Lately we’ve become quite Agile. More and more, our government customers have started to impose Agile methodologies on us. While I’ve always thought of our existing methodologies as being quite nimble, adopting Agile and Scrum methodologies has required some adaptation on my part.
Early in the game, I started to find Agile to be more of a hindrance than a help. The drumbeat of each sprint was wearing me out – and I started to feel the inevitable effects of burnout creeping into the my every thought.
But then a remarkable thing happened. I found myself not only defending Agile, but advocating it for our other projects. I was quite surprised to find myself having become such a big supporter. So what changed?
Early on, Agile was new for all of us. Our team was new, geographically distributed in three different parts of the world, all 8 hours apart. That team consisted of representatives from a set of customers and several partners all learning to work together to build a challenging solution. We adopted the Scrum methodology and planned out a long series of two week sprints. Each sprint had a set of stories assigned to it as we set off to build the most awesome bill drafting system of all time.
The problem was that the pace was too aggressive. In a software development project, you need to manage two different aspects – making forward progress by adding features while ensuring a sound implementation through refinement. Agile methodologies lean away from lots of up-front design. This makes it possible to show lots of forward momentum early, but the trade-off is that the design will need to be refactored often as new requirements are uncovered and added to the picture. We were too focused on the forward momentum and were leaving a trail of unfinished “programming debt” in our wake. This debt was causing me increasing anxiety as time marched on.
There is an important concept in Agile Scrum called the retrospective. It’s all about continuous improvement of the process. As we’ve grown as a team, we’ve become better at implementing retrospectives. These led to the most important change we’ve made – moving from a two week to a three-week sprint. We didn’t just add time to our sprints, we fundamentally changed the structure of a sprint. We still schedule two weeks’ worth of tasks to each sprint, but rather than just assuming that everything will work out just perfectly, we leave a week open for integration, testing, and development slack to be taken up by any refactoring that may have become necessary.
This third week, while arguably slowing us down, ends up helping by allowing us to emerge from each sprint in far better development shape to begin the next sprint. We just have to be disciplined enough to not try and squeeze regular development tasks into that third week. By working down programming debt continuously, subsequent sprints become more predictable. For various reasons, we temporarily returned to two week sprints and the problem of accumulating programming debt returned. The lesson learned is that you can’t build a complex system on top of a rickety foundation – you must continuously work to ensure a robust base upon which you are building. Without this balance, Agile just becomes a way to expedite a project at the expense of good development practices.
Another key change has been in how we use tools that help to do our work. As I mentioned earlier, our development teams are very distributed – around the world. It’s important that we be able to communicate very effectively despite the distance. Daily stand-ups with the entire team are not possible although we do ensure at least two meetings each sprint with the whole team. We use four primary tools – GitHub as our source code repository, AWS for our development and test servers, Slack for casual day-to-day conversation, and JIRA for managing the stories and tasks. It is the use of JIRA that has taken the most adaptation. Our original methodology was quite clumsy, but with each sprint we refine our usage to the point that it has become a very effective tool. Now, a dashboard presents me with a very clear picture of each sprint’s goals and everyone can monitor the progress towards those goals as the sprint progresses – there are no surprises.
Agile and Scrum are allowing a disparate group of customers and vendors to become a very highly performing software development team. We’re far from perfect, but with every sprint we learn more, make changes, and emerge as a better team than before.
