Monthly Archives: August 2013

Agile, Business, Lean, People, Project Management, Software Development

Slow is Smooth–Smooth is Fast

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A few years ago, to explain what goes wrong for many organisations that “go agile”, I wrote an article called “Putting the Kart before the Horse” [1].

Go-karting is where most of the current Formula One racing drivers first learned the basics of race-craft. Antony Marcano, a former kart racer himself, recounts a father-and-son racing experience that helps him explain what goes wrong for many organizations that adopt Scrum as their first attempt to “go agile.”

In this article I explained how novice drivers try to go as fast as possible rather than trying to master the racing line:

At the open practice session my son and I attended, novice drivers seemed to approach their first lap as if it really were as easy as experienced drivers make it look. They floored the throttle and flew down the straight only to crash—painfully and expensively—into the barrier at the first hairpin turn.

I went on to liken this to how many teams adopt agile…

Organizations starting their transition to agile methods with Scrum are much like the novice drivers trying to go fullthrottle before learning how to take the corners. Before being able to truly bend and change their software with speed and ease, they fly into short iterations and frequent incremental product delivery—crashing painfully into the barrier of hard-to-change software.

It was my son’s first experience in a go-kart. We started by driving slowly with him following me to learn the racing line. We gradually went faster and faster. Soon, we were the quickest drivers on the track.

Since then, he has gone on to advance further and further in his racing. Back then, we were in slow, 35mph go karts. This year he started racing for a team in race-tuned karts (see photo). The driver-coach in the team watched him driving on his first few attempts in his new high-performance machine (70+ mph, super-car acceleration). While he was reasonably quick, he wasn’t smooth.

Photo of Damani Marcano driving his 2013 Mach1 Kart for MLC Motorsport
Damani Marcano driving his 2013 Mach1 Kart for MLC Motorsport

His coach told him “slow down”. His coach said “whatever speed you can do while still driving on the ideal racing line is the speed you should be going”. My son went out again. Initially slower than he was before, his speed progressively built… we watched his lap-times improve dramatically.

Yet again, we relearned this lesson: slow is smooth–smooth is fast.

For some reason, I see teams who are novices in agile development make the same mistake, however, not always feeling like they have a choice. Kanban might make it easier to start from where you are and gradually improve but it’s ok if you’ve decided to start with Scrum. When starting with Scrum, start slow, focus on doing fewer things well first then progressively improve. On a course I gave recently, one of the attendees said “but how do you get management and marketing to back-off enough to allow us to slow down?”

My answer: avoid going faster than you can. But if you feel compelled to go faster, make it a business decision. Help them understand that there is a risk that whatever time you save now will cost you more in the future. Help them understand all the effort you’ll spend repairing the damage that going too fast will cause. Pretty soon you’ll be spending so much time fixing problems and struggling to adapt hard-to-change code that there will be little capacity left to add new features. Essentially, incurring a  “Technical Debt” .

As a general rule, I always try to start something new, slow and steady. I only go as fast as I know I can while predictably and sustainably delivering. I’m mindful of business pressures but experience has shown me that by focusing on “making things right” we can deliver smoothly, build trust and progressively become faster.

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[1] You can read the original article here: Putting the Kart before the Horse? – published in Better Software Magazine, 2009

My son’s story is continued here: http://damanimarcano.com

Is updated here: https://www.facebook.com/DKMRacing

And here: https://twitter.com/DKMRacing

And here (updated 03-02-2014)…

UPDATE [11-12-2013]: Damani Marcano finished his first ever season 3rd in the Hoddesdon Kart Club Championship Junior Rotax Formula at Rye House, the track that started Lewis Hamilton’s career. This achievement is significant since, as a novice license holder, Damani had to spend the first half of the season starting every heat from the back of the grid. Find out what happens next season by following his story on Twitter and/or Facebook. Who knows, by adding to his ‘likes’ / ‘followers’ you may become a part of his story by helping him become more attractive to a potential sponsor.

Agile, Lean

Making the right things vs. Making things right

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Recently, David Anderson wrote of how he disagrees with the idea of focusing more on ‘doing the right thing’ than ‘doing things right’.

