This post first appeared on DZone Agile Spotlight. Its original title was “What is an Agile Retrospective” and was entered as part of the DZone bounty competition.

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The first time that a lot of teams do (and what my team did when they had their retrospectives after they tried to implement Scrum or any agile process) is try to answer the following questions:

• What went well during the sprint?
• What didn’t go well?
• What can we do to improve?

We would go around the room. Each person answering the question if they wanted to. To mix it up, the manager would elicit responses, note the responses down, and then move on. The whole process took about 15-30 minutes at most and was completely USELESS!

What we did then was go by the letter of what a retrospective was, not by what its intent was.

So, What Really is an Agile Retrospective?

The retrospective is a time to reflect on the past work that has been done, and through self-assessment, determine how things went and how they can be improved. The above 3 questions may always be asked (not necessarily in the one sitting), but it is why they are asked that is as important as to how they are asked to get the most benefit from them. The goal of the retrospective is to have an action plan in place to try to improve productivity in the next iteration. I say “try” because the action plan is an experiment. Through the implementation of it in the next iteration do we determine whether or not the action plan is successful.

What Went Well?

Part of a retrospective is to look at what went well during a sprint. This serves 2 purposes:

• The first is to celebrate your success. No matter how large or small, you did something good and it should be acknowledged.
• The second is to see if this success can be replicated in other areas. Also, can it be sustained?

I recently completed a Scrum project. Now, we are a BAU (Business As Usual) team, where we mainly take care of systems rather than development, but during a recent project, it was decided to use Scrum. It was the first Scrum project for this team. For the final retrospective, one of the things I wanted the team to reflect on was, what practice could the team bring back from the Scrum project into their BAU work?

What Didn’t Go So Well?

This means “to acknowledge one’s own mistake and pledge improvement.”

One portion of the retrospective is a bit like this. When done properly, Agile uncovers problems. Problems may be small, problems may be large, but part of the retrospective is to acknowledge those problems and find ways to resolve them.

In western culture, even though it isn’t really said, mistakes are seen as a failure. They are seen as bad. So, they either get ignored, stigmatized (through blame and ridicule), or worked around. Very rarely are they directly addressed, and only then is it done so begrudgingly. Yes, all systems have problems, but it’s how you deal with those problems that is important.

One method I like to bring up to help answer the question of what didn’t go so well is to spend about 10 minutes letting the team throw out anything they didn’t like during the sprint. One example could be that planning didn’t go so well. Another could be that the sprint felt hectic. There were too many interruptions. The deployment failed. Tests failed. Anything and everything are fair game.

The next thing I like to do is have the team prioritize the top 3-5 problems and then explore what the root cause was. Based on that root cause, we brainstorm what can be done to try and determine a fix. And finally, one of the important results of the retrospective, we map out an action plan to alleviate the issue. I only focus on 3-5 problems and make sure that they are in distinctly separate segments of the development cycle simply because focusing on any more than that starts to become too much for the team to handle. You will also find that several problems have a common root cause.

For the action plan, there must be at least 1 action that needs to be done in the next sprint, but no more than 3. Any more than that, and again it is too much for the team to handle.

What Can be Improved?

The final question asked is to try to look at what you did during the sprint and see if there is a better way to do it. Improvements can be in the form of automation of tasks, or trying a different method or a different development language. It can also be as simple as explaining something a little better.

For improvements, I like to use the lean methods of eliminating waste where waste is:

• Defect
• Overproduction
• Waiting
• Non-utilized talent
• Transportation
• Inventory
• Motion
• Extra Processes

If a suggested improvement actually increases one of these wastes, it really needs to be justified.

Other Things to be Taken Into Account

An agile retrospective can take other considerations into account that help improve productivity. These can be the level of happiness of the team. A happy team is a productive team. The amount of learning the team has made during the last iteration is one example to look at the productivity level. There are many methods to do a retrospective. I’ll include some resources at the end of this article.

Rules

Within Scrum, a retrospective should take no more than 3 hours for a 1-month sprint. For shorter sprints, the time allocated should be less. For example, for 2-week sprints, I set the retrospectives to 1 hour 30 minutes maximum. Now, this is specifically for Scrum. For other agile methods, these rules may not apply.

Personally, I have two other mandatory rules:

• No blaming people. This isn’t a witch hunt. We’re all trying to solve problems and not point fingers.
• No excuses. I don’t care if you had to spend 2 days on a production problem and couldn’t do your work. What can we do to prevent the production problem from interfering again?

