Story Mapper by Carbon Five
August 30, 2010 Leave a Comment
Very cool tool for organizing and manipulating a project on PivotalTracker. I really wish it used oAuth or something, though.
User Stories and Mind Mapping
February 2, 2010 3 Comments
I read an article recently by Robert Dempsey about how he has recently discovered mind mapping as a way to manage user stories. His technique was interesting and it gave me the excuse I needed to take another shot at mind mapping.
I’ve tried mind mapping in the past and it never really stuck for me. It was a little too free form. I needed some structure for my ideas, that’s why I was looking for something in the first place. Robert’s post briefly describes the structure that he has used for forming user stories. The method made the idea click a little bit better. Basically he starts with the project in the center and then the ring out is the different actors. Hanging off the actors are the actions that they should be doing.
I downloaded the 30 day trial of MindJet MindManager and tried Robert’s technique out on my current project. It was a lot easier to get started that it had been on previous attempts with mind mapping, but I kept feeling like something was missing. Here’s what finally clicked for me: what the user does is less important than why they want to do it.
In the classic user story we have an actor, an action, and a business value that the story provides (As an <actor> I want to <action> so I can <business value>). I slightly modified Robert’s approach and added a level for business value — the “so I can” clause of a user story. Now I have the project in the center, next the actors, and then I start listing out the business value that each actor wants to get from the app that we are building. Under each of these leaves I can then start describing actions that would provide the actor with the business value.
This really make things click. My ideas started to come together and I feel like the result is clear user stories that are customer business value focused. I need to thank Robert again for convincing me to dig in to mind maps again. I think this will be a big help in focusing my ideas in to something communicable and implementable.
Unanticipated Externalities or The 6 Week Collapse
November 15, 2009 Leave a Comment
Our development team recently went through a transition period that involved the introduction of a couple of team members. We aggressively track velocity week to week. These numbers not only help in planning releases, but also to gauge the health of the team and process. I generally disregard the first few sprints (sprint = 1 week) for the team to get comfortable with each other and the tools.
I should note here that the team is using a fibonacci scale of estimates and generally has features between 1 and 5 points. This project is also made up of significant legacy code and is being “stabilized”. Bugs come in regularly and don’t get estimated. Big changes to the application need to take in to account existing users and their similarly legacy data. (Legacy here means old and originally developed with minimal QA and tight time constraints)
The first 5 sprints for this team were quite encouraging. After a 3 week bootstrapping period there was a strong sense that the team was building up to a strong pace. The team had a rough sprint 6, but they seemed to bounce back the following week. Sprint 8 had another collapse. By this point we were looking at 4 weeks and only completing 20 points. What is going on? Sprint 4 had us expecting twice that pace.
I’m very fortunate to have a reliable team, a very skilled and experienced team lead, and a patient set of stakeholders. As we began seeing the fluctuating velocities for what they were (a problem with our process) all of us began looking for causes and solutions. I’ve seen this before. The team got about 6 weeks in to the project, everyone was beginning to feel confident that we were doing things right, and then we started to lose control. We’d nail one sprint only to completely miss on the next one. It was frustrating and demoralizing.
We got through it.
The root cause came down to unanticipated externalities. That means that a task would get held up because we needed an icon from the designers, or we needed content for the new email, or our acceptance criteria were vague enough that developers couldn’t quite tell if they were done until QA approved or rejected the work. The team wasn’t quite sure if their work was done and tasks would get rejected at the end of every sprint for often minor issues.
What did we do to fix it?
The biggest change was to add detail to the acceptance criteria and make sure our QA process would verify exactly to the acceptance criteria. This ultimately was my fault and by getting QA to strictly focus on the ACs it put pressure on me to get as much in to the ACs as I could, otherwise I’d need to create a new user story to tune it and that may mess up my timelines. I like to call this approach “strategic pressure points”. The goal is to strategically put positive and negative pressure and side effects to encourage those best practices that we all say we should follow but often lose motivation after a few times.
The other shift in think came more as a side effect of the first. That was to hold on to user stories until I had all of the content and graphics ready to go with it. In an ideal world we’d be able to drop a designer directly on the team and turn the graphics problem from an external issue to an internal one. This gives the team (plus one designer) control over their ability to complete the stories that they accept in to a sprint.
