joshua hoover

I remember reading Bruce Tate’s books on Java and EJB, which were all about anti-patterns, years ago and enjoying them. It was refreshing to read about how NOT to apply certain technologies. While there were plenty of books out there on how to do great things with Java and EJB (stop laughing), many of us using those technologies also found some not so great things we could do with them.

In much the same vain of Bruce Tate’s books, I give you a Scrum anti-pattern. Most Scrum teams will use a daily task board, either real or virtual. The task board contains a Sprint’s user stories and the associated user story tasks in the form of cards. It’s normal to see a few columns across the board along the lines of, “To Do”, “In Progress”, “To Verify”, “Done”, etc. The idea is for a team member to put his name on a task card and then move the card into the appropriate column. This is done throughout the day and especially at the daily Scrum. Below is an example of a Scrum task board.

Pretty simple. Below is the task board gone wrong. The difference is subtle and deserves an explanation as to why this is wrong.

Notice the extra column, “Today’s Work”. Having additional columns isn’t an issue, but this particular column presents a problem. The way the team uses this task board is to move tasks to “In Progress” when they’ve started work. But, since the team will sometimes start a task but then need to start on something else, the team decided they needed a column that showed what was in progress currently, thus the “Today’s Work” column. For example, in the daily scrum yesterday, Joe said he’s going to get Task A done. Joe moves this task to the “Today’s Work” column. Today, Joe tells the team in the daily scrum that he needed to start work on Task B for another story to help it keep moving forward, so he moves Task A to the “In Progress” column and makes sure Task B is in “Today’s Work”, as he didn’t finish that task yet. The problem is that we have impediments hiding under the “In Progress” column now. Rather than Joe saying that he was impeded from completing Task A, he moves it to a column (“In Progress”) that makes it seem like all is fine. All might be fine, but how do we know? It would be better to mark Task A as impeded. Joe could then make it clear to the team why he made the decision to not complete Task A in order to start on Task B. Everyone would see that Task A is in progress and it’s impeded (as opposed to simply “in progress”). The Scrum Master can help the team tackle this impediment.

Impediments aren’t inherently bad, but hidden impediments are. The task board gone wrong makes it far too easy to hide impediments while also making it difficult for the team to tackle properly. We all struggle with identifying impediments, so it’s important that we make sure our management tools are setup to help us make impediments visible and hard to miss.

Jeff Patton says agile is a culture. Rob Lally says no it’s not, it’s a characteristic. Both make compelling arguments. Jeff points out that agile is ultimately a culture which promotes certain processes and practices, whereas Rob argues that agile isn’t a culture unto itself but a quality an organization can adopt and make part of its own culture.

Agile has a strong culture. Jeff makes this argument clear with vivid examples of language, legends/stories/myths, values/norms/taboos, beliefs/attitudes, rituals/ceremonies, etc. But, does having a strong culture make agile a culture all unto itself that an organization needs to adopt as its own in order to succeed with agile? I don’t think so and this is where I agree with Rob. Agile is not a culture an organization adopts, rather it is a quality organizations can choose to add. Although, I never thought Jeff was arguing that an organization needed to replace its culture wholesale for that of agile’s, as Rob positions his argument against. I interpreted Jeff’s argument more along the one I was making in my 10 Questions to Think About Before Adopting Agile post, which was an organization’s culture needs to align with that of agile in order to realize success.

Rob makes an interesting observation in regards to selling agile as a culture:

Presenting Agile as a culture is something I’ve seen many times, and it puts more people off. Agile zealots, a club I was a member of a decade ago, try to sell Agile as a culture in a way that reminds me of Mao and his Cultural Revolution; they want to come in to your organisation, declare your culture to be bankrupt and rip it out, replacing it with an idealised regime of their own.

I don’t think there is any escaping the scary part of agile. Strong cultures are often scary to those looking from the outside in, whether those cultures belong to agile, lean, open source, religious groups, political groups, social clubs, etc. Those of us advocating agile need to be sensitive to this fact, but there is no escaping it as Rob seems to imply.

In the end, I think the most important takeaway in both Jeff and Rob’s posts is what they agree agile is not – a process or a set of processes. Those that see agile in this way and attempt to adopt it as such are almost certain to fail.

Agile. Everyone is doing it, so should you, right? Not so fast. Even though it’s being sold as a silver bullet by various vendors and consultants, agile is far from easy. In fact, I’d argue that adopting agile is harder than moving to a process heavy software development methodology. At least with the process heavy approach you have the how-to guide. Agile is as much about attitude as it is about anything else. And a company’s attitude is found in its culture. Companies with cultures that clash with agile are not likely to succeed in adopting agile.