The final optional rule is:

• No one gets a doughnut until they speak.

This brings me to the final thing that I think should be at a retrospective. Food. The simple act of having food around relaxes the team. It invites discussion. Some Scrum Masters prefer to play icebreaker games. Me, I find that just having the food around helps.

One last note: a retrospective is only useful if the actions brought up during the retrospective are actually acted upon. If they are not, and they just get noted down and filed away, then the meeting itself becomes useless. It is through the actions being implemented that the team improves, and if you do it continuously (Kaizen) your team only keeps getting better.

The following article first appeared on the Scrum Alliance Member Articles

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How do you measure productivity? It’s a simple question, but does it have an easy answer?

If I increase my productivity by 20% or even 50%, how do I know for certain? How does your manager know? Is it a subjective, finger-in-the-air guess?

I thought I would explore the process of measuring how productive a person is. I presumed that a simple question would have a simple answer. To get at the answer, I realized that I needed to ask more questions.

What was the amount of work done?

The most obvious answer to how productive someone is, is to measure how much work that person has done. For example, John has done 50 things today (a rate of 50 items/day), whereas Jane has done only 5 (a rate of 5 items/day). Obviously, John is more productive, right?

Let’s consider another analogy: John delivered 50 parcels today. They were all on the same street, whereas Jane delivered only 5 parcels today — but they were delivered in towns 100 km apart. Now who do we think was more productive?

The amount of work done does not seem to be a good measure.

How many hours of work were spent?

The next obvious answer is the more hours you work, the more productive you are. So John works 12 hours per day, whereas Jane works 7 hours per day. John, again, is more productive, right?

Well, John spent those 12 hours writing Testing Procedure Specification reports that no one reads, browsed MySpace, and twiddled his thumbs. He also complained about losing his stapler. (Why, oh why, doesn’t Netflix carry Office Space!). By contrast, Jane worked on a method to save the company $5 million per year. Who was more productive?

The amount of time someone spends at work does not seem to be a good measure.

What was the value of work?

Perhaps we should try evaluating value. The higher the value of your work to the business, the more productive you are, right?

So John works on 5 high-value, 2 medium-value, and 1 low-value piece of work. Jane worked on 1 high-value piece of work. However, John’s 5 high-value and 2 medium-values pieces of work were not very difficult, as they took only a few hours to do. The low-value work took him weeks, whereas Jane’s one high-value piece of work was difficult and required days of effort. Who was more productive?

The amount of value of the work does not seem to be a good measure, but I think we are going in the right direction. Value does need to be taken into account.

What was the effort and difficulty?

Because the value of work must be taken into account, let’s work on the high-value items first. However, I think we need to take into account how much effort something takes.

Suppose we rate the work based on how much effort each item takes by using measures such as small, medium, and large. Assume that John worked on a large item for a week, while Jane worked on three medium items for a week. Are three mediums more work than one large? Are three mediums equal to one large? How can you tell easily? Who is more productive in this case, John or Jane?

Defining units of measure

I think we are getting close. We need a common unit of measure &mash; some simple way to convert from (S)mall/(M)edium/(L)arge to a number. Let’s say that S = 1, M = 2, and L = 3.

So, we have John who worked on 3 smalls, while Jane worked on 6 smalls. This also doesn’t sound right. Some small tasks take no time at all, whereas others can take significant effort. We need something more than just three categories. Maybe we can use extra small (XS) for those items that take little to no effort; small (S) for items that take a little bit of effort, but still not much; medium (M) for those that are a quite bit more effort; large (L) for something that takes a lot of effort, and finally extra large (XL) for something that will either pull a muscle or burst a blood vessel, based on the amount of effort.

The units of measure look something like this:
XS = 1
S = 2
M = 3
L = 4
XL = 5

Wait, something doesn’t seem right. Where is the cutoff point from “I’m exhausted from the effort” (Large) to “My head hurts” (Extra Large), or from tilts hand up/down, left/right in so-so motion (Medium) to “I’m exhausted” (Large)? The differences need to be much bigger than one unit greater.

How about this measure: The next level up is the sum of the two previous units? It looks something like this:
XS = 1
S = 2
M = 3 (same as before)
L = 5
XL = 8

Hmm, a 5 to 8 jump isn’t “Ow, my head hurts!” level of effort, but if we add an XXL, we get XXL = 13. That’s a big enough jump.

