Lean Thinking: You will probably like to learn the essence of agile

Image taken from: http://www.leansoftwareinstitute.com/images/img_bigpicture.jpg

If you read the Poppendieck's book called, "Lean Software Development : An Agile Toolkit", you probably liked it because it managed to get the essence out of agile practices. So, what are these core principles? Well, most of you already know the phrase, "Inspect and Adapt". Now, you also know a bunch of specifications that facilitate this, for an instance, Scrum, XP etc.

Reading the book, I had a realization that, its good to talk using concrete facts as much as possible. So, doing a value stream mapping practice is worth than spending hours in discussing the process optimization. The same holds true with the Profit and Loss statement when figuring out which option to take - quality compromise, deadline shifting or feature squeezing. Being able to answer why questions, at least 5 in a succession, is something very critical - then you know the hidden junk thats causing the bad smell. I highly recommend reading this book, especially to people who are doing agile for a year or so and thinking about getting better at it.

I also had the opportunity to attend a speech by the authors on this Monday. The speech was a great one. But for my readers, I will write about an example from the speech.

Once Mary and Tom visited a company that creates hardware and software tools for real time video conferencing. They met the Boss there and asked what they were doing. The answer was, "We are working to improve the system so that our customers get better video conferencing solution for their businesses." They went to a section where people were working on hardware and asked one what he was doing. The person replied, "I am creating a component for the system, so that our customers can do better video conferencing". Then they went to a software developer and asked what she was doing. She replied, "I am working to improve a part of the software so that our customers can do better video conferencing".... (I am sure Mary used better words than mine and it was really interesting to hear the story in her voice :-))

So, the fact that she wanted to capture using this example is, although each individual is involved in a specific task, they envision the bigger picture from the customers' standpoint. This is really important. Because as soon as you start seeing the views from the customers' perspective, you will produce less bugs. In the book they mentioned, most software bugs are not results of coding/design errors, rather they arise from the difference in views among customers and developers.

Overall, it was a pleasure to read the book, although this blog post may not reflect all of my respect and take home from the book :-(

Now reading: Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit

This book by Mary and Tom Poppendieck is an awesome read. I just read the first three chapters and loving it. More on this book will come later as I read more...

I am tuned to attend the next CAMUG session by the Authors! It should be a lightning session and looking forward to Nov 2nd.

Communicating tools for working on remote projects

Ever since I started working in the software industry, as a freelancer or representing a company, I found the most challenging part of a remote software development project is "Communication". In agile setup, collaboration plays a leading role to be effective and efficient.

By communication, I mean the following:-

1. Getting the spec as intended by the client.
2. Asking specific questions on time.
3. Status update about progress, blocks and forthcoming events.
4. Getting feedback as intended by the client.
5. Making specific suggestions with rationale to the client.

I am listing a few tools that I used and recommend others to use.

1. A note pad: I write down small bullet points as soon as I find a question/suggestion/idea.
2. Voice chat/telephone call: It should be #1 preference. Its real time and most speedy after face-to-face. I use Skype for my voice calls and sometimes my phone as well.
3. IM: I use GoogleTalk most of the time if it works with client. Otherwise, I just use the one that my client uses most frequently.
4. Collaboration tool: I use ScrumPad.com. Post my messages, people get email notification and can directly reply on that notification. This way the collaboration is all captured in ScrumPad and we can also keep using Email.
5. A wire framing/drawing tool: Sometimes a small sketch/piece of drawing may greatly ease the communication hurdle. I use MS Visio at times. However, I also use scanned copies of hand drawings and annotations. It works. However, I am looking for a good web based wire framing tool and I believe it will off-load a lot of decision confusions.
6. Desktop sharing tool: Screen capture and desktop sharing also works for me. I use LogMeIn and Xing. These tools offer first class feedback capturing capability from remote clients.

I also try to follow some general rules:

1. Always have a prioritized list of points that I want to discuss.
2. Be on time.
3. Never stay disconnected for more than 3 business days.

I am sure out-sourcing will keep growing in the coming days, not only for its low cost but also for the fact that they are getting smarter and equally competent as people who charge many folds compared to them. I also anticipate a lot of out-sourcing job will go to individuals or 2/3 person groups, may be not from fortune 500 companies, but there are still other unfortunate millions of companies who will need such small teams. If you plan to work remotely, I am sure you will need some of the above tools, and if you are already in the business and think you have other good tools, please share with me.

Web application user interface without any Menu

If you are like me, with little creativity with UI (!), on a new project you always start with a simple layout, banner followed by a row of menu and then a two column body that ends with a footer. Well, here is an example:-

----------------------------------------------------------

CampZero

zero hassle camping

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Home | Place a booking

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Welcome |

|

|

|

|

|

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Campzero.com, all rights reserved

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Well, there are other ways and you will almost always see good visual elements in most websites. However, somehow all of these beautiful sites come with some sort of menu. This post is about a site that doesn't have a menu at all.

Yes it is possible to create a web app without a menu. The application that I recently developed is designed around an intuitive workflow. The workflow itself drives the app and it does so without any menu. For example, on landing you see a dashboard with three sections. Main section shows highlights of different projects, sidebar contains the search box and top part contains profile card. Now, you can navigate the whole application from here. For example, select a project you will see main section with the project latest activities and the search box will search in the scope of the project.

The point is, if you know the users of your app will most likely follow one of a few workflows, then you can design a UI that flows naturally.

