Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social
@allenholub
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I help ppl build software better: . DM is open. Upcoming-classes: . In-progress book:
Berkeley, CA
Joined February 2009
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Educating a team slows you down for a week or two. Not educating the team slows you down forever. Time spent in learning is never wasted.
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If you're doing Scrum and estimating or breaking up stories into tasks, you may want to reconsider. From the horses mouth: 👇
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Public service announcement:
Dear programmers,
NOT LETTING ME CUT/PASTE A PASSWORD MAKES MY ACCOUNT *****LESS***** SECURE. There is a circle of hell reserved for you if you don't allow paste into a password field.
Regards,
Your Customers
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Words that DO NOT appear in the Agile Manifesto & Principles:
sprint
backlog
product owner, scrum master
release train
story
story points
estimate
velocity
meeting
Jira
manager
productivity
utilization
What should I add to that list?
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The idea of a "full stack developer" is an insane fantasy, given the complexity of modern software. That's why we have full-stack *teams.* Every skill needed to get an idea into our customers hands is represented *on the team* by at least 2 ppl, & everybody teaches everybody else
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The argument that "we need to use microservices to get hard boundaries between components," is really "we are so undisciplined that we need to add considerable complexity to protect ourselves from ourselves." →
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Valve is one of the most agile companies I know of. No Sprints. No backlogs. No frameworks. No Scrum. No SAFe. Just pure agility built around iterative development and feedback. It's worth 15 minutes of your life to see how they work: 1/2
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Do not use a TODO comments. Instead, add a test that fails because of the issue. That way, it might actually get fixed!
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Agile:
• Work small
• Talk to each other
• Make people’s lives better
That’s it. All that other junk is a distraction.
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Not deploying on Friday is a huge red flag, indicating a seriously broken process—insufficient testing, for example, a lack of continuous integration and waterfall thinking (deploy many times throughout dev), and most importantly, no culture of quality. Fix all that.
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The purpose of TDD is to design/build the code, not test it.
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Scrum solves problems that existed 30 years ago. If your organization is 30 years behind the curve, by all means, try it! If, however, you're not living decades in the past, there are now much better alternatives (and none of them are certificated/canned processes/frameworks).
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There is no such thing as a "DevOps Engineer." There are just engineers. They can develop. They can deploy the things they develop.
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I find it interesting that PO/PMs at Atlassian don't use Jira. Just sayin'.
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The real "Spotify Model" is to continuously adapt your process and structure as you learn. People who are copying a snapshot of what Spotify was doing 8 years ago, which those ppl call the "Spotify Model," are clueless about how agile companies work.
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You can work for years to be more Agile at the team level, and the first time a CEO says "I need a solid estimate and roadmap & schedule for developing this product," 100% of that agiity is flushed down the toilet. It has to come from the top down.
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I do not do Scrum, so I have no need to estimate an increment/Sprint. I just work on the most valuable single story next. I pull that story, narrow it down to a set of <= 2-day stories, pick the most valuable (of the most valuable 😄), and build that. 1/3
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I think one of the most destructive myths in software is that it costs more or takes longer to develop higher-quality code. IME, the higher the quality, the faster the development goes. You cannot be fast if you can't trust your code.
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No customer on the planet cares about how many points you completed in your Sprint.
Just sayin'.
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Bugs do not appear by magic. Somebody was paid to write them. Somebody was encouraged to work in a way that bugs would be created. The inevitability of bugs (beyond a very small number) is a myth. Their presence reflects the culture.
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You can do Scrum until you're blue, but if you're fighting your code to make small changes, agility is impossible. Fix that first. Bad code costs real money and adds real delay. The cost of that delay often easily exceeds the cost of a rewrite.
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Teach the testers to program. Teach the programmers to test.
Testing is a skill, not a job title.
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Unnecessary complexity is probably the single biggest problem in the software industry. It spawns a host of problems.
Write exactly what you need to write to solve the problem at hand, not one semicolon more.
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"Do it in small pieces and talk to each other"
That's pretty much what Agile is. It's not complicated.
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You need PRs when:
• You don’t trust the code
• You don't trust the person writing the code
• You don’t trust the process used to write the code
• You don’t trust the system used to check in the code
Maybe we should dump the PRs and work on that trust thing instead?