This sequence looks familiar. I remember my high school math teacher, Mr. Fibonacci, mentioning something like this. This looks very interesting. I’m going to call these work units. (Hey, who said story points? What’s that?) Now we can work out how much work has been done.

Assume that John with his Large unit of measure has completed 5 work units, whereas Jane has completed 6 work units. I think we are making progress.

Let’s standardize this to a time period. They both completed the tasks in one week. The productivity rate for John was 5 work units per week and Jane’s was 6 work units per week. (Hey, who mentioned velocity!)

Hang on, we’re not quite done yet. Individual productivity rates are all well and good, but John and Jane are a team. Measuring individual productivity rates does not promote a team mentality. If Jane is doing more than John, she should be helping John, or vice versa. I should combine these to one overall rate, so the team rate is 11 work units per week. I should only compare rates week to week, per team, and not across teams, because each team sizes work differently. I also need to make sure that the team agrees on the size of the work as a whole. There’s no point in having Jane say something is small when John thinks it’s large. They will both need to discuss and agree.

If, in a few weeks, Jane and John’s combined work increases to 17 work units per week, they have gained about a 50% increase in productivity. A measurable, comparable unit of measure for productivity. I think we’ve got it!

Conclusion

This experiment on trying to determine how a manager might work out how to measure productivity is a fun way, at least for me, of trying to understand why in Agile you would use something like story points and velocity.

Using velocity for measuring productivity is not perfect and is subjective, because it is based on an individual’s or the team’s idea of the size of work. It is also open to abuse. Jane and John could say all their work is Large and increase their productivity (throughput) significantly. Therefore, this rating should not be used for any incentives, simply because it can be abused and thus the rate becomes meaningless. However, it does indicate, for an experiment or trial, whether a productivity gain has made headway.

As you can see, this also ties into estimation, which is another reason to move away from doing estimates as time units.

One more thing: Although this story is complete fiction, I still think it deserves a happy ending.

Epilogue

With the help of their manager, John and Jane were able to visualize their productivity rates. Thus, they were able to put them into effect. They could make changes to the way they worked and get quick feedback on how those changes affected their throughput for work. Six months later, their productivity rose 1000%. They did this through experimentation, eliminating wasteful practices, and adopting a framework called Scrum.

And they lived happily ever after.

This article first appeared on the Scrum Alliance Member Articles Section This version is the original unedited version.

Little’s law is the theorem of queuing created by John Little, a retired professor from MIT

The theory is

l = tw

Where

l = the length of the queue

t = the rate at which items arrive or are removed from a steady state system (Throughput) and

w = the wait time in the queue

So, if you want to work out the wait time in the queue (ie, how long before your job is looked at) then we rearrange to

w=l/t

We see that the wait time is proportional to the length of the queue and inversely proportional to the processing rate.

So what does this mean. Simply put, if your processing rate is slow, then the larger the queue is, the longer waiting time before a new entry into the queue is processed. In other words your ability to change – be agile reduces.

Whereas, if your processing time is faster than your length in the queue, then you will be processing the queue quite quickly – but you run the risk of your system constantly being starved for work.

So how can I demonstrate this?

Let’s say you have a processing rate of one story every 2 days. This gives you a rate of 0.5 stories per day.

If we have a queue size of 1.

Then

w = 1/0.5

= 2 days your story will wait in the queue before it is even started on when added to the queue.

Now, lets say we push to the queue 2 stories.

w = 2/0.5

Now, for any additional stories entering the queue will take 4 days before they are looked at.

Our agility is really slowing down now.

Adding More Resources (Increasing Throughput)

Now, ok. Surely if I add more resources I can processing things quicker. My throughput has increased, so things should improve.

Ok, let’s say you now have 2 people, each with the capability of doing 0.5 stories per day. So you’re processing speed has doubled to 1 story per day.

So with a queue depth of 1.

w = 1/1

So the time waiting in the queue is now 1 day. We have increased our throughput.

Let’s try increasing our queue depth to 2.

w = 2/1

So the wait time is now 2 days again. Our agility is starting to go away again.

The more we assign to the queue, the longer it is going to take before the story is looked at.

The problem here is that you cannot always add more people. People and resources cost money. So what else can we do?

Reduce Queue Size

Let’s try something else. Let’s try reducing the queue size to zero. To keep things simple, we’ll go back to one person.

w = 0/0.5

Our wait time is now Zero????

We now have complete agility – the ability to change stories up until they are worked on.

