to something helpful (e.g., "OneScreen"). Repeat to add the other macro. Close the Customize dialog.


With this hack, you can keep lots of useful Visual Studio bits visible (liberating you from relying on the mouse to hover over auto-hiding windows, and maximizing your editor window), but stow them away quickly when you need the second screen for something else.

So how 'bout you? What are your workstation hacks?

Change your organization, or...

So here's the thing about being in a place that makes you depressed: You're too depressed to make the changes necessary to get out of the place. It can seem insurmountable. In eerily coincidental-sounding but utterly unrelated news (*cough*), I have a new job! You will certainly already know this if you've had occasion to see me bouncing off the walls lately. While some of my friends are content in their jobs, many are not, so I'll share my self-help program, in the hopes that it might console and inspire those who are wishing for a change.

I had been in the old job for 8 years, so even thinking about a change was scary. Here's what I did.

Believe.
You deserve a job that makes you happy.

Really, you do. You probably have a list of reasons why you need to stay at the place you're at, but look critically at those reasons. Put yourself into a five-year-old's mindset and ask "Why? …Why? …Why?" about each one. The reasons on my list, when I started doing some fact-checking out in the real world, turned out to be myths.

Throw rocks at that old adage, "…that's why they call it 'work.'" Pfft, whatever. If you're reading my blog, I'll assume you're a knowledge worker, and probably a programmer, and someone who likes to think about new ways of doing things. Lucky us, there are many lucrative careers for people who like to think. For me, writing software is like play—heck, it is something I do for play—so I didn't need to find a different line of work, just a different job that let me write software. You don't need to suffer to put bread on your table.

Network.
Get out there, walk amongst the people. If you're really sunk in the doldrums, this is probably the most tempting one to blow off, but here are some benefits: meet people with similar interests and challenges; dispel myths about the job market; find inspiration, in people who like their jobs, in people with passion; meet job prospects; become known for your ideas and contributions.

Networking and professional venues I find helpful: door64, AgileAustin, AgileATX, GeekAustin, Austin .NET User Group, classes, and my blog. Yeah, yeah, and LinkedIn.

Define the goal.
I developed a really clear list about what I wanted in an employer. Honed it, you might say. Took it out during meetings and quietly polished it. But this was helpful, because it gave me a concise list of interview questions to ask of my potential employers. The ultimate filter question, the one at the top of the list that immediately let me know whether it was even worth continuing, goes like this: "Do you like your job?"

Look for a yes. There are a ton of answers that are not yeses. I know, because I had years of delivering them myself. "It presents me with a lot of challenges. I get to work with people from all over the world, and I'm part of a great team." Yeah, but that wasn't a yes. I want to work in a place where it's possible to like your job.

Keep it positive.
No matter how bad it is, if you come off as a complainer, you will sour job prospects. Be diplomatic, and steer the conversation to what you're working towards, what you look for in the future.

Seek support.
To keep the gushing to a minimum, I'll simply say: My husband rocks. You've probably got someone, too, whether a sweetie or a best friend, a pen pal or your mom or your dog, someone who knows that you're awesome. This is a good time to trust that person (or dog), to let him or her know that you're embarking on something intimidating and you'd like encouragement through the journey. It helps to have a belayer.

Believe in yourself.
At my lowest, I believed that I had no useful, marketable skills; all I was good at was politicking my way through my employer's byzantine bureaucracy. I had to break out of that if I was going to even begin the process of moving elsewhere. (Or of getting a promotion, for that matter.) I got a big sheet of newsprint and a box of goofy-big crayons, I went into a room by myself and closed the door, and I brainstormed. Crazy, wild, unrelated ideas about what I do, what I'm capable of, and what I am that is awesome. I wrote a lot of things on that paper, and many of them showed up on the next draft of my résumé.

Improve.
And then I thought about what I wanted my résumé to look like. Or, more specifically, what skills I would need in order to get the kind of job I would enjoy. I made a curriculum: books to read, topics to research, and projects to implement. Tuesday is homework night, for writing code. Here's the trick to making this palatable: Every time I worked on a curriculum item, I complimented myself on taking another step towards that new job. When you're in a hole, the very act of climbing up makes you see the sky. That's where I'm going, and I'm making progress towards it. Yay, me.

