Simple UX plea

Dear UX designers,

If I'm not authorized to perform a specific function in the application, please show me a grayed-out button or disabled select list, rather than not showing anything to me.

This way, I know that I'm not authorized, and I won't waste hours scanning the application looking in other corners of your app for the functionality you have simply hidden.

Thanks.

Verbal Combat

And here is where the decision is made. Do I retreat to my established viewpoint? Do I dig in my heels? Or do I consider the alternative, offered by my combatant? And suffer the indignity of being judged wrong?

Truck Factor Mitigation

One of the strong selling points of pair programming is that knowledge of the code base, techniques, and domain are shared across multiple people. We joke that this reduces the "truck factor" for a team. Truck factor is the risk to the team or project of any specific person getting "hit by a truck".

Some other phrases: "beer truck factor", for those who like to imagine being hit by a worthy cause, or "lottery factor", as one colleague suggested, since it is a happier ending.

High truck factors can be good for the individual. After all, if your specific knowledge or talent is critical to the firm, so too, is your ability to negotiate for higher compensation or to easily acquire extra latitude for resources and decision-making authority. Management does not want to scare away the geese that lay the golden eggs when they have no idea how the egg-laying works.

A high truck factor has a downside for the individual though. When you finally get tired of the same platform/domain/language and want to move on, the hand that feeds you is likely to restrain you from departing to other projects. Sometimes, the only departure path is to leave the company. That can be a good thing for getting out of a rut (and introducing potentially lucrative contract work with your prior employer), but can also force you to start from scratch in building a reputation in a new situation.

What of leadership/management? How do we reduce the truck factor for managers? They don't typically pair. What happens when opportunities arise for a promotion, or an exciting lateral move, but the leader is tied to his current position with no replacement in site? Perhaps he needs to turn the new position down. Perhaps the external market is tapped for a replacement. Perhaps he just adds the new position's responsibilities to his current responsibilities. These are smells of poor succession planning.

If you're a technical superstar, or simply a master of your technical niche, or
if you're a domain expert, or simply master of your domain niche, or
if you're a leadership expert, or simply the most ingrained leader in your current role:

Identify, train and groom your successor(s)

You never know when that lottery ticket will hit.

Talent acquisition and retention

My friend, Brad Cross, posted an interesting blog entry recently on how compensation relates to attracting and retaining technical talent. This particular phrase resonated for me:

"Great workers long to work on interesting and challenging problems and collaborate with other great people who have a strong sense of vision and purpose in their work. They long for an open and supportive environment grounded in mutual respect that enables them to make their own decisions as appropriate."

His blog post goes on to relate the disconnect between the 10X productivity difference between the best and the worst software developers and the incongruence of the meager salary differential proffered by employers to recognize this difference (hint: it's not 10x).

Brad's post is thought-provoking, as usual.

No applause, just throw money

I have an aversion to the applause that occurs in some iteration showcases (aka sprint reviews) on agile teams. The showcases are the meetings at the end of an iteration where the team shows working software to project stakeholders. Unfortunately, many teams end up displaying PowerPoint presentations instead or in addition, but that's a topic for another post.

I once witnessed a team that had 2-week iterations and held a 2 hour review at the end of each iteration. Each team member presented what he had worked on and accomplished over the course of the iteration. First of all, two hours was too long for this team for a 2-week iteration. They simply did not produce enough demonstrable working software to warrant a two-hour meeting. Worse, they often resorted to presenting partially completed stories - another problem, but again, fodder for a future post.

Having each team member speak and present his accomplishments might have been a good thing for that particular team. It can provide a similar social pressure that stand-up meetings provide - nobody wants to stand up and say they didn't accomplish anything, so each team member strives to deliver demonstrable value. The problem I had with this particular team was that the norms established that everyone applaud each person after his little piece of the presentation. Not only was the applause time-consuming, it was gratuitous. Folks in the meeting applauded simply because they were expected to, not because of any remarkable achievement.

In some cases, the team member didn't really accomplish anything of note on his own and the applause was simply out of place. It is as if my dog takes a dump in the middle of the carpet during a party and the crowd rushes up to pet and praise him, and offer him doggie treats. Clearly, this confuses the dog.

Though applauding every presenter is certainly overkill, I argue that applause at the end of an iteration showcase should be eliminated (or better, never started in the first place). In any case, it should never be de rigeur, and should never be instigated by an outsider who may have no clue as to whether the team really accomplished something special.