So how do we achieve Zero queue size? Well, we’re cheating a little. There is still a queue – the backlog. What we are doing is no longer assigning stories to people. Their personal “queues” (The work in progress) has been reduced to “zero” – in other words they are working on one story/task/item at a time and “pulling” new items off the backlog when they finish. This allows the changing of the backlog without affecting the work.

Multitasking

Now, one of the problems with “assigning” tasks to people is that they have a tendency to multitask. Chop and change between what has been assigned to them and think they are making progress.

This is actually not the case. Let me explain.

Say you have 3 tasks. A, B and C. Each task takes let’s say a nice round number. 10 days to complete.

Now if we do these tasks sequentially, it’s going to take 10 days to complete each task.

But, we are supermen/women err people! We can multitask! Get everything done quicker! Is that the case?

Well, lets see. Say we split up the task so we work 5 days on each task to get something done of everything. We’re keeping it simple here.

So is it quicker to finish each task? Umm, no. We have actually doubled the time it takes to complete each task.

Now, this may not matter as the overall time for all tasks is still 30 days. The same as if we did it sequentially.

Where it comes into a problem though is that switching tasks is not free. There is a penalty. We have to dump our thought process on one task, and reload everything for the next. That takes time and energy. Especially if the time between multitasking is hours or minutes and not days.

Secondly, if there is any delay in completing a “portion” of a task – For example C took a little longer than first thought and you spent 6 days instead of 5, then you not only have delayed task C, but also completion of task A and B! And potentially the whole project! This then leads to stakeholders of A and B escalating as they need their stuff done NOW, so you stop, rearrange and the whole thing becomes a chaotic mess. Business as usual? For most people it is. So much so that for most it’s a fact of life. So much so that when developers look at how long something will take to complete, we ignore elapsed time and focus on work time, but stakeholders focus on elapsed time, so as with any mismatch, tension arises.

Caveat

Now I should probably mention that these techniques are not going to shorten the delivery time for a set amount of work in a perfect system without losses such as context switching or reorganizing regardless whether or not you have a queue size of zero or fifty or if,you switch tasks every few minutes. We are not doing any magic here. Just like the conservation of energy, the amount of work being done overall in the system is maintained. What we are doing here is rearranging things so that stuff gets done sooner and if you prioritize your items to give the most value, you get more value sooner as well. We are also dealing with a system that has reached steady state. As with anything to reach steady state, there is a ramp up time where the system is loaded and variances in work from one item to the next are minimal. Something that doesn’t come naturally in any knowledge based project.

Conclusion

I know my maths is a little off – I could probably explain it a lot better 20 years ago when I actually did maths in Uni, but Little’s Law shows a mathematical model on our ability to be Agile. It shows that “Pulling” increases your ability to respond to change as opposed to “assigning” work to someone. If you do assign, it shows that reducing the amount you load onto a person actually helps get things done sooner.

Finally, if you do overload someone by assigning tasks to them, as we are human, we tend to chop and change between those tasks for whatever reason. What this means is that for any one particular task to complete – it will actually take longer to complete any one task. Not only that, but a delay in one task could affect the delivery of other tasks that may be of a higher priority.

So keep your work in progress small (Preferably 1 thing at a time) try to keep the size of the work even and small in size to regulate the throughput to a steady state, and pull new work as required. You will get things done sooner, smoother and hopefully be one step closer to gaining control of the whole system. Better yet, you are doing this all with no additional cost!

Since I received my Lean Six Sigma Yellow belt from goleansixsigma I have been receiving a lot of emails about how to do things better. How to implement Lean and Six Sigma from doing your gardening to any project. Now, a lot of these posts include techniques taken from the Agile community such as Kanban boards, Retrospectives and such. What we are seeing here is a cross pollination of techniques across different disciplines. Its not surprising. Go Lean Six Sigma, mainly used, but not limited to the manufacturing space  as I understand it and Agile for the software industry have the same parentage in the Toyota Production System and both foster continuous improvement. It stands to reason that in improvement and practice in one discipline could be used in another.

To me, it just proves that we are all on the right track, be it Agile, Lean, DevOps, Theory Of Constraints, they are all on the same path, just in different lanes to the same destination of continuous improvement through feedback loops. Each lane a variation of solving the same or similar problems, but in different contexts.

So my thinking is that regardless of the methodology you employ, or even if you make it up yourself. Provided you are willing to question everything, have an open mind, diligently try to improve and implement a feedback loop to test those improvements and adapt to be better, you will eventually find yourself on or close to one of these methodologies, or potentially a completely different lane as your “context” may be different but still going the same way.