So there's an overview of how I improved my lot in life. The hardest part was overcoming inertia and getting started. Well, that, and persevering through to the goal. ;-) If you're happy where you are, don't forget to look around and appreciate that from time to time. Every job has its annoyances and challenges I imagine, but it is possible to find one where you feel fulfilled and appreciated, where your skills are useful, and where the challenges are fun. You deserve a job you enjoy.

Lurking Under that Resistance

Some of the topics at the AgileAustin Open Space revolved around a theme. Is Agile appropriate for critical systems (medical, life-supporting software)? Can we use Agile when we have a fixed timeline and a finite budget? Will Agile work when our software supports an always-on manufacturing floor? What about when developing strategic software, breaking new business ground? Are there times when Agile is not appropriate?

I believe the conveners are primarily asking these questions as proxies. They're at the conference because they believe in Agile, but they've been asked these questions by stakeholders they need to convince. So they're looking for help in crafting their arguments.

In my experience, resistance to Agile derives from an underlying fear. That fear tends to take some mix of two forms: "I've invested my career in getting good at one way of doing things, and you want to make me obsolete," and "My rear is on the line for a lot of money. I'm not interested in risking my rear while you experiment with your touchy-feely methodology. Just deliver."

When trying to convince someone, first sussing out his concerns and then pitching your argument to address them will make you most effective.

For the fear of obsolescence, convey that, while some ways of doing things may no longer be needed, the person is still valued, and he has skills and experiences that will help the team make the transition. Give that person a clear role, an obvious place of value, and his fears and therefore resistance should relax.

To those who are inherently change-averse, you can still work to improve the feeling of safety, to make the change more palatable. There are some folks, however, whom Agile doesn't suit. Let them find jobs as SOX auditors or something.

For those who seek assurances that this crazy experiment will deliver, on time and on budget, I take two tacks. I show them burndown charts, and explain how you can clearly see, "Does this trend line look like it's going to hit the finish line when you want it to?" Burndowns are very communicative graphics; they're a great tool. Second, I ask permission to try it for a month. Just, give me two sprints. Worst case, you've lost a month, which you would have spent writing half of a Business Requirements Document. Best case, you might have a few high-value, ready-to-ship features. That's a pretty good risk-to-return ratio.

Understand what fears are hiding behind their resistance. Address those fears (usually without making direct mention of them; fear tends to turn defensive if you point out a perceived weakness). Talk in their language, using their own levers, to present your case (e.g., talk numbers to a finance person). Finally, ask for something reasonable: "You don't have to do this forever, just let us try it for a bit, and then you can decide whether to continue or adjust."

Agile Open Space: On Certifications

The AgileAustin Open Space has kicked off. I found the opening session positive, engaging, really fun to be there. I'm chuffed because I felt confident enough to suggest (convene) a few sessions. One responsibility of a convener is to capture notes from the session. This blog post is meeting that responsibility.

Y'see, one of the sessions I proposed was entitled, "Certified ScrumMaster??" I wanted to gauge people's opinions of the CSM certification: Is it valuable, is it real, or is it just résumé-padding fluff?

I got my answer. The groans, grumbles, and rolled eyes around the room confirmed my suspicions. In this crowd at least, it is worse than irrelevant. It is counter to and detrimental to the philosophy of the Agile community.

After the proceedings broke into less formal conversations, I caught up with some community members whom I respect and enjoy. They elaborated on their earlier non-verbal remarks. It is not difficult to get a CSM; you attend a two-day class. That's it. That sounds like just enough knowledge to be really dangerous.

Why do we even need certifications? What does a certificate indicate about my real skills, abilities, and past experience? No, I inherently reject any model that sets up a gate-keeper-style hierarchy to knowledge—a system that says, "We know things; you don't. Your ideas and perspectives are not as good as ours until we bless you and permit you to be one of us (and your check clears)." I don't accept religions that do this, nor governments, nor software project methodologies, for Pete's sake.

The true flaw in the CSM is the name: Certified ScrumMaster. Go to a hiring manager and ask which she'd rather have, someone with 3 years' experience as a Scrum team member, or a Certified Scrum Master [trumpet fanfare]. Those in the know, know that ScrumMaster is the role; you hear it without the space. But to those who are not yet well versed in Scrum, it sounds like Mastery of the Scrum process; they inject a space between the words.