Applauding showcases for mediocre or even poor iterations can have a deleterious effect on motivation. Consider this possible thought going through a team member's head: "They applauded for this crap? They have no clue what we're doing".

We have a habit of rewarding performance. If my kids come home with straight-A report cards, I heap praise on them. If a see a C, I begin my own inspect and adapt cycle at home. But in report cards, the grades are clear, and are mostly objective. That is - the "A" reflects a large number of assignments, tests, and projects, and the teacher assessing the outcome has a substantial pool of similar production to compare against. Outcomes of iterations/sprints, on the other hand, are hardly objective, and are not comparable to other teams' output. It is truly only the team members who know, in their collective heart of hearts, whether they really deserve applause or not.

So my suggestion: omit the applause until the code gets into production and the customers' rave reviews start flowing. That's when the party should start.

Crew bags in the bulkhead overhead

<pet peeve>

This has happened to me on several recent flights. I am seated in the bulkhead of the airplane - sometimes in first class. I open the overhead bins and airline crew bags are taking up that precious space.

As frequent travelers know, bulkhead travelers must put *all* baggage in the overhead, which increases their overhead space requirements. Flight attendants putting their luggage into that limited overhead space is inexcusable, particularly since there is no need for them to gather their luggage until everyone else is off the plane. When they use this space, bulkhead passengers must place their bags several rows back, making the deplaning process much more difficult (swimming upstream to retrieve bags).

</pet peeve>

Kudos to the Airtran flight attendants on my most recent trip, who spaced their bags out over several different rows beyond the bulkhead.

www

Listening to the radio - folks talking about words. One problematic pronunciation is for folks pronouncing website names.

double-you, double-you, double-you ... 9 syllables, awkward

dub dub dub .... 3 syllables - better

Three-Dub ... OK - maybe this one isn't used - just throwin' it out for consideration.

Politics at work

I just read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team on the plane this week.

I saw an interesting interpretation of the term "politics" which intrigues me:

"Politics is when people choose their words and actions based on how they want others to react rather than based on what they really think."

Threshold Anxiety

"Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher, first described what has come to be known as 'threshold anxiety'. He describes the feelings of a young man who is about to leave home to go out into the world to seek his fortune. As he stands on the threshold of the house, about to leave, he feels that he's turning his back on everything that is warm, familiar, and secure -- what he has known all his life. Beyond the threshold lies the world, filled with all that is unknown and strange. If the young man turns back at this point, he is lost. If, however, he can take the fear of the unknown and turn it into the excitement of the unlimited possibilities which are open before him, he grows in the moment and is alive, as never before."

- Mildred Newmand and Dr. Bernard Berkowitz
How to Take Charge of Your Life

Squirrel Agile

A client shared this term a few weeks ago that I really liked: Squirrel Agile. Thanks Steve.

I'm sure you've seen a squirrel trying to cross a street. The squirrel starts off on one side of the street, looks, darts out, then sees something scary and retreats. Sometimes he retreats all the way... sometimes he just stops in his tracks. When he starts again, he may continue trying to cross, or may high-tail it back to the original side of the street.

In agile adoption, we sometimes see fits and starts... and retreats - just like the squirrel.

One aspect of agile adoption - self directed teams - seem to me to suffer a great deal from this behavior. Management agrees to self-directed teams in principle, but as soon as the manager fears loss of control, or loses confidence in the team's ability to deliver, the agile squirrel darts back towards the original side of the street. The command-and-control tendencies return.

Other fits and starts occur when you start taking shortcuts in your approach. "We don't need to do a showcase this iteration; we don't have much to show". Or "We're 98% complete with this story - let's take credit for the story in our burn-up, since we'll finish it quickly at the beginning of the next sprint." I'm sure you can come up with other examples.

These behaviors mirror the squirrel's fear. These short-cuts and adaptations are typically not to improve effectiveness or efficiency, but reactions to fear of judgment. My suggestion: rather than darting back and forth as you cross the road, take a deliberate approach with courage.

agileshout

I just recently discovered this StackOverflow implementation focused on Agile issues: http://agileshout.com. Seems to be low traffic at the moment, but perhaps my agile friends can find some value there.

I'm not quite sure why it's necessary to have a separate site from StackOverflow, since the tagging mechanism in StackOverflow permits differentiation of topics (e.g. "agile") and cross tagging of topics (e.g. "agile" and "BI") that might not otherwise find a specific home on a specific site.

