Monday, December 29, 2008

Embrace Uncertainty

At CommuniTech, Jeff Patton gave a talk about agile software development. Jeff starts by giving an introduction to agile. He mentions that it is nothing new. Scrum (1986), Crystal (1997), FDD(1998), XP(2000) all lead to the agile manifesto was in 2001. Agile development describes a class of approaches and not just a single approach. It combines elements of Scrum, DSDM, Crystal, FDD and XP.

Jeff then gives a primer on Scrum. A product owner sets product goals and adds requirements or features to a product backlog, he then takes highest priority items and elaborate them into details and start a development cycle of 2 to 4 weeks. Team has a daily stand up meeting to follow progress. At the end of the iteration, they evaluate the working software and get feedback which might affect the product backlog and the next iteration.

Jeff shows how the picture of the scrum process looks like a snowman. The head is stories that get packaged into an iteration. Every iteration does not have to result in a releasable product. It’s a number of iterations that form a release, and a number of releases form the product. Each cycle feeds into planning. At the iteration level, feedback is used to better understand the problem and to reduce risk. At the release level, the feedback ensures proper planning for releasing value. At the product level, the feedback is to update the roadmap.

Next Jeff presents 3 very entertaining scenarios (using personas and music lyrics) which demonstrate some practices that might lead to problems when using an agile model. He concludes that iterate does not mean increment. In incrementing we are piecing things together and it calls for an early well formed idea. Iterate builds a rough version, validates it, and then slowly builds up quality. Quality here refers to look and feel, characteristics and features. The client needs to prioritize the goals that generate return on investment. The developer needs to know what the client wants but always keep in mind what the ultimate goal is. They also need to push decisions to the last responsible moment and build up feature quality iteration by iteration. Instead of writing stories about what to do, write stories about what it intends to accomplish. Have a goal, take action, evaluate the action, and then evaluate if the goal got accomplished. Push decisions to the last responsible moment. Each story has the following characteristics:

1. Necessity: The minimum needed to get working software.

2. Flexibility: what are some alternative ways of doing it, what additional data we want to capture.

3. Safety: better validation rule to avoid ugly error messages.

4. Comfort, luxury, and performance: more usable, sexier to look at (animation), hot keys.

Jeff recommends starting out with the necessities and then slowly build up the product.

This presentation is available on InfoQ at http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Uncertainty-Jeff-Patton