The key to this turnaround is a return to the basics. What do the numbers say? What is going wrong or right; what is causing frustration in the team members? And, what can you do to make things incrementally better? Keeping our eyes on the metrics that we are collecting helped us track the instability of our process and allowed us to focus on specifics when looking for problems. Constantly looking for things that aren’t working perfectly and finding ways to make them slightly more perfect helped us respond to the problems rationally and see rapid recovery from the issues that were affecting us.
Podcast.local – localhost podcasting
May 17, 2009 1 Comment
Last week I discovered a set of mp3′s covering Lean practices and principles. You can access them here. I’ve been on a bit of a management optimization stint lately and Lean is a very natural extension of Agile software development in to a broader management context. It largely predates modern software techniques and represents one of the early generalizations of the Toyota Production System.
In any case that is not what I’m here to talk to you about. In looking through these mp3′s the list of webinars was not collected in to any sort of podcast format. This is frustrating because this would be ideal commute time listening on my iPhone. Out of this frustration came podcast.local. Podcast.local is a simple Rails application (really simple) that allows you quickly create a podcast through a series of forms. The name comes from the naming convention provided by the Passenger preference pane on OS X. If you set it up through the pref pane you will just need to go to http://podcast.local. From there you can create your podcast one episode at a time and then subscribe to them through your iTunes. The coole thing is that because it’s on the web iTunes just picks it and starts downloading episodes.
Like I said above, this application is too simple to go in to much detail. I used it to do some experimentation with a few technologies that I haven’t had much time to mess around with. Namely Blueprint CSS, jQuery, jQuery UI, and Paperclip. Enjoy!
It’s not the size of the tool
March 6, 2009 Leave a Comment
I’ve been having discussions recently with some coworkers about finding better tools for various aspects of our business. A lot of our discussions are looking at how to organize our development process, but every once in a while it diverges to a different set of issues, especially how we track our developer/designer/account managers’ hours.
If you’ve known me for a while, you’ll know that I get a kick out of trying out new apps and services. I like to find ways to make myself more efficient and better at my job and life in general. Usually I end up throwing these tools away after a few weeks. But every once in a while I find something that lasts. A great example of this is OmniFocus. I had been trying to implement a good approximation of GTD for several years, and in that time I’ve tried probably 15 different tools and online services that implement various approximations of GTD. But it wasn’t until I started using OmniFocus that I really found a sustainable process and a tool that empowered me.
Coming from the agile community the common reaction to “What tools should I use to organize my development process?” is whiteboards, poster paper, and ample note cards. While I do appreciate this tactic from first hand experience, this has some obvious flaws as soon as your team members are not co-located.
Our current suite of tools have a number of failings for a number of different reasons. The reaction that I’ve been hearing lately from my colleagues is that we need to find a single tool that handles all of our major needs. The theory—I presume—is that having fewer tools will mean less manual work maintaining the tools and their content.
I’m not a big fan of this philosophy for a few reasons:
- It is not likely we will find a single tool that fits all of our business requirements without it being too complex or expensive (or both), therefore our processes and practices will need to be adjusted for the tool. The realist in me is OK with the idea of adapting to the tool to an extent, sometimes the tool can give you a better process that you didn’t know before (eg: OmniFocus), but that’s pretty rare.
- There are a few tools that are actually working very well for us, however the “one tool to rule them all” model creates artificial value in eliminating that independent tool for a consolidated one that may be less effective.
- It impairs a teams ability to experiment with new work patterns and tools by adding cultural pressure and often bureaucratic overhead around tool choice. If agile software development is about expecting change and continuously adapting to it, then I want to have the flexibility to adapt everything down to the tools the I use.
- I’m not convinced that maintenance overhead is entirely due to the number of tools. I think it has more to do with not using the right tools.
Modern application development approaches have really focused on the idea of specialized tools that solve a small set of problems. The old model of monster apps that can be customized to do what you want, but not quite perfectly, is being phased out for interoperability and APIs. Our Github account can send post-commit notifications to our Campfire account, our Acunote account integrates with our bug tracking system, and just about everything will send an email to keep you up to date.
The moral of the story: Why use one tool that does everything just OK when you can have many tools that to their own things really well and will talk to each other?
Dopplr
