Karmona Pragmatic Blog

Ken Schwaber was quoted giving this mind-blowing Scrum / mother-in-law allegory:

“imagine that your mother-in-law believed her daughter could do better… and then imagine that she moved in with you… that’s what Scrum is like”

Think about it…

Assuming we shouldn’t aim to completely avoid all errors in software development (since this is an inherent part of any human creation) but rather to spot them as quickly as possible before they become real problems.

And… since Scrum is indeed a very good “tool” to bring the problems in-your-face without any mercy in a daily manner.

So without even getting into the continuous improvement possibilities with mother-in-laws, I really liked the Mother-In-Law allegory :)

By the way, with great anticipation I have proudly joined the Haiku contest @ the famous Ktorium – Wish me luck! :)

My rough estimation is that the number of software project managers in the world is smaller in (at least) one scale from the conceived time-estimation techniques and this post is my humble four-cents contribution on how to do pragmatic time estimation for software projects (just finished one in Delver).

• Start with the mother of all lists to store your Product Manager wish list– We use eScrum Product-Backlog to store our work-items
• Prioritized them – We use 0-Yesterday; 1-Must; 2-Important; 3-Nice-to-Have and 4-”Forget-About-It”… ;-)
• Get relative estimations on all items
  • Granularity is the bronze-bullet for time estimations – Strive to the finest grained possible in reasonable time-frame  e.g. We usually aim for 2-5 days granularity in 2-3 days of time-boxed-estimation-period since the finest granularity in planning without reasonable time-box might take twice the time of doing the planned work (a.k.a. The Estimation Paradox)
  • Experience can turn your bronze bullet into silver one (ye ye, a silver one) – Relative estimation is calculated relatively upon a common scale of known work items from the team history e.g. We use Scrum “Story Points” and constantly measure the team velocity for time estimation adjustments
  • Fibonacci sequence (0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89 etc.) can be used to “embed” the complexity and risk of rough (with insufficient drilldown) estimations e.g. if your estimation granularity for specific task reach ~40 days then your pragmatic estimation should be around 55 days (= the closest Fibonacci sequence) since it is reasonable to believe your (insufficient) granularity conceals risk, complexity and unknowns issues which requires Fibonacci-like-”buffering”
  • Strive to synchronize your time estimation techniques into very simple one – different time estimation conventions in the same development team is the 2nd reason for time delays. (I will give 0.95$ grant if you can guess what the 1st reason)
  • I know I am different but personally, I do prefer to have “pragmatic hours” vs. the normal Agile “ideal hours” and to start the project when 1 “Story Point” =  1 “Pragmatic Day” so long everyone understand this will change as soon as you start the project and then you need to return to velocity tracking to calculate the end
  • Don’t be naïve (a.k.a. “Ideal  Days”) with two known flavors:
    • Optimistic time estimations,  assuming 24*7 of concentrated programming ability with no outside interference (a.k.a. no such thing)
    • “Stupid” hand-waiving time estimations a.k.a. It is only 10 min to code this (but ~5 days to Integrate, Review, Design, Test, Schema and DAL changes, I18N support, Styling etc.)
• Get the rough project estimation = Sum of all product backlog story points / 22 (work days in month) / Number of relevant people
  • Usually this calculation will show you don’t have enough time for the project (even without project dependencies buffer which can be added later)
  • Start the “Tradeoff Game” – Try to cut items (content) based on the relative ROI
  • Revalidate your priorities since they will be the main tool (beside dependencies) for creating the project work plan.

As I see it, estimating software projects in a realistic time-frame is a statistic prediction of chaotic, time-delay-series of events and will never be straightforward nor easy so you can only do your best in the estimation and then track the project as it goes and make the needed adaptation on the way upon crystal clear project priorities.

Good Luck!

Oren and I, have decided to form an invite-only Scrum Clan.
We would like to tag Pasha Bitz (snapshot attached) as the 3rd clan member.

Pasha, please choose carefully, you can only tag one Scrum-Lover like yourself to this distinguish clan….

Good Luck!

P.S. The web 2.0 tag was added to this post since it is a genuine-user-generated-content-post especially made for Pasha

Google Trends (a.k.a. my experiment – part III)

• Clytie Lane
• Moon Bloodgood
• Deceptively Delicious
• Rotten Neighbor
• Melinda England
  

Chronicle of a Death Foretold = Waterfall Shmoterfall = Checkmate in 10 moves
* Note: I did see, participate and lead some successful waterfall projects (mainly due to some adoption of agile methodologies ;-) and this is my view of the projects which failed…