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Best ways to speed things up:
• Work on only one thing at a time.
• Work as an ensemble, not as isolated individuals.
• Get all the skills needed to do the work in one place.
• Don't' waste time building things nobody wants/needs.
• Trust people to do their work. 1/2
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Deadlines (even end of Sprint) are an anti-pattern. With only a few legitimate exceptions (e.g. regulatory), they are nothing but a tool of manipulation used to exploit people into “working harder,” and they invariably lower quality. If you can’t finish “in time,” reduce scope.
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It’s highly doubtful that you’re an agile organization if every team in your company is using the same process. “Self-organizing teams,” are essential to agility, and if you’re told what to do and how to do it, you’re hardly self organizing.
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I just came across somebody whose last name is Null. I cannot imagine the grief the poor guy is going through on a daily basis 😄
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MVP is the:
_M_inimum thing you can build that tests the
_V_iability of a
_P_roduct idea.
It is a TEST, not a product.
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The 8-hour day is an artifact of the industrial age. It’s how you get 3 shifts in a factory. They were 12-hours in the 19th c.
IMO, 40-hour weeks, 8 hours/day, is not sustainable for knowledge work. 6 hours is about the max for any productivity. The other 2 is just punishment.
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There is not a customer on the planet who cares how many story points you complete this Sprint 1/5
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I'm a little shocked by the comments to this that say that the first one is better. We have a lot of work to do as a profession.
Nine times out of ten, clarity beats brevity when writing code.
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Words that DO appear in the Agile Manifesto & Principles:
individuals
interaction
valuable (software)
collaboration
change
customer
deliver…frequently
conversation
technical excellence
simplicity
self-organizing
reflects on…effective
adjusts
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When you release high quality code every day or so, people stop asking for estimates.
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Every bug is really a missing test.
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OKRs are fine as far as they go, but I *really* dislike the requirement that the KR must be a metric—something measurable. Time for my periodic list of quotes on measurement!
Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". 1/6
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An MVP is an experiment that tests the hypothesis that something’s worth building. It is NOT Version 1 of a product.
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"Scaling Agile" almost always means "add bureaucracy to make this Agile thing look more like what we do now (and make sure middle managers keep their jobs)."
Doesn't work that way. Sorry.
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"Low performers" often become high performers when they move to another team. The team matters. A lot.
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I've yet to see a product that was improved because of estimates.
I've yet to see a product that was delivered sooner because of estimates.
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I HATE HATE HATE Microsoft Teams. I couldn't join a meeting today. Tried for 30+ minutes. There is no "Join a meeting" button. The links sent to me didn't work (got me to some worthless splash page). It insisted I log on (to what? with what account?) It's insanely bad.
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"Agility at scale" is nuts. Scale the work down, not the process up. I've never seen an Agile process that was "scaled up" retain its agility. Can very large systems be built in an agile way? Sure. Should they be? Probably not. Build smaller cooperative systems instead.
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The 8-hour day is a remnant of 19th c. industrialism. The factory ran 24x7 with three shifts. There's zero reason to keep that convention in software. We don't work shifts. Nobody can can do intense creative work for 8 hours straight, day in, day out.
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Agile software projects cannot be late, so "are we on schedule" and "will we meet our deadline" are meaningless questions. 1/7
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I’m hereby introducing a new technical term: agilewashing. It’s the practice of putting a thin layer of Agile™ paint on a corrupt and rotting waterfall system and imagining that everything’s fixed. SAFe, for example, is a form of agilewashing.
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No. Things don't take longer. Let's look at one way to make stories smaller. The image in the QT is the first step in breaking up a large story into many small ones. (Something they evidently didn't do.) A "workflow diagram" like that is the first step. 1/5
This is the flowchart of how slack decides to send a notification.
It is an excellent example of why a simple feature may take much longer.
This might also explain why people don’t get notifications or clear the red dots sometimes.
Img source: slack eng blog
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When you scale shit, you just get a bigger pile of it.
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I think PRs are a _really_ bad idea. They make sense in an isolated-individual open-source model, but are an antipattern in most business-dev contexts where collaboration (e.g. mobbing) is possible, so code reviews aren’t needed. PRs just add dependencies, delays, & bottlenecks.