Showing unread posts/comments: An example of rails ActiveRecord 'touch'

I worked on the following story:-

"As a partner, when I visit a project's dashboard I want to see five most recently started or updated discussion threads with number of unread comments, if any. If any of these are new, I want to see them in a highlighted view. Next, if I open the thread, I want to see all new comments in a highlighted view as well. However, once seen, the threads/comments should no longer be highlighted from the rest."

I used the following steps to implement this.

Step#1: Added a model MessageReadTime (message_id, user_id, last_read_at)

class Message 
has_many :messages_read_times 
end

Step#2: Added filters in the messages_controller

after_filter :update_message_read_time, :only => [:show]
def update_message_read_time
read_time = MessageReadTime.find_or_create_by_message_id_and_user_id( params[:id], current_user.id)
read_time.last_read_at = Time.now
read_time.save!
end

Step#3: Added :touch=>true and unread? function in Comment class

class Comment
..
belongs_to :message, :touch => true
def unread?(user)
 read_time = self.message.message_read_times.find_by_user_id(user_id)
 return true unless(read_time)
 return read_time.last_read_at < (updated_at || created_at)       end   end

Step#4: Added unread_comments method in Message class like this

class Message
...
def unread_comments(user)
self.comments.collect{|comment| comment.unread?(user) ? comment : nil }.compact
end

def unread?(user)
read_time = self.message_read_times.find_by_user_id(user.id)
return true unless read_time
return self.updated_at >= read_time.last_read_at
end
...
end

This is it! If you know a better way to do this, lets discuss in the comments. You are also welcome to share your thoughts/suggestions :-)

Some useful plugins for RoR projects

Previously I used a few plugins in RoR projects including ScrumPad. On a more recent work, I found the following plugins to be really useful and easy to get started:-

1. I18n: Rails Internationalization

RailsCast at http://railscasts.com/episodes/138-i18n

Guides post at http://guides.rubyonrails.org/i18n.html

2. Seed-fu: Initial data loading for application  (e.g. admin user, product categories)

Tutorial http://github.com/mbleigh/seed-fu A support is now built in for Rails 2.3.4

3. Thinking-sphinx: Full text search

RailsCast http://railscasts.com/episodes/120-thinking-sphinx

Tutorial http://freelancing-god.github.com/ts/en/

4. Paperclip: File and image upload made hassle free

RailsCast http://railscasts.com/episodes/134-paperclip

Thoughtbot wiki http://wiki.github.com/thoughtbot/paperclip

If you looking for any of the above for features in your app, I suggest you give these plugins a try. It should be good for most of the apps unless you have some really unique needs.

Write in comments if you would like to share some other useful RoR plugins.

The CGI story on agile scaling success on a large project

This intro is from the presenters:-

PAS was a joint venture development initiative by 4 major oil and gas
companies and CGI. Devon, Encana, Husky and Talisman joined with CGI to
develop a new Production and Revenue Application. Each company put 3 senior
business resources on the project. The development component of the PAS
initiative cost $35M over 5 years with up to 90 people on the team. This
presentation is on how we used Agile to achieve this mammoth undertaking.

The product is currently running in production at 5 major oil and gas
companies with great reviews. It is also in production for several mid and
smaller sized companies. CGI is currently marketing the product.

This was my first ever meet with the Calgary agile methods user group, CAMUG and it was a great experience. Off late, I have been looking for my graduate research topic on agile methods, especially around scaling agile beyond a single team and this was just a perfect session for me.

I noted down a few of their discussed topics that I would like to share with my readers:

1. The project continued in dev mode for 5 years, a $35M project.
   
2. It started with only 3 members and extended to a team of 90 following Scrum+XP.
   
3. The project had 5 sponsoring companies or clients.
4. They had 6 teams working in the same sprint cycles.
5. In each team, there were significant members from the business working full time with the team onsite and in the same open-space arrangement.
6. They had some 3000+ unit tests and also 300+ acceptance test.
7. They automated all repetitive tests.
8. The had external experts visiting them from time to time. Eric Evans once visited them and helped them getting better grasp on Domain Driven Design.
9. There had been a $800K and one month deviation from the projected cost and timeline.

They also discussed some issues related to working in a multi-team, multi-client project. I remember the following ones:-

1. They had to balance between features/bug fixes.
2. The deployment was taken care of by the respective sponsors, not the teams.
3. They had issues with sprint backlog management.

They highlighted some aspects with great emphasis:-

1. Open communication is the key to success.
2. Onsite and full time real user availability is very important for such a big project.
3. Automated tests, partial pair programming and continuous integration is a big plus.
4. Staying co-located was really helpful.

What about scaling beyond?

1. I asked them, if they felt it would still be a similar success if there had been 12 teams or even more with 200 people or so. They said, it would be challenging. But in response, they also said, following waterfall would make life much harder with such a big team, if at all it could be a success at the first place! Yes, I also believe this.
2. One of the audiences asked if they outsourced a part of the project and the response was 'No'. CGI has a big team in India with a very high CMM ranking, but the project manager and asst. project manager said, it would be much difficult for differing time zones. Also, it would be difficult to transfer the knowledge as well as replicate the value of onsite client presence. The development manager also added that, the cultural difference between an agile and CMM setup would also been an issue if they had to go for the off-shore team.

The session was much more eventful than what I could compile. So, if you are anywhere near Calgary and interested about meeting agile practitioners from the industry, lets meet at the next meet!