Ok, after more than 2 years of studying Lean and Agile and a little over 1 year since I got my Scrum Master certification, I am finally a Scrum Master (albeit part time) in a project.  I haven't got full control of the scrum process and I wasn't Scrum Master from the start (I was on leave when the project started) but it is a start and there have been and still are a few challenges.

Last Friday I did my second retrospective and I tried to do one of my own making this time.

After a successful showcase the day before (It was the only time we could get all the stakeholders together – so we had a 9 day sprint) I didn't want to focus on the success. Unlike most projects I've worked on, when something is successful – we tend to focus on the successes and the failures and problems get shoved under the rug. This time I wanted to make them front and center.

So, with the sprint report in hand showing a big cliff after 5 days of work, and buttering everyone up with doughnuts we went to work.

The question became "How can be make a sprint more linear in execution instead of the cliff we had?" This became the guideline for the retrospective, but what I was really after was any problems.

I had 3 rules for the Retrospective.

2. No one can have a doughnut until they bring up a problem. This was to firstly give everyone an incentive to speak up. Doughnuts can be good incentives – except for those who are looking out for what they eat – but they still got involved.
4. No Blaming, finger pointing. I don't want anything said to be held against anyone else.
6. No excuses. I don't care there were BAU issues during the sprint.

The first step was to get a list of problems, issues, anything that you hated and anything that you think prevented you from completing stories in a linear fashion. We did this for the first 15 minutes.

Next we identified any duplicates and prioritized the first 5 problems.

The final step was to go through each of the 5 problems and work out the "Why?" the problem occurred. "How?" we can overcome the problem and finally any "Action" that needs to be done.

The board was broken up as follows.

In the Problem section, I inserted the first of the 5 problems.

In the Why, the team then brought up reasons for the problem with me prompting to drill down. I was trying to use the 5 why's technique to get to the root causes. I probably didn't do so well, as there was many root causes, but it is still early days experience wise for me.

In the How section, we brought up contingencies and countermeasures for the causes of the problems.

Finally in the Actions section, we bought up actions for the Scrum Master, Product Owner and Team Members either collectively or individually to do something. These were not assigned, but members decided to take responsibility for the actions.

I think the whole process went fairly well with the only problem that we went overtime by about 10 min. (From 1.5 hours time-boxed for the retro because it was a 2 week sprint).

The reason I liked this type of retrospective was that it actually focused the team on individual issues and problems that "they" found and had issue with. The sprint report gave focus  as to what was wrong rather than pie in the sky thinking.  Now we see what we can do about it in the next sprint.

As a personal note – Implementing Scrum is hard. Especially when you are doing it the first time and have no idea what you are doing, even after studying it for so long. I have this mental model in my head of what a Scrum sprint should look like and we have varied wildly from that. I'm not going to take this as a sign that Scrum doesn't work – but as a sign that I'm doing something wrong, which I know I am. I feel that my job now is to reign in the bad practices and try to introduce good practices as I understand them in gradually. For those practices that I don't quite understand, try something and see if it works while still staying to the scrum framework.

Once everything is reigned in, then start taking stats more seriously and be more aggressive in our improvements.

At least that is my thinking – which is going to be hard with a 4 sprint project. But who knows, it might help with BAU work in the future after this project.

Ok, here is another chapter in my upcoming (hopefully) book on Agile.

This post is the raw text, it still needs refinement, but I just wanted to record my unfiltered thoughts first. At some point this will be reposted as an edited version, or I’ll just release the book if it is ever done.

Agile Methodologies

Most likely if you are thinking about going agile, you are thinking Scrum. Yes, Scrum is the most popular method of Agile, but there have been many that have been developed over the years. Some have stood the test of time and are still in use today. Others have dropped off to the wayside. Some are new comers and have managed to gain a following. In this section, I want to go through some of the agile Methodologies that are out there, but I will concentrate specifically on Scrum for two reasons. Firstly, it is the most popular implementation of Agile, and secondly, it is the agile methodology that I am most familiar with.

The Toyota Production System (Lean)

The Toyota Production System was the first Agile approach although it was developed long before the term Agile. It even pre-dates software development. In fact it started in the Car manufacturing industry. The approach was simple. Elimination of waste and continuous improvement. I won’t go through details of how it was developed, but eventually it was taken up by other car manufacturers in the 1980’s and 1990’s and changed its name to Lean as you could not have car manufacturers saying they worked the same way as Toyota. It wasn’t until Tom and Mary Poppendieck published the book “Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit” in 2003 that the Lean software movement took off, even though a majority of Agile Methodologies developed earlier used Lean Principles as a basis.
The lean Software development approach is summarized in the following principles.

