In my travels I spend a good deal of my time discussing Scrum Product Ownership, Product Backlogs, and inevitably User Stories. Stories are containers or artifacts, which have nearly become ubiquitous for handling software requirements within agile teams.
Most seem to be a using the standard phrasing construct for his or her stories:
As a – User
I want – Feature or Functionality
So that – Business why, What problem does it solve?
Because the “User” clause is so simple, I see many teams who fill out their user stories in a by-rote fashion. They’ll literally have hundreds and hundreds of user stories, features, themes, and epics and all of them have “User” as the user.
I often cite Salesforce in my classes as a company that has:
- gone “all in” from an Agile Transformation perspective;
- done it in an abrupt Top Down fashion;
- has gone from technology to IT to now Organization-wide in their adoption;
- but most importantly is a company who shares its lessons in the community.
I always lament the fact that too few companies that are adopting agile approaches actually share their lessons publicly. Oh sure, some small bit leak out, but most unfortunately decide to keep their practices to themselves.
My partner Josh Anderson and I just finished a Meta-Cast on the topic of self-directed teams. One of our listeners asked us to share our thoughts on handling agile team members who simply wanted to be “told what to do”.
On the surface, this doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. In fact, I’ll bet these folks are bright, capable and work very hard. They’re also probably “good people”. So if there is an issue with this in agile teams, what is it? And why would it be a problem?
As a coach, I’m getting truly tired of talking to managers and leaders who’s sole drive to adopt agile methods is for…
More, increased capacity, to go Faster!
For example, I ran into a few leaders of one company at a conference. They came to the conference to learn a little bit more about “Agile”, but they’d already made the decision to adopt it within one of their key divisions.
Not only had they decided to adopt it, but they’d already decided that agile would give them an increase in capacity, so they reduced the development teams in the division by 50%. The thought was—agile will give us a force multiplier of at least 2x our capacity, so we can redirect those resources (people) to other initiatives.
I remember over 25 years ago when I learned about developer to tester ratios. It was my first experience at management and we were planning our hiring for a 2-year forecast. We were expecting to grow by roughly 25 staff in our software engineering group and the question was posed to me regarding developers vs. testers in our hiring plan.
To be honest, I didn’t have a clue. My boss stepped in to help me out and he spoke about a 5:1 ratio as being industry standard at the time, so I took him on his word and used it for my forecast projections. Heck, I didn’t know any better. It seemed to work, but that was a long time ago.
The Agile Austin conference was held on March 21 in Austin Texas. It's been held since 2012, so this was the third annual conference.
I'd submitted a couple of talks and was lucky enough to be selected to present. Most of the presenters were from the local area and Texas, but a few "out of town" folks participated. Since this was my first Agile Austin conference, I didn't really know what to expect.
Well, it was a blast. 500 raging agilistas showed up. They apparently sold out the event with about 100 on the waiting list. Imagine that? I was talking to one of the organizers and he said people in his company were asking him to "get them in" and he had to turn them down.
A rather long time ago I was in a meeting with a fairly senior development director and we were talking about annual roadmap planning. He was complaining about things. One of the things he brought up several times was race horses. He kept saying –
Bob, we simply don’t have enough race horses.
I became confused and a bit frustrated and I sort of lashed out saying –
What do race horses have to do with us meeting our software product goals for next year?
He said – no Bob, I’m talking about resources, not race horses.
After all these years, I still find this story both amusing and troubling at the same time. I think we often overuse the term resources as leaders, managers and project managers in software discussions.
I was working with a colleague the other day and we were talking about speakers for a possible local agile conference.
I brought up a few people that I respected in the national agile community and, almost to a person, they discounted them as being “the same old…same old” presenters. From their perspective, they were looking for more:
- Fresh meat or new blood
- Novel or breakthrough ideas
- Something “different”
- Out of the Box thinkers
- More modern and energetic
And I think I understood the point. We can certainly get repetitious in our industry. Following the same old pundits with the same old messages. But at the same time, something bothered me and for quite awhile…and I couldn’t put my finger on it.
Mike Cottmeyer is one of my favorite agile coaches and leaders within our community. When he worked for VersionOne years ago, I used to read his blogs fairly often. Now that he’s been out on his own with LeadingAgile, I don’t get the chance as often to experience his thoughts.
So I was pleased when I ran into a recent post by Mike that had the same title as this post. I read it with anticipation, and as with all of his writing, Mike made me stop and think a bit. Here’s a context snippet from Mike’s post:
