Tag: Development team

Context.

In the last year, I have been reflecting a lot on the decisions making process.
Not specifically how I make a decision but how people are making decisions in general.

The question that often bubbles in my mind is WHY, why I made that decision, why my colleague took that decision instead of the other one, why that person is approaching that problem from that angle.
Sometimes I really struggle to understand certain decisions made by people and this is not necessarily a bad thing but it made me wonder.

I started giving an answer to the following questions:
Why don’t I understand that decision?
Why my decision would differ so much from another person?

LACK OF CONTEXT.

Context, yes… context.

The definition of “context” provided by Google is

“the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood.”

I think the keywords for understanding the meaning of context are circumstances and fully understood.

Let me share a story with you.

A few months ago I was in a meeting where some colleagues were proposing an idea for solving a governance challenge that from my point of view wasn’t fitting the purpose.
I listened, elaborate in my head and I asked a few questions but I didn’t share my opinion at all.
I spent the following hours rethinking that conversation, every single word was echoing in my mind trying to find a sense of the solution proposed during that meeting.

After a day or two, I replayed again in my head the entire conversation several times and I tried to explain how I would have solved that problem from my perspective for seeing overlaps between the two solutions.
During this mental exercise, what I realized was that from my colleagues perspective, in their own mental model the solution was absolute fine, my point of view was different from theirs, not necessarily better or worse.
I realised I was analysing the problem adding different dimensions and information that allowed me to find an angle not explored by the others due to the lack of context on how the architecture, the implementation and the governance would have worked all together.
The circumstances weren’t fully understood, more than that, the circumstances weren’t shared, we weren’t thinking about the same solution because we had a different context.

Context is everything.
Think about it.

In software architecture, a successful architecture may be replicated in another organization with a completely different outcome (positive or negative).
Have you ever asked yourself why?
Because the context is different, the players are different, the interactions, communications, environment, the governance are all different.

In an Architecture Decision Record (ADR) we usually capture a decision made along with its context and consequences. Often these decisions are revised in the following months because the business evolves and therefore the architecture has to evolve alongside the business.
What we decided six months may be obsolete right now.
This doesn’t mean we took the wrong decision at that time, but with the ADR we are trying to capture WHY we took that decision in a specific moment in time, drawing metaphorically what was the context of the architecture, the forces and the solutions evaluated for being able to reassess them on a later stage and bring everyone inside the organization up to speed on the what reasoning process we applied behind a specific decision.

I don’t think we can change the fact that context can dramatically modify the outcome of specific actions for better or worse.
There is although one thing we can definitely do, learn more about the context we work for providing the right solutions and take the correct direction. More we know, better we can think about the possible consequences.
Moreover, we need to invest time creating a common context in our company, despite we work in a large or small organization, often the context where an architect or a developer operate is completely different from the one of another colleague in the marketing team.
It doesn’t matter if we work in the same organization, the reality is the context for people in a different department, even different teams, may differ substantially.

A thing I learnt in the past few years is not stopping in front of a decision made but challenge or be challenged in a genuine way.
When I design a new architecture, I usually socialize with developers, with the principal engineers and the other architects.
What I’m looking for is feedback and validation of an idea, but more often than not I gather the point of view of different people, how they would solve the same problem from their perspective, with their experience and expertise.

It shouldn’t be a problem changing your mind after gathering more context, people may judge you because of that, the reality is they have just collaborated on enriching your knowledge, augmenting your context and making the solution you are working on better than before.

Therefore engage with your peers in a meaningful way, especially the ones outside your teams, engage with product people, senior management, stakeholders, architects, other developers, other departments even.
Don’t be afraid to leave your bubble but explore outside it. I know it sounds easier than what it is, but remember…

More context we are able to gather, better decisions we are going to make!

Don’t be afraid to ask WHY, to understand the value behind a decision, to understand the train of thoughts a person holds, because all of these actions provide you with more context enabling you, in the long run, to make better decisions or understand better the point of view of another person.

Tech people often research online, study books, watch videos, listen to podcasts, dream about the implementations made by other organizations, and I’m one of them.

However, the next step after a research is contextualizing the learnings in our own environment.

Contextualizing… context again.

Replicating 1 to 1 what we have learnt, may or may not provide the same outcome inside our organization.