Task breakdown - To do or not to do

I've had this conversation with agile folks over the years. It's about task breakdown. This is not entirely fair, but I'll say it anyway: I consider it one of the "thou shalt" approaches of agile by the numbers... or by the tools.

Assume a master story list with estimates based on points.

The iteration planning meeting (IPM) looks like this:

Foreach Story in Candidate list:

• Product owner: Describe the story
• Team: break the story down into tasks
• Team: estimate the effort for each task in hours
• Iteration Manager: Increment the task hours counter by the amount of the task hours for this new story
• Iteration Manager: Measure the task hours against the team's ideal capacity and report how full
• Team: If iteration is full (based on ideal/actual capacity) leave foreach

As the iteration progresses, we see this:

Foreach Day in iteration:

• Team member: update the remaining task hours for each of his/her tasks
• Iteration manager: udpate/publish burn-down
• Iteration manager: interrogate team members whose tasks are moving "slowly"

There are some benefits to breaking work down into tasks:

• Intra-story progress can be measured by the iteration manager who can address slowness ("John: you reported 2 hours left yesterday morning and today you're still not done... what's up?"
• The aggregate burn-down should show you how close you are to your target on a daily basis

My issues with this approach:

• Tasks become the center of the reporting universe within the sprint and so progress against task completion may mask poor progress against story completion (e.g. due to undiscovered tasks)
• Team "feels" progress based on completed tasks, rather than on the real objective: completed stories
• Weird reward structures get created ("John - yesterday you said you had 12 hours remaining on the task, yet you finished it. Great job!")
• Weird negative feedback is inferred ("John - yesterday you said you had 2 hours left and you're not done yet": inference - you're not working hard enough)
• Daily reporting requirements implies distrust of the team to raise issues or problem: "If I don't keep an eye on the task level reporting, I can't hold them responsible on a daily basis"
• Estimating iteration capacity based on ideal task hours may conflict with iteration capacity planning based on historical velocity. What happens if my hour capacity is reached in the IPM, yet my booked story point total is below my historical velocity? (I'll save the tendency for re-estimation for another blog entry). Reminds me of the old adage - experienced sailors never go to sea with two compasses. They go with one or with three, because if the two disagree, you have no idea which one is right.
  

I feel that task breakdown should be done only in limited circumstances and only to the degree where the benefit outweighs the admin cost:

• if the team feels that the benefit outweighs the cost
• if a developer or pair needs to break the story down into tasks in order to understand the work to be done, go for it (but don't worry about tracking all the details in a tool)
• Perhaps if your team is not mature enough to understand how to break down a story into tasks, and so you must spoon feed them with tasks (even then, I think it better to have them pair with experienced developers to learn how to become self-sufficient.)
• If the tasks to implement a story can be parallelized (different developers or pairs can be working on different tasks for the same story in parallel)
• If your team has "silo dysfunction" that requires choosing stories that don't overload a skill or domain area on the team

Example: let's say you have a project with equal parts C++, Java, and Fortran code and you have C++, Java, and Fortran programmers who can't span technologies. In order to keep from overloading one technology group, you must choose stories that balance the work across those silos. Sometimes, the only way to create this balance is to task out the work across technologies, to ensure you're not overloading one camp.
By the way - removal of this dysfunction over time is recommended.

My feeling: Using the whole team's time in the IPM doing task breakdown and estimating tasks is usually wasteful. I recommend that task breakdown be undertaken, if necessary, at the last responsible moment... when the story moves from "ready" to "in development", rather than at the IPM. The developer or pair picking up the story should do the breakdown.

Task breakdown smells (and yes, I've seen them all):

• The tasks look like this:

Design the code
Write the code
Write the unit tests
QA the code

Why is this an issue? You're probably doing mini-waterfalls, not simple, evolutionary design

• The "remaining work" for a given task is reduced by 8 hours (or perhaps 6) each day

Why is this an issue? Team members are not providing real data, they're telling the iteration manager what he/she wants to hear

• The hour-based iteration burn-down (or, as I prefer, burn-up) is practically a straight line.

Why is this an issue? In reality, many things take more or less time than imagined. Straight lines are an indicator of "cooking the books"

• The iteration manager asks people throughout the day... "How many hours do you have left on this task? When will you be done?"