1. Release scoping start with marketing high-level-copy-paste-from-last-year-marketing-presentations MRD in ~1 month delay
2. 1 month of quick lets-write-all-the-features-we-can PRD – This is also the last time you hear from the product manager until the next milestone-demo-crisis.
3. High level design for a couple of weeks which sum-up to a Very Rough Time Guesstimate a.k.a. VeRTiGo
4. Release time-frame is set ~1 year ahead with the needed VeRTiGo “squeezing” and high level time-frame is determined:
   • 2 months of the waste above and last release leftover
   • 1-2 months of Planning (functional and technical design)
   • 4-5 months of Development – with ~3 Major Milestones
   • 3 months of QA & stabilization
   • 1 month of Project Buffer
5. Very soon the development teams are scattered like lonely wolfs – everyone for himself until the next integration or major milestones months away.
6. First milestone is ending with:
   • 20% of the content is really Done a.k.a. “Even a Blind Chicken Finds a Kernel of Corn Now and Then”
   • 50% is “done” with dirty bugy code, low quality, performance issues with missing or wrong functionality
   • 30% is just not ready
7. Developers and low level management remind themselves yet again to put more buffers…
8. The PMO suggest (in relax and trusting tone) to postpone the milestone or remove content.
9. Management doesn’t get in panic (they have seen it before ;-) and decide not to decide: “Let’s see if we can cut the drawback in the next Milestone” a.k.a. The classic do {} while(timeRemaining > Last Milestone)
10. Next milestone has much more content and the pressure builds up… until the last milestone blaming game which usually ends up with ~2 month delay and half of the planned content.

Checkmate

Almost a month ago, I have moved to my own hosted blog due to google blogger outage.

Last week (September 3rd ~00:00), I was visiting BlogCatalog and I got the Internet Service Outage-Lie-of-the-Day: “Database Error – We’re sorry, but our database servers are currently overloaded. Please enjoy a cup of coffee and then try refreshing this page – Blog Catalog” [BlogCatalog Outage September 3rd - 2007] … so I followed the site recommendation and I have enjoyed a great cup of Italian coffee but I was very sorry to see that it didn’t helped the BlogCatalog database to recover…

These days, we are working intensively on the last sprint goals; One of the goals was to finish the architectural design of our unique internet service.

So… Yesterday we where guesstimating (until the very late hours of the night) on the scale needed for this service and started mapping the IT topology, Database implementation and software back-end options that are viable to support it.

I have a lot to say on the process, technology challenges and options for my future posts and I can sum it up now saying: We all hope that by taking the right decisions when reaching a critical-architectural-junction these days, we will be able to enjoy a good cup of Italian coffee while our databases are down for maintenance… but we also know that simple risk management on our guesstimates is also to be prepared for rainy days with a good enough Internet Service Outage-Lie-of-the-Day ;-)

To my humble opinion they are very much alike but Scrum do take project management to the extreme (like everything else) so the bottom line for me is that:

Scrum Master = Extreme Project Manager

…

(short post and without internal references this time but I couldn’t resist the bold stuff ;-)

After watching many Agile project failures and during most of my adult-software-life you could easily bumped into me saying (with agile critiques link referencing embedded :-)
“Agile can only fit hello- world project scale… It is a bad excuse for weak management, development chaos, poor planning capabilities, lousy communication skills and lazy “we don’t need documentation” programmers – There is no silver bullet for handling software but those agile manifesto guys really found the silver bullet buzzword for making money with the scrum-master for dummies certifications…”

…Then came Scrum by “Natural Selection”:

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change” – Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859)

…So I have evolved by Natural Selection to Agile and I can’t really go back to over-planned fantasy Gantt charts that try to capture every feature in advance and predict we will finish the project exactly in 666 days …

Why “Agile”?
For using all the right buzzwords e.g. Flexibility; Transparency; Short-term predictability; Long term vision ;-)

Why “Scrum“?
Scrum provides the mechanism for making the people and process problems apparent so they can be solved – It encompasses almost any good engineering technique; very simple, not overly prescriptive and relatively small set of interrelated practices and rules which can be learned quickly and is able to produce productivity gains almost immediately.

Why not???
The main reason as I see it now, is that it is extremely simple but very hard to implement successfully* – Mainly because short iteration cycles, rapid changes and transparency brings project management headache and programmer life to extreme optimization while traditional development processes (e.g. waterfall) give you the misleading euphoria** for very long time-frames (e.g. ~666 days in the above example ;-) inside the traditional project lifecycle

e.g. Transparency forces accountability, responsibility, prioritization discussions, trade-offs, and often scope reduction. Scrum requires that managers behave differently than in the past. Instead of reviewing status reports, managers should attend Sprint reviews and retrospectives. Instead of waiting for team members to prepare and present updates, management should go to the project room and see the project’s task board and burn down chart.

Scrum isn’t a silver bullet* but a simple yet powerful encapsulation of Peopleware mindset, project management patterns and development best practices which can put you on a good starting point when you face the software challenge…

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* Friendly reminder: no silver bullet in successful software management
** Although I did see few cases where a mixture of skilled project management & legendary engineers have managed to bypass that inherent misleading euphoria while allegedly practicing traditional development process but my claim is that if you look very closely they were actually practicing 90% scrum without even knowing it…