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release planning

Anchoring your Product Backlogs

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Anchoring your Product Backlogs

If you don’t know, I’ve got some opinions about Scrum, the Product Owner role, Backlogs, and User Stories. I’ve written a book about Product Ownership and I spend a great deal of my time up to my eyeballs in stories and backlogs at various clients.

One of the things that frustrates those clients is that there are very few “prescriptive rules or firm guidance” when it comes writing stories and crafting Product Backlogs; in many ways, it’s more art than science. It’s also a practiced skill that gets better the more you actually do it—of course as a team, which is also true of agile estimation.

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The Agile Project Manager—No Upfront Estimates!

The diagram represents the Cone of Uncertainty—coined by Steve McConnell of Construx. I’m sure he’s not the first or only one to reference the cone, but he famously has connected it with software development. The cone indicates the futility of estimating & committing to software projects at project initiation—not matter how well conceived the estimates are. There’s typically too much uncertainty to be accurate. Instead, an iterative or incremental approach will glean more information to improve the estimates over time. This is particularly true for projects that include new technologies, new teams, or trying to create novel or innovative products.

I’ve been managing software projects for much of my career. Early on, I spent most of my time trying to estimate projects more and more effectively. I pulled together models for how to estimate. I kept track of historical estimate vs. actual data, so that I could evaluate the quality of my estimates. I even tried some modeling or arithmetic techniques to fine tune my estimates. Some of these are quite well know techniques like Function Points or Cocomo or the Personal Software Process.

All of this was focused towards estimate quality…not software product quality. I was worrying about how to represent the time to build the software to stakeholders and accountants so that we could reasonably know how much it would cost. Then we could make better decisions around whether to start it or not.

The odd thing, at least in my experience was that no matter neither how hard we tried nor how much effort we expended on estimation and planning, over 60% of our projects went awry. They failed. They were Death Marches. They were incredibly painful. And in many cases, they resulted in people losing their jobs.

I guess my point is—accurate software project estimation is incredibly hard.

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The Agile Project Manager—Fostering Controlled Chaos

As you may or may not know, I’m an active agile coach. I often get asked to enter new teams and jump-start them or assess their overall level of agile-ness. One of the ‘smells’ that I look for in a strong and healthy agile team is what I’ll call controlled chaos or perhaps a better phrase would be guided chaos.

You see, the atmosphere in these teams isn’t safe nor predicted too far in advance. The teams don’t have a false sense of security. They’re working on a short list of features in close collaboration with their Product Owner. They know that challenges will rise up to meet them. Risks will fire. Team members will get sick or get married or tend to ill parents. And the design approaches and code won’t always work as advertised.

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