Mickaël’s Weblog

I’ve read the post from Eric Lippert on Fabulous Adventures In Coding , describing what’s the “real work” behind 5 minute of development at Microsoft:

One dev to spend five minutes implementing ChangeLightBulbWindowHandleEx.

One program manager to write the specification.

One localization expert to review the specification for localizability issues.

One usability expert to review the specification for accessibility and usability issues.

At least one dev, tester and PM to brainstorm security vulnerabilities.

One PM to add the security model to the specification.

One tester to write the test plan.

One test lead to update the test schedule.

One tester to write the test cases and add them to the nightly automation.

Three or four testers to participate in an ad hoc bug bash.

One technical writer to write the documentation.

One technical reviewer to proofread the documentation.

One copy editor to proofread the documentation.

One documentation manager to integrate the new documentation into the existing body of text, update tables of contents, indexes, etc.

Twenty-five translators to translate the documentation and error messages into all the languages supported by Windows.The managers for the translators live in Ireland (European languages) and Japan (Asian languages), which are both severely time-shifted from Redmond, so dealing with them can be a fairly complex logistical problem.

A team of senior managers to coordinate all these people, write the cheques, and justify the costs to their Vice President.

And I garrantee this is not a joke…this is true. During my short carrier in software development, I’ve seen all size of software companies: from 6 to more than 7000. I’ve seen this only in large companies, so what startup (I guess we can also apply this to Open Source) companies are doing to handle this? They simply dont care and don’t do it.

Jeff Atwood comment also on this in his post Is Eeyore Designing your software saying that startup and Open Source do not have all this development process.

What is the rational for such heavy process? I guess at least 2 reasons: type of customer and sofware development vision.

Some of the large companies are targeting large customer (Fortune 500 for example) to sign for large deals. These customers are world wide companies, so the localization is key to close a deal. The documentation is also important. They also emphasis standards in their selection criteria as 508 compliance for US governement. Thay also have technical schemas as for example allowed operating systems or supported application servers.

The software development vision of large software companies is also an industrial view: be predictible through control and strong processes. It’s very common to hear people saying:

• You can’t manage what you can’t measure.
• You can manage quality into a software product.
• Software needs more methodologies.

These are part of the fallacies highlighted by Jeff Atwood (yes again) in his impressive post on Revisiting The Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering.

I had a boss who was questioning : “Why building software is no as simple as making a car?”. He was refering to the ability to deliver a product on time with good quality…which is very rare in software delivery. First, making a car is not so easy, but I agree from an external point of view, it seams more predictable et cars more robust than softwares. The main reason is that software development echosystem is evolving a lot and quicker than car making technologies. The tools are always changing, every month some new technologies appears, even languages, methodologies also are evolving a lot. To gain predictibility, large software company are enforcing processes that decrease drastically productivity.

What about Program and Development Management that are using a waterfall approach with agile development team? By waterfall approach for management I’m talking about management decision not to start the development before requirements are defined, planification and release date setup. It’s not unusual to see also a stabilization phase defined as for example the last couple of iteration.

This is mainly due to:

• Product Management team is not ready at all for the first iteration,
• Infrastructure changes not identified before the first iteration,
• Product Management wants to have a full plan on the future release before starting, to prepare pre-announcement.

The final result of this approach is that the development team is not working at all…because it’s simply forbidden. The market driven approach has been well understood by Product Management and they are blocking any kind of development before they have decided what features have to be implemented.

Joaquim Rendeiro talk about co-existence of waterfall (especially for management) and agile methodology in his post on Agile or Waterfall?. Yes, they can exist but may have the consequences I’ve talked about.

IMHO, this occurs inside teams that are transitioning to agility and are not mature enough on this agile approach. As agility provide a huge responsibility and control capability to the product management, they used this extra-strength keeping in mind the waterfall approach targeting dates and content of the releases.

The development management should be the driver to accelerate the transition to a real agile approach. For example by rejecting all big kick-off meetings to start a release, and encourage a better preparation of each iteration. The development team managers should also avoid any technical discussion include an product owner and take the responsibility to make the technical choices. Often, the technical choices are delegated to product owner. Yes this is strange, but haven’t you any discussion with a product owner like: we can implement the story this way and it will cost 13 points or a different way and it will cost 21 points but this last one is less good for reasons A and B. Let guess the answer…do the shortest path. Even if this is usually the good answer from a technical perspective (I’m supporting the principle of simple design which is often shorter to implement), there is not reason to delegate this decision to product owner.

Agile approach requires a clear definition and separation of responsibility for every shareholder.

Getting agile is probably the only (or best) way for large R&D organization in a software company to setup their workforce in front of their need. They usually are working over multiple products (legacy or not), and are market driven. In small software companies, the product management marketing function is endorsed by R&D management and they work usually on a small number of projects which are at least tightly integrated, which means R&D team is focusing on only 1 common goal.

Start-up have focused/sharp vision, excellent creativity. Large company are relying on strong market analysis and capacity to move on…most of the time as soon as a startup has demonstrated new markets.  Vijay Challa talk about this in his post on Agility World 2.0.So, they have to invest (put development resources) on the products depending on the market trends, profits from each product,…etc. That’s why its important to be able to switch developers from a product to another to be reactive.

Some agile principles helps for this:

• iterations and time boxed releases to have reactivity when some resources are removed from a project,
• sharing knowledge instead of specialization to be allow reallocation,
• pair programming to reduce learning curve when new developers are working on a new project.

I tend to think that agility is maybe not always that relevant for small company, but its certainly a must have for large software company to be reactive.

Product owner is a role within scrum methodology that represent the customer. The question is about a team that would like to apply Scrum methodology without such role.

The answer is definitely “No” obviously. How to use such methodology in an organization that do not provide such role. I think this can be hardly achieve by managers assuming this role but they have to be fair. The team will assume its responsibilities (sizing, self organization…etc) and the manager will validate the acheivement of the stories even if this has no value from a customer point of view. The manager then will do the buffer with the “real” customer, and takes his responsibilities.

The hard point is for the manager:

• have an iterativ approach at least (1 month is perfect) 
• create new user stories if the customer is not fully satisfied with the implementation and track them as new items,
• describe precisely the content of the user stories to help the team do a precise and accurate sizing,
• provide support to the team if they have questions on the impelmentation during the srpint,

The key point is not to have a manager which is only simple bridge between the customer and the dev team, but fully assume the role of Porduct Owner. Sure this is not easy, but this can be done this way.

This week, the team get a training on Scrum. The goal was to introduce more agility in our development methodology. After this training, managers decided to use Scrum as Agile methodology, starting in 2 weeks for our neqw internal release. That sounds good.

The team is about 18 developers and QA engineers. Scrum recommende to have about 7 folks per group. This imply to split the team into smaller groups. The current oganization is really not agile; this not so suprizing as we kept the same organization for around 11 years and we are Agile practitioners only for 3 years. So the team in splitted into 3 blocks: QA and 2 development groups (business and platform). My concern is that we keep the same organization on re-grade the existing manager as ScrumMasters. I think this is faking Scrum for 3 reasons.

First, teams are supposed to be cross-functional, which is not the case today.

The ScrumMaster is supposed to be a facilitator/moderator and contribute to the features development as the other members of the group. The existing managers do not have such contribution. More over the ScrumMaster is not supposed to have any authority, which makes very difficult the association of manager and ScrumMaster roles for one person.

And last; self-organization of the team is a fundamental of Scrum. I do not see any of that in a re-organization fully handled by managers.

I hope we will go throw a different path: let the team re-organize itself by involving every members and do not fake Scrum.