Honest Estimating On First Sprint
I sat in on the Sprint Planning meeting with some of my developers today. It was time boxed for 4 hours to do higher level estimates, select the backlog items for the Sprint and agree to commit to them. The second meeting will be Monday for 4 hours where the tasks are broken down into 4-16 hour chunks so everything can be planned out in more detail.
As it turned out the meeting only went 1.5 hours which is one of the advantages of time boxing. We already saved 2.5 hours today. Walking back for lunch I saw the QA tester for the project. He explained:
“Heh, I like this whole Agile thing. Nobody hides the fact that we’re just making things up with the estimates at this point.”
It is really nice to agree to be honest about these things. And after the first Sprint the estimates should get better since we have actual experience to work from. It’s nice to be free to admit we have an empirical process instead of something that can be tracked in minute detail on a Gantt chart.
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Grady Booch Ada and Use Cases
In June of 1979, the Ada programming language became a reality ([SIGPLAN, 1979a], [SIGPLAN, 1979b]). The U.S. Department of Defense set up Ada training classes at West Point, the Naval Post Graduate School, Georgia Institute of Technology, the National Physical Laboratory (U.K.), and the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
At the Air Force Academy, the task of designing a week-long Ada training course fell to Major Dick Bolz and Captain Grady Booch…
It is the second step in Booch’s process (i.e., the development of an informal strategy) that involves what some today would call a “use case.” The “informal strategy,” as Booch originally described it, was in the form of a paragraph describing a solution to the defined problem.
— Be Careful with Use Cases, Edward V Berard
I’m showing my age here, but I came across this mention of Grady Booch as an Ada instructor for the military and was honestly surprised. My knowledge of Ada is very light, pretty much just a few rants from my college roommate about dealing with it in a CS class at Georgia Tech. Indeed when I heard about Adabas a few years ago at a client job at CalSTRS I assumed it was Ada they were talking about and not a legacy mainframe database.
So Use Cases have some sort of strange link to Ada.
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Free Tests?
Cory Foy has a post on evidence from at least one project that unit tests may be in fact free, as long as you do TDD. The point is that they wrote 35,000 lines of source code for a project and 35,000 lines of test code and they delivered in about 9 months with 8 people. According to some numbers from McConnell this would be pretty good if you just count the lines of source code. If you count the 75,000 overall lines the team performed at an extraordinary level. So in essence the extra quality baked in with unit tests kept them on schedule and didn’t actually add any time to the schedule, essentially making it free. This is similar to the idea I’ve heard from JB Rainsberger and others that everyone believes that:
- You need to go faster to code faster.
- Actually you need to slow down to go faster.
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Waterfall to Scrum at Yahoo
I tend to follow Yahoo pretty closely since my brother and a few friends worked there. (At one point my brother was the product manager for Yahoo Messenger) To a tee all of them got very frustrated with the corporate situation after Yahoo grew up and eventually left. I still get flak about not switching to Gmail from Yahoo mail, but heck I’ve had the same account for at least 8 years.
Anyway Yahoo has been heavily promoting Scrum internally. I found a quote from Pete Deemer, the VP of product development for Yahoo, explaining how they went from a pretty agile, slightly chaotic development environment in their earlier days:
How did Yahoo! get bamboozled by waterfall?
Accenture as experts in a time of trouble.
So for 4 years they did straight waterfall which corresponds to when my brother ranted that Yahoo was losing it’s vision. Probably just a coincidence though.
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Squatting in a Conference Room
I think the honeymoon phase for our official Agile projects is over with. The signs are:
- On our first agile project the team got two facing rows of cubicles and a large team meeting room setup just for them.
- On the second pilot the team got mostly moved into the same general wing of one building, but the QA person is separated by about 4 cubes from everyone else as well as the PM. And the business analyst is only dedicated 80% and is in another building. (Maybe the other 20% is dedicated to walking back and forth between buildings.)
- The third Agile pilot is about to start and so far no one has been collocated. I’m working with an admin and the ScrumMaster to find some space, but no one’s volunteering. I’m a little more than tempted to suggest something radical like simply commandeering and squatting in a conference room for the next few months. We’ll have to see if our culture is really ready for that. I have volunteered my office for the team meeting room if they end up in our wing of the building.
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