Why is this an issue? It's command and control leadership and dilutes the power of the self-directed team.

• Iteration Planning Meetings (IPM's) take more than an hour and are more about numbers than about story understanding

Why is this an issue? You spend more time taking swags at hour estimates than you do actually thinking about the functionality to deliver

• The iteration manager applauds the team for accomplishing "400 hours" when their calculated capacity was only "350".

Why is this an issue? It's focused on task hour accounting and doesn't imply anything about how successful the team was at completing stories

I've worked on projects with both approaches - task breakdown with hour-based burn charts and no-breakdown with point-based burn charts. My suggestion is to avoid speculation about the superiority of doing it the only way you've ever done it and at least give each approach a fair shot.

I remember my elevated caffeine intake as a developer at interminable IPM's where I just wanted to get on with the work.

I remember debating minutia about whether a task belongs or not, and whether it's 8 hours (by Kurman) or 16 hours (by someone else). Yes - all those issues that the point-level estimating deigns to abstract by using relative estimates can rear their ugly heads in hour-based estimating. (By the way - if your solution is to assign the tasks at IPM time, you'll suffer from other problems).

I remember being the first to pick up a story as a developer and finding a better approach that implied a totally different task breakdown. Yes, I used the new approach, and yes I had to fix the accounting (XPlanner) to reflect my new approach. (Umm... on second thought - I just left the existing task list in place and fudged the actual hours into the old list. You might think this was wrong. I knew, however, in my heart of hearts, that the micro-accounting really didn't matter).

I've also worked with teams that have eliminated task breakdown/estimates and felt freed by the defenestration of the bureaucracy.

This tends to become a heated topic of conversation. In the end, the best answer, I think, is to let the team choose the approach that's right for them. Mandating task breakdown or mandating against it is almost always wrong. Drive the questioning to determine if task breakdown adds value or not, and try it both ways. If you have an agile management tool that requires tasks in order to do reporting, and you want to avoid defining tasks, just create one task per story that says "Do it". (In parallel, find a different tool that provides more flexibility).

scrum terminology decoder:
iteration = sprint
iteration planning meeting or IPM = sprint planning meeting
iteration manager = scrum master
iteration showcase = sprint review = sprint demo
master story list = product backlog (or possibly release backlog)

PMO vs. PPM

I have a visceral negative reaction to the PMO initialism; it stands for Project Management Office. I recently pounced (in an overreacting sort of way) on a colleague who was using this term. Sorry Carl.

I need to explain a bit. It's really all about the "O" - for Office.

"Project Management Office" screams bureaucracy to me. I've never seen an efficient and effective PMO. This is perhaps because most of them seem to be mired in "SDLC" - an oft-used euphemism for "waterfall" (despite it's innocuous spelled out translation: software development life cycle).

I once had to sign off on a 19-page document provided by the PMO to justify the acquisition of two load balancers for a test environment. This document had to be signed by 25 people in a 2000-person company. It was a stunning example of the need to feed the process beast. Some project manager in the PMO - who probably thought this process was necessary - filled out this template. My favorite section of the doc was "Metrics". Ostensibly this section existed to establish the metrics upon which the success of this project would be measured. The PM filling it out, indicated that 2 load balancers would be acquired - as if the number "2" satisfied whatever the template providers had in mind for metrics.

If we want to revamp the bureaucratic, inefficient, ineffective approach currently used for managing software project portfolios (the PMO), I think we need a departure from the term.

I'd love for us to agree to focus on the verb - not the noun. A brief digression:

I see many agile teams who use the iteration planning meeting - IPM - or the "sprint planning meeting" if you subscribe to that religion - as the only time in which the development team is exposed to upcoming work (other than, perhaps, estimation efforts that occurred months ago). I coach teams to treat iteration planning as a "verb": planning - rather than a noun: meeting. The "planning" should occur fluidly - some done in meetings before the IPM (e.g. estimation), some after (e.g. task breakdown).

Project portfolio management (the PPM in the title of this post) implies active engagement in assessing the health of the portfolio. The estimated release date or feature list should be adjusted after every iteration, and approaches need to be introduced to raise awareness of the new projections at least this often.

Let's please talk of project portfolio management, rather than project management offices.

97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know

The book "97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know" has just been published. I have two contributions: "Use a wiki" and "It's the People Stupid". Get 30% off by entering the code ABF09 on the oreilly.com site.