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Conway's Law is the law, not a suggestion 😄
Brazeal: How your org predicts your CI/CD pipeline
https://acloudguru.com/blog/engineering/cd-pipeline
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In general, it's a bad idea to ask customers what features they want, but it's a really good idea to ask them about their work and what's hard/frustrating/painful to do. It's your job to figure out the best way to fix that problem, not theirs.
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You don't ask a surgeon to track time by task to the minute as she operates, and if you did, what would that tell you about how successful the operation would be? How, exactly, is software development any different?
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Teams working on multiple projects is a huge red flag. There's been a lot of research in this area. You loose considerable productivity with each project. (At 5 projects, you loose about 80% of your productivity when compared to working on a single project).
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"Project managment" usually means: keep the project on time an in budget. "Product managment" is more: build the most valuable thing you can within the time/budget constraints we have. That makes way more sense to me.
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Agile orgs don't have QA teams, by and large. As Deming pointed out, you cannot inspect quality into a product. It has to be there to begin with. A separate QA team is an antipattern. Cross-functional teams have all the skills necessary to deliver an idea, including QA.
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How do you estimate the team cost for a project? Don't. Create stable teams (a fixed cost). Replace project thinking w/ product thinking. What's the most important thing that moves the entire product forward? Do that. Bring work to the teams. Don't form teams to do the work.
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Tech debt is entirely about learning. You start by writing the best code you possibly can. Then you learn something that tells you that the code has issues (so fix them). Tech debt is inevitable if you're learning. I, at least, am always learning, so there's always tech debt.
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Conway's Law says the structure of the code reflects the structure of the org. When management arbitrarily reorganizes teams to work on "projects," they are also randomly & arbitrarily changing your architecture. No wonder monoliths in project-thinking orgs are such a mess.
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If you can get a certificate in it, it’s not Agile. You can’t certify "do what works & if it doesn’t work, fix it." You can’t certify "talk to each other." You can’t certify "build small." You can’t certify "treat people with respect." You can’t certify "pay attention & learn."
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Was asked: "How do I stop the team from overcommitting story points every Sprint?" That's easy!
• Stop committing.
• Stop using story points
• Stop using Sprints.
Problem solved!
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If you're a "senior" on a team & think you'll have to do 50% of the work yourself, my advice is to do _none_ of the work yourself. Instead, spend your time helping the "juniors" do the work. You'll find the overall work will go much faster because everybody becomes better faster.
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If you think you must do something (e.g. Sprints, backlogs, story points, estimation, meetings, &c.) to be Agile, perhaps you don't fully understand what Agile is. It has nothing to do with rigid practices or frameworks. See
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@SusanChappelle1
@BowmanNancy
@tweetmommybop
@Granikins
Actually, not enough. Maybe you don't remember a few years ago when a pregnant teen was sent "congrats on your new baby" junk mail based solely on ad-tracking her normal browsing. You need to disable all ad tracking. Use Brave + Privacy Badger + a VPN. They _will_ sell this info.
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Agile has NOTHING to do with increasing output (or "velocity"). It has everything to do with building the right thing, however long that takes. Don’t know what "twice the work in half the time" is, but it’s not Agile. Building twice as much garbage in ½ the time benefits nobody.
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Several time recently, I've heard that "meetings are way too expensive when devs are present." The problem, ofc, is that they're even more expensive when the devs _aren't_ present, particularly when the devs build the wrong thing because they don't have the right info.
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So, you're using Fibonacci story points? Here's the perfect tool! Estimate away.
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Let me try once more. TDD == test-driven DEVELOPMENT. "Test-driven" is an adjective modifying the noun "development." It's is a dev technique (the noun), not a testing technique. The movie "The Bicycle Thief" is about a thief, not about bicycles.
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Agile is not a process. Agile is the ability to create your own process.
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Any backlog that's so large that you need an electronic system (like Jira) to manage it is way too large. Instead of looking around for tools to manage that backlog, make the backlog small enough that you don't need tools. In fact, you don't really need a backlog at all.
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A true "10x" programmer will produce code at the same rate as everybody else, but it's 10x simpler, 10x smaller, 10x easier to read, 10x more maintainable…. It has nothing to do with output.
