Is Agile is obvious?

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

iStock-1174931869-2020-07-27-14-29.jpg

From time-to-time people say to me:

“Agile is obvious”

When I’m being honest it is kind of hard to argue with them, it is certainly “obvious” to me. But at the same time agile is not obvious, or rather, the opposite of agile is also obvious. For example,

Agile says: obviously, you don’t know the future so don’t plan and research too far into the future.
Non-agile thinking says: obviously, failure to plan is planning to fail, obviously you need a plan of action, you need to plan for the future.

Agile says: obviously, people work best when they are self-motivated and given a say in what they do.
Non-agile says: obviously, people are lazy and will do as little as possible, therefore someone needs to manage them.

Agile says: high quality makes it easier to change in the future, obviously.
Non-agile says: obviously, quality is an endless quest, there is no point in polishing something which isn’t important, 20% of the effort gives 80% of the reward so don’t do any more.

Agile emphasises the here and now, the soon, obviously requirements can be handled just-in-time, so live for today.
Non-agile says: if we don’t think about the future we will obviously duplicate work and incur additional costs.

And my own entry: obviously, software development as diseconomies of scale therefore optimise for lots of small. The opposite is equally obvious: economies of scale are what makes modern business – and the cloud – successful so exploit them

There are a number of obvious examples that go with that:

Agile says: obviously we should test every change and new feature by itself to avoid the complications of interacting changes.
Non-agile says: obviously full test runs are slow and expensive so bundle work together and test it on mass.

Both agile and not-agile are obvious. What you consider obvious depends on your starting point. Once you start thinking “agile” a lot of things become obvious. But if you are not thinking agile then, if you are thinking some other model, then the opposite is also obvious.

Some would term this “An Agile Mindset”. However I don’t want to do that, I find the idea of “an agile mindset” too nebulous. I also note that most of the people I hear talking about “an agile mindset” seem to clinging on to some piece of holy lore which I consider not very agile and they believe is totally agile (the project model and upfront requirements usually.)

Instead I find myself going back to Theory-X and Theory-Y. In general people fall into one camp or the other. If you, your philosophy on work and life, align with theory-Y then all the “agile is obvious” statements above are indeed obvious. Conversely, if you generally follow a theory-X philosophy then all the non-agile statements are obvious.

Perhaps surprisingly I find people can flip, and be flipped, from X to Y. What is more difficult is getting people to unlearn behaviours and actions which they acquired with a theory-X mindset. Even if some element of theory-Y (and agile) is now obvious people need help to learn the new way and let go of the old. Some people can do this by themselves, others need help – or at least help speeding up the change.

Yes, thats part of my job as an Agile Guide. Sometimes just talking (and reflecting on recent events) helps. Sometimes exercises (or process miniatures they are sometimes called) help. Sometimes it is by experiments, exposing people to others can help as well – so conferences, user groups.

Rarely do people change because they went on training and were lectured too, but good training incorporates talking, reflection, exercises, etc. Such training is less training and more about practicing the future.

Obviously, my training is like that: I aim to make my training courses a rehearsal for future actions. Actually, while I “sell” training I prefer to think of it as a rehearsal or kaikaku event – kaikaku events also call a “kaizen blitz”, they are big change events from the people who brought you kaizen, more on them another time.

So when someone I’ve worked with turns around and says “Agile is obvious” I take it as a sign of success. They no longer seem agile as something strange, it is normal, it is onbvious.


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September micro-workshops

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

I’m running all three of my half-day workshops again in September:

You can read reviews of these workshops on the Allan Kelly agile training pages where you will find more details too.
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Tickets are on-sale now with Tito – with a 20% early bird discount. (I’m using Tito this time because it promises to handle VAT better for those of you outside Europe.) If you have any problems with Tito or would prefer to receive an invoice contact me directly via e-mail, allan at allankelly dot net.

Blog readers can get another 15% off with the code “Blog15”.

Plus, if you book and pay for one workshop you will receive a code for 50% off the other workshops – buy one get two half price offer.

As before there are a few free tickets for the unemployed and furloughed. I might release more unemployed free tickets nearer the time so join the wait list if you are unemployed and miss out.

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Recent talks online

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

During the last few months I’ve done a lot of online talks and presentations. Most have been public but some have been private, some have been repeats (with updates) of past presentations while others are completely new.

As always a full list in the insights section of my website and on my YouTube channel. These include:

And “Everything think you ever wanted to know about the Product Owner but were afraid to ask”, a conversation with Adrian Reed.

Unlike conference recordings which show me dancing around a stage these were all delivered online so I expect you will find the recordings better quality. The slides are available as PDFs, again on my website.

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Surveys are fake research

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

For some time now, my default position has been that software engineering surveys, of the questionnaire kind, are fake research (surveys of a particular research field used to be worth reading, but not so often these days; that issues is for another post). Every now and again a non-fake survey paper pops up, but I don’t consider the cost of scanning all the fake stuff to be worth the benefit of finding the rare non-fake survey.

In theory, surveys could be interesting and worth reading about. Some of the things that often go wrong in practice include:

  • poorly thought out questions. Questions need to be specific and applicable to the target audience. General questions are good for starting a conversation, but analysis of the answers is a nightmare. Perhaps the questions are non-specific because the researcher is looking for direction: well please don’t inflict your search for direction on the rest of us (a pointless plea in the fling it at the wall to see if it sticks world of academic publishing).