Funny enough a few days ago, I was listening to a podcast episode on Domain-Driven Design (DDD), the speaker was sharing his experience of implementing DDD in two different companies.
The first time was a complete failure, they made several mistakes due to lack of experience in applying DDD breaking the services in very small units and ending up with a “distributed monolith”. The company closed a few years later.
In the second company although, the same person gained experience, reviewed his mistakes and applied with his new colleagues a similar approach avoiding the pitfalls he learnt from the previous experience.
It was a complete success, he learnt from his mistakes, he capitalized his experience and, with a different context, DDD was successfully implemented.

There are plenty of stories like this one out there of achievements and defeats, two sides of the same coin.

Every time we write a line of code, every time we design a new architecture, every time we introduce a piece of infrastructure, we should be able to answer the simple question WHY we are doing this.
I learnt by experience this answer is not always easy to provide.
Maybe we want to try a new approach or tool, maybe we thought that specific approach would make more sense over another, and there isn’t any problem on this but let’s spell it out, explain why we do things in a certain way and if we don’t have a specific reason, try to find it because it will help yourself and the people you are working with to follow your idea better and rationalize the decision in your heads.
Don’t be afraid of sharing your reasoning, the worst-case scenario is that you learn a bit more about the context you operate.
Having an idea turned down is not a defeat, instead, it’s a great win because it means next time you will be able to add a new dimension on your ideas that would make them more contextual for the environment you work with.

Context means also that there isn’t always right or wrong, black and white, right and left. There isn’t the absolute truth!
Often I see developers stack with their position because an “influential person said that” or “John Doe tweeted about it, so if he said that…”.
However, it may be applicable only to certain contexts. We should challenge ourselves and our beliefs from time to time, looking for different opinions and different point of views to have a better picture of how people may approach the same challenge differently from us. Embrace a different perspective and don’t push it back up front.

Next time you are in a discussion with a colleague or a friend, try to move a step forward finding the reason behind a particular decision or behaviour.
And then try again, and again.
Interacting with people, asking questions, sharing your thoughts or reasonings, will expose yourself and maybe sometimes put you outside your comfort zone, however, it will add to your personal growth an enormous value and more food for thought to reason about.

Context is not immutable, many people when they join a new company have a lack of context but that doesn’t mean they will not have it unless they are not looking for it.
I truly believe human beings are curious by nature, our passions drive our curiosity pushing the boundaries when we really and deeply love what we are doing.
In these cases, these people are going to look for creating quickly the context for making what they love valuable again.

I personally started to see the world with different eyes, I am trying to understand more the context where a specific architecture, implementation, decision or feature would be applied more than solutionize upfront.

I don’t believe there is always a solution that fits them all. And “the standard” is not applicable in every context.

I decided to believe in accepting failures for improving an empiric world called software development, in learning from failures and successes, in human interactions, in growing without limits, in understanding better the context before providing a solution, in a wrong decision made for lack of context, in listening and providing context, in challenging and being challenged, in starting with the WHY more than the HOW, in looking for the context no matter where I’ll find it.

It took me a while to gather my train of thoughts and decide to share them, it may be valuable for some of you or not.
Hopefully, you will find some interesting angle in these few words.

Thank you.

Product Owner, Scrum Master and Team: this is Scrum!

As you read in my previous post “Approaching Scrum”, in the short description of this Agile technique, I talked about  3 main roles that composed the Scrum team.

The main 3 roles are:

  • Product Owner
  • Scrum Master
  • Development Team

There are also other people that partecipate in a Scrum team and I’ll talk about them in a bit.
I’d like to share a brief introduction to each role before talk, in another post, about the Scrum process in details.

Where is the project manager ?