…we’ve heard a number of leaders in the Agile community promoting the idea that you should focus on doing the right thing – discovering what customers really want and need – rather than focusing on building and deploying working software

David disagrees because…

“doing things right” creates the circumstances to enable deferred commitment. Deferred commitment enables better predictability and faster delivery and a virtuous cycle ensues. Deferred commitment forces hard selection decisions and creates a focus on how selection is done. Combined with the limited WIP of a kanban system, deferred commitment raises awareness of the scarce resource of engineering capability. This is turn focuses attention on how to best utilize that scarce resource by “doing the right thing.”

There is another reason why focusing on “doing things right” is a good idea. One of the very principles behind many agile/lean approaches is iteration, allowing us to make the wrong thing so we can see it is wrong and more rapidly figure out how to make it right. The ability to do that quickly in an easy to evolve product is a significant aspect of agile approaches. “Doing things right”, as David points out, is the path to making this rapid evolution viable.

One way this is relevant is when we give the customer what they say they want so that they can then see what they really need. The ability to iterate quickly and predictably, as David clarifies, builds trust and leads to getting the right thing faster.

So, I entirely agree with David, however, I would phrase it in a slightly different way. To me, there is a distinction between “doing things” and “making things”.

David is talking more about what I would describe as  “making the right things” vs. “making things right”. I think of “doing” as a layer below this. Where “making things” is more what we do and “doing things” is more how we do it.

doing the right things -> doing things right -> making things right -> making the right things

For example, using TDD might be “doing the right thing” but maybe the practitioner isn’t very experienced in it and is not using many of the techniques that give them the most benefit for the effort they put in. While they might be effective, by “doing the right thing” (TDD in this case), they are not as efficient at it because they’re not yet “doing TDD right”.

So, if you ever hear me talk of “doing the right things” before “doing things right” then it’s because of this distinction in my mind between “doing” and “making”.

Start with “making things right” and you’ll get better at “making the right things”.

To improve at “making things right”…

Start with “doing the right things” and you’ll get better at “doing things right“.

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Footnote :

Barry Boehm is the first thinker who I saw use the phrase…”Building the right thing” vs. “Building things right” in his 1981 book Software Engineering Economics. I use the term “making” because it’s a more general term that has fewer implications on “how” we create a product. This is partly because developing software products with agility doesn’t feel like “building” to me.

Agile, BDD/ATDD, Business Analysis, Lean, Software Development, Software Testing

Software Pottery

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“Building software” is a phrase I hear used time and again. Indeed, many do still think of software development as akin to construction.  Modern (agile) software development doesn’t feel like that to me. There was a time, like the construction architect, when we had to increment and iterate on paper and in models. The cost of computing was too high to do such iteration inside the machine. The cost difference between making a small change in our understanding and reflecting that in the actual product was too great. The cost of change meant that we had to treat the creation of software like constructing buildings or bridges. But those times are, or should be, in the past.

To me, modern (agile) software development feels more like pottery. But, instead of ‘throwing clay’ we throw our consciousness, in the form of electrons flowing over silicon, onto a spinning wheel of user-story implementation cycles.

Picture of a pot being created and evolved on a pottery wheel.
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kellinahandbasket/2183799236

We evolve our understanding of what our customer wants with each conversation. We reflect that understanding by evolving the product’s shape as we touch the outer surface with each new automated acceptance test (or example scenario). We evolve its structure as we touch the inner surface with each new unit test (or unit specification). We keep it supple as we moisten it with each refactoring. Our customer looks on, gives us feedback and we start the next revolution of the software development wheel. Never letting the product dry and harden; keeping it flexible, malleable, soft(ware).

There is nothing that feels like construction here. I never feel like I’m “building” something. Much more like I’m evolving my understanding, evolving the product, evolving my understanding again and so on.

For these reasons l am not comfortable with referring to this process as “building”. I’m also not comfortable calling it “throwing” (as in pottery).

I am very comfortable calling it “development”. I use the word “develop” in terms of its literal meaning:

“to bring into being or activity; generate; evolve.”
–dictionary.com

From the first thought of a new idea, through each conversation along the way, to each revolution of the software development wheel, I develop products.

I don’t “build”.

I create. I make. I shape. I evolve.

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Footnote: I’m not aware of anyone drawing this analogy before. If you have heard or read someone explain it in this way before now, please let me know.