1. Eliminate Waste.
2. Amplify Learning.
3. Decide as late as possible
4. Deliver as fast as possible
5. Empower the team
6. Build integrity in
7. See The Whole

Lean Software Development Wikipedia Entry
The Lean Mindset – Tom and Mary Poppendieck

DSDM (Dynamic System Development Method)

DSDM was first developed in 1994 and was thought to provide discipline to RAD (Rapid Application Development) software development.
DSDM is an iterative and incremental approach to software development that has elements of the agile development approach and encouraged s end user/customer involvement of the process. DSDM is also where the MoSCoW prioritization method was developed.
MoSCoW uses the four following priorities.
M – Must Have Requirements
S – Should Have Requirements
C – Could Have Requirements
W – Won’t Have Requirements
DSDM is owned and managed by the Agile Business Consortium, a not-for-profit vendor independent organization.

Dynamic System Development Method

Extreme Programming (XP)

Extreme Programming was created by Kent Beck during his work at Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation payroll project which he started working on in 1996. He refined his approach and released the book Extreme Programming Explained in 1999. The premise of extreme Programming was to take the best practices of Software Development at the time and take them to extreme levels. At the time Extreme Sports was very popular. Principles of Test First development and Pair Programming were formalized through the extreme Programming

The lifecycle of Extreme Programming consists of 5 phases.

• Exploration
• Planning
• Iterations to Release
• Productionising
• Maintenance and
• Death

The 4 basic activities for Extreme Programming are

• coding
• Testing
• Listening
• Designing

The 5 values of Extreme Programming are

• communication
• Simplicity
• Feedback
• Courage
• respect

Extreme Programming Wikipedia Entry

Kent Beck – Extreme Programming Explained

Agile RUP (Rational Unified Process) or AUP (Agile Unified Process)

Agile RUP is a simplified version of the Rational Unified Process. The Rational Unified Process is an iterative software process originally developed by Rational Software in the 1990’s. Rational was later purchased by IBM in 2003.

AUP has seven disciplines.

• Model
• Implementation
• Test
• Deployment
• Configuration Management
• Project Management
• Environment

Philosophies

• Your staff know what they are doing
• Simplicity
• Agility
• Focus on high value activities
• Tool independence
• You’ll want to tailor the AUP to meet your own needs

Wikipedia Entry For Agile Unified Process

Kanban

Kanban in software development is a method for managing knowledge work. It is a visual method that specifically uses “pull” to control the flow. This is in contradiction of more traditional methods of work management where work is “pushed” into process.
Kanban was developed by David Anderson n his 2010 book “ Kanban” where he used the Theory of Constraints methodology at a project at Microsoft. The name Kanban comes from the Toyota Production System where it means “signal” and is used to signal the need for something.
A simple example of a Kanban system in manufacturing would be where an assembler might have 2 tubs of screws. The first tub he takes from, the second is standby. When he runs out of screws in the first tub, a card attached to the tub is taken to signal that the assembler has run out of screws. The assembler continues to use the second tub. The card, known as a Kanban card is then taken to inventory where the screws are kept. This signals the inventory to send out another tub of screws to the assembler, which now becomes his second tub.
That is not the end of the card though. That card is then sent to the purchasing department where it triggers he purchasing of another tub of screws. As a side note, Toyota does do orders at least daily for the work to be done the next day, if not more often. Very rarely do they order in bulk. That would only be for times when there is long shipping times for parts directly from Japan, at least here in Australia. Most parts are sourced locally, delivered either that day or the next day for the cars to be manufactured that day.
Back to software development, David Anderson modeled work in a similar manner. Cards represent the work that needs to be done. There are lanes that indicate the process the “work” needs to go through. The idea is that the worker pulls the cards as it progresses from one process to the next. Work in process is limited only to a maximum of 3 items per worker. This helps alleviate some inconsistencies. If a worker has more than 3 items in progress in a process, then the person giving the work needs to step in, and help that worker get back on track.
For example, a developer develops 4 features quickly in succession, but the tester is stuck on the first feature still. The developer stops further development and then helps the tester with testing. The developer may help test 2 features. Now when the testers work in progress drops down to 2, the developer goes back to development.
The advantage of the system is that it gets things done quicker. It also allows you to see where the problems are in the system and know where to add additional resources. Kanban is also very visual. You can see at a glance the work in progress, what is remaining to be done and what has been done. Especially when a physical board is used. Some people also like virtual boards. The advantage of a virtual board is that it can help teams with remote members, automatically generate reports and not be knocked over, but you loose the visibility. You have to “open” the software to view the board and thus it can fall to the “out of sight, out of mind” problem.