That’s a good question, as you can see above in the list of the main roles, the project manager role is not mentioned.
Basically what the project manager represents in the traditional software development where basically manage the communication between clients and the company, manage the team’s tasks and so on, in Scrum we are dividing those functions trough the members of the Scrum team (product owner, scrum master and development team) giving more responsibilities to them.
This thing will have a positive impact with the whole team that is more involved in each part of the project (planning, decision and development) and they can drive the risk using Scrum to achieve the best business value so the best result for their customers.
Another important aspect to take in consideration, when you are working with Scrum, is that we don’t have the concept of “project” anymore, but we’ll work on features and improvements with a continuos delivery instead of a “big bang delivery” at the end of the project.
This will ensure that we’ll focus more in the business value instead of waste time in something that is not important for that project and that couldn’t have the right value for our stakeholders.
For my perspective a natural evolution for a project manager could be the product owner, or if he has got a technical background could be Scrum Master; for sure the most important thing is that he has to change the way to approach any development and he has to think in a collaborative instead of a hierarchical way.

Product Owner

This role is very important inside a Scrum team, in fact the product owner is the “voice” of stakeholders and customers or users.
He is also the person that has the product vision, that is in charge to take the right business decisions during the development of a new or existing product and he has to help the team, if it’s possible everyday, answering on questions related to the product.
He is in charge to create and maintain the Product Backlog and to share the product vision with the whole Scrum team.
The most important thing is that the Product Owner is always available for the team because he is part of the team and his role is essential to accomplish all the business aims of a project.
In fact he is in charge to order the activities to do in the Product Backlog and to update them (this process is called grooming) following the customer’s perspective.
Usually the Product Owner is someone that have familiarity to talk with customers or internal management as well and he is quite technical to talk with the Development Team.

Scrum Master

The perfect definition of a Scrum Master is: “Mr. Wolf” !
The Scrum Master is the person that try to facilitate the use of  Scrum inside the team, he has to remove impediments to the Scrum team, facilitate Scrum introduction in a new team,  avoid any external distraction to the Development team and so on.
The key concept for any person that is approaching this role is that you are not a chief of someboy, you are coaching Scrum to people not imposing something to them!
In fact another good definition of Scrum Master is the servant leader.
Usually the Scrum Master is a Lead Developer or a QA person anyway it should be someone that has got enough technical knowledge to understand and solve the problem of the Team and to discuss with the Product Owner and guide him to create good artifacts for the Scrum team.
This activity required more or less the 50% of the time for a person so usually the Scrum Master is often member of the Development Team as well.

Development Team

When Scrum talks about Development Team it doesn’t mean only developers but a group of people that work actively to the product.
So inside the development team we can find: analysts, designers, testers, UX team, developers and so on.
In Scrum the team has cross-functional skills that allow them to deliver feature every Sprint.
Another important thing is that the team is self organised so nobody (nor the Scrum Master neither the Product Owner) can add activities to their daily job or impose the timeframe to finish a task.
At the beginning it could be so strange but in this case people in a team assume more responsibility and the project will be done in the best way ever.
In the old way to manage a team where the project manager imposed his role to have the feature that he wants when he wants, the team was only executive people without any relation with the project and often without any reward if the project will be well done.
In Scrum the team is in charge to estimate the project, to choose the task to accomplish during a Sprint deciding them with the Product Owner and, last but not least the team has to develop more features as possible with an high quality of code (tested, documented and so on).
We’ll talk more in deep about estimates and about the “definition of done” in next posts for now what you need to know is that the team is not passive anymore but they play an active and important role to achieve the goals of each product.

Other actors

In Scrum the main roles are what you have read above but there are many other people that partecipate to the good delivery of a product, in particular when you start to scalate Scrum to many teams.
In fact Scrum is a framework to manage 1 or 2 teams but not more, there are many other Agile frameworks that help you in this activity like SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework).
Other people that partecipate to the delivery of a project are for sure the stakeholders.
Stakeholders can be internal or external, when we refer to internal stakeholders we have to think to our management that share with the team their needs and how their point of view to improve or change the product developed by the team.
The external stakeholders are our customers or users, yes you read well, our customers or users are very important in the Scrum process because they are the ones that decide if the project is going in the right direction or is failing.
Personally I think is the biggest challenge involve our customers inside the Scrum process but for sure it will be very useful for the team and the product because they can constantly give us feedback on the right direction to take with the product.

Approaching Scrum

Have you ever felt disappointed because you don’t finish a project in time?
When you try to estimate a project you feel like a poker player?
Have you ever wrote bad code because you were overtime and you needed to delivery as fast as possible?