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This oft-cited picture is just wrong. We do not start with a skateboard and end up with a car. At no point did our customer request a skateboard or a bicycle. They'll reject that out of hand. 1/2
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If you're recognize anything in this picture, you're in deep trouble. Get some help. Please.
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Yes, but all documentation is technical debt. You constantly have to update it. It’s always wrong. Consequently, you should write as a little of it as possible.
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If a factory worked like a software development shop, the car would be redesigned continuously as it moved along the line. You'd have no idea what the car would look like until you delivered it, and every car you delivered would be different. We do not work in a factory.
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User stories are supposed to be unclear. They're anything from a word to a sentence long with no implementation details. (They describe the user's work, not yours.) They are a reminder to have a conversation just before and during implementation. Fill in the details during Sprint
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TDD "tests" are not tests.
I wish we'd get over that.
They are examples of how we want the code we are writing to be used, expressed in a test format so that we can execute them easily. As such, they are executable specifications—explaining how the code should work. Not tests.
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A periodic reminder:
Agile ≠ Scrum
Thank you.
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We need to unlearn lots of the things we learn in school: Helping each other is cheating, don’t question authority, don’t break rules, your beliefs are inherently wrong if they’re not aligned w/ the curriculum, be quiet in class, do what you’re told. An endless list.
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I see no need to "scale Agile." You cannot become more agile by adding bureaucracy, which is what "scaling" almost always seems to mean. I've no interest in that. If huge orgs want agility, they need to become autonomous smaller orgs. Scale the work down, not the process up. 1/2
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I do collaborative trunk-based dev. We commit/push every 10 minutes or so, and use feature flags to hide unfinished things. That way of working is very effective, and is impossible to do with a PR-triggered code review—a waterfall gate at its worst. Collaboration rules!
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To me, the way to introduce agility into an org is to systematically remove the obstacles to agility. You don't force an "agile transformation" onto people. Instead, you stop doing the things that prevent agility, and the "transformation" takes care of itself. 1/1
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Agile is easy. The hard part is getting rid of all the stuff that prevents it.
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For those of you who imagine that it's expensive to test software:
Today they dropped a plane from the gantry at work!
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Backlogs are a symptom, not a tool. The very existence of a backlog tells you that you don't have the capacity to do the work, so you defer it. Replace the backlog w/ capacity. Improve processes. Don't work on non-value-add stuff. Minimize waste. Hire ppl. Do whatever it takes.
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Re. SAFe. Why does anybody on the planet think that adding bureaucracy, rigid process, and command-control hierarchy to Scrum will make anybody Agile?
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When you look at failed-Agile orgs, the root problem is often that nobody on top trusts the people who do the work. If they'd understood that agility required giving up control, they'd have run in the other direction as fast as their little feet could take them.
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There is NO SUCH THING as a "technical *user* story." A user story is a story that your user tells to you. It describes your user's work, not yours. "Story" is not a code word for "some random programmer task." Tech is an implementation detail for a story, not itself a story.
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"Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential."
And then we have Deloitte. Failure to grasp the concept on a grand scale.
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Software development is a craft, not an assembly line.
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Re. "non-technical" Scrum Masters or coaches. We programmers, to be effective, need to understand the domain we're working in. Why does anybody think they can be an effective SM/coach without understanding the domain they're working in: software development? Learn to code.
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I prefer the metaphor of a sea chart to roadmaps. Chart your destination (strategic goal), current position, & hazards. You can't chart your route. That depends on the wind. Note in this chart, an estimate based on average travel/day is 10 days, not the 67 it actually took.
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There's nothing better at destroying creativity than a sense of urgency and a push for results.
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Was asked what I don’t like about Scrum. Not much, really. Just:
• Backlogs
• Sprints
• Daily Scrums
• Sprint Reviews
• POs
• SMs
• Commitments
• Accountabilities
• Standardization on an inflexible framework
• Certs
Just little stuff like that. The rest is okay.
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Agile != any framework
Agile != specific roles (e.g. SM)
Agile != ceremonies
Agile != specific practices
Agile != standardized process
Agile != rigid adherence
Agile == flexible. able to accommodate change.
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