The following is a list of questions I think anyone considering the move to agile, whether company wide or at a smaller scale, should ask before moving forward.

1. Is your company policy driven?
   If employees feel inundated by policies, watch out. There is nothing wrong with policies, but a company driven by policies is likely to be at odds with agile values and principles that support people interacting with one another over contracts, documentation, and processes. A company culture overrun by policies struggles to trust its employees to make good decisions without heavy handed tactics.
2. Does your company encourage identifying and eliminating its stupid practices, policies, and processes?
   A company culture that encourages, at all levels, the elimination of the stupid things the company does will have no problem latching onto agile’s principles concerning change. Don’t have a culture like that? Good luck with accepting and embracing change in a manner agile demands.
3. Is the contract king at your company?
   Contracts come in all shapes and sizes. Some contracts are legally binding documents between two parties, like a service provider and its customers. Other contracts are less obvious but more prevalent, like change request forms and requirements docs. A CYA approach by employees is often a result of a “contract is king” company culture. Welcoming changing requirements and customer collaboration are agile values and principles that are next to impossible for a “contract is king” company to adopt.
4. Is “on time and on budget” your company’s best measure of project success?
   Agile promotes continuously delivering working software that is valuable to the customer. When delivering on time and on budget is the key measurement to a project’s success, it misses the most important point: value. And this all gets back to our previous question of contracts. Companies that value “on time and on budget” the most as a measure of project success are often the same ones that depend on the contract to determine value, not whether the project truly does deliver something the customer wants or needs. This isn’t to say that agile cares little about time or budget, quite the contrary. Agile focuses on delivering value early and often.
5. Would a fair description of your company’s structure be one of tribes at war with one another?
   A great book to read to get an understanding of what I’m talking about here is Great Boss Dead Boss by Ray Immelman. Examples of warring tribes include production versus sales, engineers versus marketers, accounting versus purchasing, etc. Most of us remember the high school cafeteria and the cliques that form. Most of us laugh at how absurd the cliques got, yet too many of us grow up and create even more absurd cliques in the business world. Agile demands constant communication between people and focusing on the customer. You cannot succeed at either of these if your company is made up of factions of tribes. A company needs to be one tribe striving for a common goal.
6. Are simple solutions ignored within your company?
   Simple is hard and yet agile calls for simplicity. Company cultures that struggle with promoting simple solutions are often the same ones that “try agile” for a bit and abandon it because “agile doesn’t scale”. Also, companies that are in love with solving huge problems with complex solutions often struggle with simplicity. Simple is, well, too simple for these companies.
7. Does your company advocate and live by the “No Asshole Rule” (in principle, if not by name)?
   My apologies if the language offends. I find the behavior and acceptance of such individuals within an organization more offensive. Companies that do not adopt this rule will struggle mightily with agile. Individuals who are grownup bullies in the workplace will make sure that anything like agile, which encourages everyone involved to make good things happen, fails in spectacular fashion.
8. Is “corporate speak” the primary language spoken at your company?
   Communication is key to everything, let alone agile. Being able to reflect and adjust behavior is also key in agile. Speaking in a language that doesn’t say much at all is a serious roadblock to effective communication. Corporate speak is also a sign that a company’s culture may value style over substance. Style can come in the form of fancy documentation but little working software.
9. Do the people at your company enjoy working there?
   Don’t show me the survey done by such and such publication. Those are nice awards to put in the job postings but the real deal is found amongst the people on a day-to-day basis. The vibe of the workplace is hard to miss. Motivated people who feel empowered to get the job done are critical in successfully adopting agile. A place where the people don’t enjoy working for the company doesn’t fit this bill.
10. Do customers enjoy working with your company?
    Customers who go out of their way to say nice things about you because of how much they enjoy your company and its products/services trust your company and are going to want to make good things happen together. Agile is all about working closely with the customer. If customers don’t enjoy working with your company now, there is no magic agile pixie dust to make them enjoy working with your company when it adopts agile.

Some might argue that adoption of agile is an answer to these questions. That may be true, but I have my doubts. Company culture is what needs to change in most cases. Changing company culture in a positive way is difficult. The temptation for many of those considering the adoption of agile is to think of it as just another methodology, process or set of practices that can be adopted. Those taking this path are almost certain to fail. With that failure will come much finger pointing. Agile didn’t scale. Agile wasn’t disciplined enough. Agile is missing X, Y, and Z. Agile simply didn’t work. In reality, agile was never understood and never a good fit from the beginning.