If you think that there isn’t a way to escape from this nightmare you are completely wrong and I understood it in the las few months as well!
I don’t want to say that with Agile you can solve everything, but what I can say that for sure it can help you to achieve your goals and deliver in time with the best quality and value for your customers or users.

Let’s start from the beginning…

What is Scrum?

Scrum is an iterative and incremental Agile software development framework for managing software projects and product or application development. Its focus is on “a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal” as opposed to a “traditional, sequential approach”. Scrum enables the creation of self-organizing teams by encouraging co-location of all team members, and verbal communication among all team members and disciplines in the project.

A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called requirements churn), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team’s ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements.

From Wikipedia.org

When you start to read about Scrum a lot of things seem impossible to apply in your daily job but I think that, like any transition period, you can arrive to work completely in Scrum in less than 6 months if you really want change your organization and improve it.
From my experience Scrum is a good framework that should be used extensively if you are working in products that will be delivered to the final user, otherwise you have to train up your customer to be Agile; but in the real world it could be more difficult.
Mainly because you need to have a good trustability before start to involve them in an Agile process and sometimes there isn’t enough time to do so.

Why have I to use Scrum?

That’s a good question, it was the same that I asked me few months ago and finally I’ve an answer, if you are a developer think when you started to write the first lines of code, obviously day by day you increase your knowledge and your code became even better until to the procedural code it wasn’t enough and you try to look to something more.
Then you have discovered OOP concepts and maybe design patterns, after few times you started to work with MVC, MVP, MVVM or your favourite architecture and probably after many years if you look back you won’t write procedural code anymore.
Does it sound familiar?
In the same way of Design Patterns and a micro-architecture that drive you to create solid and maintainable project, Scrum can help you to organise your projects creating a great business value, knowing every time the next steps and the actual status of the project, estimating better the goals and the time to achieve them and last but not least to drive the risk in a better way than the “traditional” methodology (waterfall model for instance).

How does Scrum works?

Scrum diagram
Scrum

As you can see from the diagram above, Scrum is an iterative workflow that happens in a small amount of time (usually 2 weeks or 4 weeks at least) where with few documents and a lot of communication you can achieve the best trade off between the business value for your final customer and the best quality of your software.
Scrum is composed by some actors (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Development team and Stakeholders), some meetings (Release Planning, Backlog Refinement, Daily Scrum, Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective) and few artifacts (Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, Burndown chart, Product Increment).
The most important concept that you have to keep in mind is that Scrum is easy to use and to understand but if you want to have its benefits you have to follow its rules.
To enter in this interesting world you have to keep in mind the 3 main concepts of an empirical process like Scrum:

  • Transparency
  • Inspection
  • Adaptation

Without this 3 fundamentals principles, Scrum it’s not useful at all!
Transparency means that you and your team don’t have to hide anything to anybody, if there are any impediments or problems or bottleneck following Scrum you can find and resolve them.
Inspection means that you and your team have to analyse what you have done after a small amount of time (Sprint Retrospective) and find what positive or negative was happened during that period.
Adaptation means that everything is not binary (0 or 1, true or false) but you have to adapt your way to work day by day improving yourself inspecting what you have done and being agile!

If you want Scrum is not only a good approach to work, it could be a good approach for life as well!
(Check also this useful article on Scrum Alliance website that explains Scrum in 30 secs)

Ok, now I’m really interested in Scrum, where to begin?

There are many books that allow you to enter in this amazing world, the first one that I can suggest you is Essential Scrum: a practical guide to the most popular Agile process

Essential Scrum
Essential Scrum

In this book you can really understand how the Scrum framework works and how to use it in your daily job.
I also suggest it if you are planning to join in a Scrum training course, it can really help you to have a good preparation for the course and for the following certification exam.

Next steps

What I’d like to share with you is my notes about Scrum studied on books, read on blog or social networks and share with my fellows, my idea is to fix few concepts on this blog that could be helpful also for people that is approaching Scrum right now or they would like to know more about it.
There are really tons of things to know and you’ll never finish to learn (as usual) so I think a blog it could be a good resource to share the basic of Scrum and in the future, going more in deep with real case studies related to my daily job.
I hope you will enjoy this information that are not what you usually find in my blog but maybe could be interesting as well, as usual any suggestion will be very appreciated so don’t be shy and share your thoughts!