Linked-In grammar issues

John Doe "has added new links and updated their profile"

John Doe is an individual. "Their" is plural. I understand they're trying to avoid "his or her", but I'd prefer it.

Another example... when someone requests an endorsement, the message comes across as "Can you endorse me?".

The word "can" implies ability to do something, not willingness. I'd much prefer to see "Would you endorse me".

There. It's off my chest now.

Why Blog?

I recently had an extended conversation with a group of about 10 folks who lamented the poor understanding of the value their particular functional role brings to a software development team.

One question I posed: how many of you blog on the topic of your profession? The answer was zero.

Why don't they blog? Here is my interpretation of the reasons for not blogging:

• Not enough time - working 40 to 50 hours per week leaves little extra time to spend composing and presenting ideas in a professional manner, much less having a reasonable social life.
  
• Lack of original ideas - there's not much I can think of to write about that hasn't already been addressed somewhere - whether in another blog, in a book, or in conference presentations.
  
• Confidentiality - many of the examples from my work are proprietary; obfuscating the details takes time and can cause loss of message fidelity.
  
• Low readership - the effort to reach a small number of readers, given the size of the blogosphere, has a low RROI (readership return on investment?)
  

My blogging is sporadic. I understand the effort required to wrap ideas in a digestable format. I also edit articles for an online IT journal (alphaITJournal.com). Editing is hard work. Blogging doesn't require the depth of perfection that articles do.

Sometimes you're better off taking a stab at it and clarifying the concept through further blog entries than simply waiting to start.

Who reads my blog? According to Google Analytics - about 15 - 30 people. That's the volume of hits I generally get with a new post. It's not much, but size isn't everything. Every once in a while a link to your post will get posted to an aggregate someplace (digg, reddit, Developer Zone, etc.) and will generate more traffic and conversation.

The benefits to blogging:

• Personal brand promotion. As your blog is read by others, your personal brand improves.
  
• Clarifying thoughts. Organizing and writing about a topic forces you to develop clarity on your topic.
  
• An idea portfolio. When you apply for new jobs or try to sell to new clients, your blog serves as a portfolio of your ideas and promotes your depth of thinking on your profession. It also serves to show off your communication skills.
  
• Writing skills. Most of us need to communicate through the written word in our lives. Blogging is great practice.
  

Here's a technique I use to generate blog entries. Whenever I get an insight or a flash, I start a blog entry in a text file. Sometimes it's just a thought (one file - pragmatism.txt - has the following: "Pragmatism vs. agile").

When I have down time (waiting in the airport, sitting on a plane), I take a look at my partials and figure out what I'm in the mood to explore. I happen to be on a plane as I type this.

Your topics will rarely be entirely original. What will be original, however, is how you shape your message with your unique perspective and background. Combining this uniqueness with the topic at hand is what renders insight.

Low readership is not an issue. The benefits of clarifying your thoughts, having an idea portfolio, and improving writing skills are all independent of the size of readership.

So go ahead and start. Create a blog and type "Hello World". You may be surprised at how the ideas start flowing. Start recording things you want to explore ... and start blogging !

Uncle Sam Industrial Average

With GM and Citigroup being removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average stock index, it occurs to me that we need a new index to track the health of government owned/quasi-owned companies. We should be able to come up with 30 by now, no?

I propose the Uncle Sam Industrial Average (USIA).

Jump in

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

- Teddy Roosevelt

XP Game redux

I assisted in another XP game with legos last Tuesday - led by my ThoughtWorks colleague Conrad Benham. Several other ThoughtWorks folks helped to facilitate. We did this at the Atlanta Agile User Group meeting. Kris Kemper captured some of the activity in his blog post. Another participant captured his perspective here. I particularly like his comment "I was stunned at how many real world challenges our team of 5 mirrored". I'm always pleasantly surprised at how effective these games are at conveying agile concepts

I facilitated one of these last year at a Florida .NET user group meeting which was captured in the Apress website in their content area that brings attention to various user groups.

If you have a desire to introduce agile concepts to an audience in a fun setting, you can't go wrong with an XP Game with Legos.

Euphemism in Podictionary

I previously posted a blog entry on Dysphemism and cross-register synonyms. I sent an email to the guy who runs Podictionary - the podcast for word lovers, suggesting he use dysphemism in one of his podcasts.

Well, he did. Kind of. He used euphemism and mentioned dsyphemism. Check out the post here.