The Kanban system has been so successful that is is used on many agile Methodologies as a means to manage work to be done. Many teams that use agile of varying types can be seen to have physical boards around their office as a means to manage work, be they use Kanban itself or Scrum, XP or even Lean Software development.

Wikipedia – Kanban Development>)

David Anderson – Kanban

Crystal

Crystal is a family of Agile methodologies such as Crystal Clear, Crystal Yellow, Crystal Orange and Crystal Red. The darker the colour, the more heavy the methodology. Each approach is used depending on the project size, team size, critically, project priorities etc.
Several of the key properties of crystal include teamwork
, communication and simplicity. There is an element of frequent reflection to adjust and improve the process. Like other Agile processes, Crystal promotes the frequent delivery of working software, high user involvement, adaptability and the removal of waste in the form of bureaucracy or distractions.
Crystal was started by Alistair Cockburn when he released the book “Crystal Clear: A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams” published 2004.

Wikipedia Entry for Crystal Clear)

DevOps

The DevOps movement was started by Patrick Debois in 2009 when he saw the live presentation streamed over the internet by Paul Hammond and John Alspaw at the 2009 Velocity Conference.
The talk, “10 Deploys Per Day, Dev and Ops Co-operation at Flickr”.
Through the twitter stream, Patrick sited how much he would have liked to be at the conference and through a joke was told to start his own conference.
Patrick did just that and in 2009 in Ghent Belgium, the first ever DevOps Days conference was held. Due to Twitters 140 character limit, the “Days” portion of the name was dropped and the hash tag #DevOps was born and has stuck since.

DevOps was created by people in operations who were frustrated at the way work was being done. They would see Agile being used by Developers, but would stop once the features were in production. There had to be a better way. And so people in operations started their own methodology which included culture, tools and philosophy. Technology such as Infrastructure as Code, Continuous Deployment and culture borrowed from other Agile processes such as Theory of Constraints, Lean. They embraced the teachings of W. Edwards Deming, Elyahu Goldratt and Taichi Ohno. Learned lessons from the Manufacturing industry from 30 years previous. They embrace Agile methodologies such as Scrum, but expand on the process to continue into operations.
DevOps promotes continuous delivery, automation of the mundane, the difficult and frequent deployments. Some companies deploy multiple times per day. Amazon, one of the most prolific users of DevOps deploys on average once every 11.6 seconds. DevOps encourages experimentation to try to improve processes and continuously strive to get better.

Some say that DevOps may be the next evolution of Agile. They may be right.

Wikipedia Entry For DevOps

Damon Edwards – The History Of DevOps

John Alspaw and Paul Hammond – 10 Deploys Per Day

Amazon Deploys Every 11.6 Seconds

Scrum

We finally come to Scrum. Scrum is a methodology and framework developed by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber and presented to the OOPSLA conference in 1995. Scrum is an open source framework. You do not have to pay any licence fees to use Scrum, but you do need to follow the required portions of Scrum, otherwise as mentioned in the Scrum Guide, although you can use portions of Scrum, if you are not following the requirements as per the guide, you are not doing Scrum.
Scrum is a framework. It has been created to form a base process. Once you have the basics in place you can develop on top. Practices such as User Stories and Kanban Boards are examples of this.
Scrum consists of 3 roles.
The Scrum Master who is in charge of making sure that the team follows the Scrum principles. Without someone driving the principles, teams tend to regress to more familiar development processes such as Waterfall, or start doing the “Easy” Parts of Scrum without doing the hard parts, thus not getting the full benefit.
The second role is the “Product Owner”. The Product Owner is the advocate for the business. They provide the requirements. What the business wants. They are also in charge of what work is to be done which is in the form of an ordered backlog. The backlog is ordered based on what gives the most value to the business. The product owner does not dictate how the work is to be done.
The third and final role is the Development Team. This is a self managed , cross functional dedicated team who performs the work. The team is in charge of how to implement the requirements. There are no leaders within the team. The whole concept is very egalitarian.