    Questions that demonstrate how little the researcher knows about the topic serve no purpose. The purpose of a survey is to provide information of interest to those in the field, not as a means of educating a researcher about what they should already know,

  • little effort is invested in contacting a representative sample. Questionnaires tend to be sent to the people that the researcher has easy access to, i.e., a convenience sample. The quality of answers depends on the quality and quantity of those who replied. People who run surveys for a living put a lot of effort into targeting as many of the right people as possible,
  • sloppy and unimaginative analysis of the replies. I am so fed up with seeing an extensive analysis of the demographics of those who replied. Tables containing response break-down by age, sex, type of degree (who outside of academia cares about this) create a scientific veneer hiding the lack of any meaningful analysis of the issues that motivated the survey.

Although I have taken part in surveys in the past, these days I recommend that people ignore requests to take part in surveys. Your replies only encourage more fake research.

The aim of this post is to warn readers about the growing use of this form of fake research. I don’t expect anything I say to have any impact on the number of survey papers published.

Metal Commando – Primal Fear

Paul Grenyer from Paul Grenyer

I've had much anticipation for this release and I wasn't disappointed. While it lacks the epic nature of Severn Seals and New Religion until the final (13 minute!) track, it's packed full of solid power metal songs. Unlike most albums, I found it instantly enjoyable on first listen. Other than the lack of epicness, my only complaint would be it's rather short. I'm fully expecting this to become one of my favourite albums of 2020.

Metal Commando

Effort estimation’s inaccurate past and the way forward

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Almost since people started building software systems, effort estimation has been a hot topic for researchers.

Effort estimation models are necessarily driven by the available data (the Putnam model is one of few whose theory is based on more than arm waving). General information about source code can often be obtained (e.g., size in lines of code), and before package software and open source, software with roughly the same functionality was being implemented in lots of organizations.

Estimation models based on source code characteristics proliferated, e.g., COCOMO. What these models overlooked was human variability in implementing the same functionality (a standard deviation that is 25% of the actual size is going to introduce a lot of uncertainty into any effort estimate), along with the more obvious assumption that effort was closely tied to source code characteristics.

The advent of high-tech clueless button pushing machine learning created a resurgence of new effort estimation models; actually they are estimation adjustment models, because they require an initial estimate as one of the input variables. Creating a machine learned model requires a list of estimated/actual values, along with any other available information, to build a mapping function.

The sparseness of the data to learn from (at most a few hundred observations of half-a-dozen measured variables, and usually less) has not prevented a stream of puffed-up publications making all kinds of unfounded claims.

Until a few years ago the available public estimation data did not include any information about who made the estimate. Once estimation data contained the information needed to distinguish the different people making estimates, the uncertainty introduced by human variability was revealed (some consistently underestimating, others consistently overestimating, with 25% difference between two estimators being common, and a factor of two difference between some pairs of estimators).

How much accuracy is it realistic to expect with effort estimates?

At the moment we don’t have enough information on the software development process to be able to create a realistic model; without a realistic model of the development process, it’s a waste of time complaining about the availability of information to feed into a model.

I think a project simulation model is the only technique capable of creating a good enough model for use in industry; something like Abdel-Hamid’s tour de force PhD thesis (he also ignores my emails).

We are still in the early stages of finding out the components that need to be fitted together to build a model of software development, e.g., round numbers.

Even if all attempts to build such a model fail, there will be payback from a better understanding of the development process.

On May The Fours Be With You – student

student from thus spake a.k.

In their most recent wager Sir R-----'s goal was to guess the outcome of the Baron's roll of four four sided dice at a cost of four coins and a prize, if successful, of forty four. On the face of it this seems a rather meagre prize since there are two hundred and fifty six possible outcomes of the Baron's throw. Crucially, however, the fact that the order of the matching dice was not a matter of consequence meant that Sir R-----'s chances were significantly improved.

The Business Case for Agile in 2020 – video blog

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

A couple of weeks ago I gave a private presentation to an organization entitled: “The Business Case for Agile in 2020.” Actually, it surprised me a bit that in 2020 people still wondered what the business case for agile was but that probably says more about my arrogance and the agile bubble I live in.

I’ve re-recorded the presentation and it is now on-line: The Business Case for Agile in 2020 is on YouTube and embedded below.

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September workshops

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

Summer is here so things are quiet. I’m not running any more workshops during the summer and will use the time to review what I’m doing. Still, I have started to create an initial programme of events:

Tickets are not on sale but the events are listed on Tito so if you are interested register your interest today and as soon as tickets are on sale you will know. More details are on my Agile training pages – where you will also find some great reviews from people who have been on the courses recently.

I have lots of ideas for more online workshops so if there is a subject you would like to see please drop me a note (contact at allankelly dot net) and I’ll see what I can do – it would be great to know what people actually want!

I’ve not yet decided what to do about free tickets for the unemployed and furloughed. While I like offering these tickets – it feels like the right thing to do – I am getting high dropout rates from people who register for these tickets. The old case of people registering for something and having nothing to loose if they don’t turn up.

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Agile & OKRs – the next book

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

Last year I had a surprise: the company I was working with introduced OKRs – Objectives and Key Results. I started off very cynical about how effective these were likely to be but …

Not only did I come to like OKRs and the OKR setting process I came to see how they plugged a gap in agile and how they can be powerful for agile teams.

So a few months ago I started writing a book: A little book about Agile with OKRs.

I stalled for a few weeks but I’m working on it again so expect more updates in the coming weeks. Please let me know what you think of the book, and if you are using OKRs I would especially appreciate your thoughts and stories – I might even include them!

(Yes the name is deliberately chosen to build on the success of my “Little Book about Requirements and User Stories”.)

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