The Training page on the Scrum Alliance website says it plain: "The journey to mastery begins with..." and "These courses [CSM and CSPO] provide a solid foundation to help you make the paradigm shift to managing a project using Scrum." [emphasis added] They state straight up that this is the starting point. But the name of the certification doesn't say that. The opportunity for misinterpretation will get people into trouble.

Why does it get my dander up? Personally, because it threatens to be Another Damn Thing I gotta do to stay in the game. Professionally, because agile projects can be magnificent, and certifications smack of the process-for-process'-sake mindset that turns software development into a tedium. Philosophically, because neophytes will incorrectly elevate the merit of opinions from a Certified ScrumMaster, no matter how little experience he may have, and dilute and muddle the tenets of Agile.

Mike Cohn the other night joked about the CSM culminating in a tattoo. I don't know, man, I might put more stock in that, if the tattoo embodied the Agile Manifesto. (Embodied—ha!) It would at least convey the right level of commitment.

Simplest Responsible Thing

Someone on Saturday asked rhetorically, how do you reconcile the agile philosophy of "do the simplest thing possible" with good OO design principles. That apparent conflict stems from misquoting the first part. The more useful version is:

Do the simplest responsible thing that works.

That is, responsible to highly probable future features; responsible to your known performance demands; responsible to your business's security and reliability requirements.

Above all, responsible to your future teammates (and your Future Self) who will have to support and maintain that code. Happily, this last responsibility is nicely supported by the emphasis on "simplest."

Note also that it is "simplest," not "easiest." Your old familiar habits will be easiest, but if those habits were formed in a different paradigm—say... old ASP that you learned by osmosis (Hey, we all had to start somewhere.)—then it will take some dedicated study to turn the responsible thing, the simplest thing, into something you can do easily. Meanwhile, the state of the art in Simple will keep moving, but that just gives us something to keep striving towards. That's what keeps it interesting, right?

Wrangling Rhinoceri

I've been asked to help some teammates become more comfortable with Rhino.Mocks. I'll practice my explanations here, and y'all can offer guidance and ask clarifying questions if you're so inspired. I'll be glad for the help.

Rhino-what? What-mocks? What-what?
The domain we're discussing is unit testing, the code that developers write to verify the logic in their code. Rhino.Mocks is not a testing framework, but a mocking framework, which means it allows you to mock (simulate) parts of your application. You use it along with a testing framework like NUnit or MbUnit.

If you have written code without keeping an eye on testability, it is likely to be witheringly difficult to apply Rhino.Mocks after the fact. Life is simpler if you write the tests first, therefore Rhino.Mocks plays well with Test-Driven Development, which drives you to design your code in a testable way.

As far as what it is, Rhino.Mocks is a dll you include with your test project files. You create a reference to it from your test project, and it gives you some additional classes and methods you can use within your unit tests.

State-based and interaction-based tests
There are two main styles of unit tests, state-based and interaction-based, and each is useful for different things. With state-based, you set up some variables, run them through the methods you want to test, and then verify that their state has become what you expect. You use Assert statements to assert, "The state should be [this]. If not, fail the test." If you're testing an addition method, you can verify the state of the answer, as in, "I assert that 2 plus 2 should be 4."

Rhino.Mocks is used in interaction-based tests. Here you are verifying the interaction between your classes. For example, in a Model-View-Controller architecture, you could test your Controller's interactions with the Model and the View, as in, "I want to verify that, when the Controller is asked to display customers, it gets customers out of the data repository, runs the results through my CustomerFormatter class (I don't know, it's just an example), and sends them to be displayed on the user interface."

You have three interactions there, so you'll probably write three tests. You are not testing what comes out of the data repository, just that the Controller talked to it. In fact, you don't even need a real data repository for this test. If you could just simulate that repository in a way that let you verify it was called... This is what Rhino.Mocks gives you.

What next?
Martin Fowler has written a great article, Mocks Aren't Stubs. If this is your first introduction to Rhino.Mocks and mocking frameworks, perhaps not everything in that article will click with you. It is still worth reading now, and I'll link to it again in my next post. It wouldn't hurt to read Martin's article twice.

My next post will include why you would want to simulate classes instead of using the real thing. I also want to explain why you even want interaction-based tests. I have an intuitive sense of the value, but I am not yet good at articulating it. Feel free to chime in.