In Scrum there are 4 ceremonies.
The Sprint Planning Sessions where planning of the sprint, a short period of development usually about 2 weeks.
The Daily Standup where the Development Team members synchronize on what they are doing.
The Sprint Review where the development team shows the stake holders what they have done during the sprint and finally the
Retrospective where the team reflects on the sprint. Determine what practices went well, what didn’t and try to find out how to improve on the next sprint.
This is another form of the feedback cycle.

Finally, there are 3 artifacts in Scrum.
The Product backlog.
The Sprint Backlog and the
Product Increment. A portion of the product that should be in a state that is releasable to production after each sprint.

We will go through the details of Scrum later in more detail.

The Scrum Guide

Wikipedia Entry – Scrum Software Development)

Scrum Hybrids

Finally there are Scrum Hybrids. These are where 2 or more methodologies are combined with Scrum. Some notable hybrids are Scrumban, a combination of Scrum and Kanban and Water-Scrum-Fall where the waterfall methodology is combined with Scrum. It should be noted that Water-Scrum-Fall is not generally an accepted methodology in the Agile community, but is seen as an example of what can happen when the easy bits of scrum are combined with the Waterfall Methodology. Generally the benefits of this approach are minimal compared to properly implemented Scrum.
Not all hybrids are bad – Scrumban is considered a success, but you do need to know what you are doing to get the full benefits.

Wikipedia Entry – Scrumban

Water-Scrum-Fall

Notable Mentions

Other notable mentions are
The Theory of Constraints. Not considered an Agile Methodology, but can be adapted to Software development and in the case of DevOps has been incorporated. Released when Elyahu Goldratt released his Management teaching novel “The Goal”.

Lean Six Sigma. Another manufacturing methodology that can be adapted to Software Development that combines the elimination of Waste part of Lean with the Continuous Improvement parts of Six Sigma.
Six Sigma uses the DMAIC process for problem resolution where it stands for
D – Define
M – Measure
A – Analyze
I – Improve
C – Control

Firstly a disclaimer. I have never done pair Programming. Never read officially about it I.e. Kent Becks Extreme Programming Explained. I have only what I have read in blogs, which is limited and my own thoughts. 
I feel it is important to document my ignorant understanding before I embark on learning as it gives a base level of my understanding based on what I currently know about agile methods which I can look at in the near or distant future and see my progress. 

Now, for my ideas on pair Programming .

Say you have 2 people, A and B. A has knowledge that B needs.

First phase, A and B sit together. A works while B observes. B can ask questions, but A explains as they go along what they are dong.

Second phase, B takes over while A observes. B applies the knowledge they have learned, while A corrects B for any mistakes or answers any questions as required.

At the end of both phases, you now have 2 people converse in the knowledge.

Now it it time for the third phase. B now teaches C and simultaneously, A can teach D if required.

This I see as a good way to disseminate knowledge through a group. You get the one on one time and then apply the knowledge through teaching. 

I first saw something similar in a TV show. ER as a method for surgeons to disseminate knowledge. The saying was…

• See one
• Do one
• Teach one

Now, as I mentioned earlier, this is my ignorant thoughts, but I would like to know everyone else’s on the topic. Let me know in the comments.

I recently watched the movie ‘The Founder’, and i was watching the MacDonalds brothers talking about how they started. To me, the way they worked everything out looked like Lean to me. They way they worked out the restaurant layout, on a tennis court, with chalk outlines then get the people in to simulate their work. Try it out, when it doesn’t work, scrub out the lines, re-draw. The way the brothers automated, also how they failed but kept trying different things. They also didn’t hide anything. Eye showed everything off. Not only to Ray Kroc, but anyone interested. Just like TOyota does.
The whole system looked like lean in the making, if this story is accurate, it meant that the US had lean concepts 30+ years before it was formally introduced by Toyota in the 80’s. The movie was sad in the end, the McDonald brothers lost their legacy. Had there been collaboration instead of confrontation between the McDonald brothers and Ray Kroc, maybe lean might have been incorporated into the culture a decade or so earlier.

I guess we’ll never know.

I’ve just completed and passed the Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt course at https://goleansixsigma.com/

The course is an introduction to Lean Six Sigma and goes through the DMAIC steps. The basic introduction is the white belt which is also free, but I didn’t take.

D – Define

M – Measure

A – Analyze

I – Implement

C – Control

The course itself is free and I recommend doing the course as it will give you another perspective to Lean. Whether or not you choose to do the certification, I leave that up to you, but it costs $99 US to take the test with unlimited retakes, which I happily paid.

At some point I’ll go through the things I found interesting in the course, but for now I just want to let you know about it.