Moving to scrum: changes

So we started this product cycle with two geographically-dispersed mixed-discipline scrum teams on two week sprints. Specifically, the geographical co-mingling was designed to break up some of the silos that had built up on the team due to the existing functional teams being in different cities. By the third sprint, we’ve now switched back to scrum teams that mimic the original functional and geographic splits and are now on four week cycles. This has made cross-team communication more difficult, but has made everyone a lot happier by keeping the scrum meetings more relevant to everyone on the team. I can definitely see why people like this more, it lets people focus on what they are doing, but I do think we are losing something by not spreading the knowledge of the different parts of the project around the team. Also, not having multiple functional areas represented in the scrum meetings means that some fresh perspectives are lost in any of the technical discussions that come up. Over the next few sprints we’ll try this out and see if this is working. I think this will probably be what we stick with, and we’ll need to address the cross-team communication issues separately.

Switching to four week sprints was mostly to reduce the amount of time spent in the scrum meetings themselves relative to the amount of working time. Between planning poker, retrospectives and sprint planning, a lot of time is lost to the process itself in a two week sprint. For a team used to working on 6 week sprints, fitting stories into 2 week chunks was also difficult. I like the idea of two week sprints, but in practice, it was difficult for a team that is new to scrum. We’ll maybe try 2 week sprints in a future product cycle.

We still haven’t switched to our planned internally created scrum tool which itself makes things difficult. Our backlog is an excel spreadsheet and our tracking is all on Wikis. Hopefully, we’ll be converted over to the tool by the next sprint, which should make life a bit easier on me and the scrum master.

Converting from agile-mumble to Scrum: the introduction

I’ve been a convert to Agile for almost a decade now. I was first exposed to it when I was working at a start-up called Bootleg Networks as a Development Lead (don’t bother looking it up, it is long lost to time). I’d just come from six years at Microsoft where Waterfall was the only methodology and it was followed religiously. I’d seen all the worst aspects of Waterfall and seen nearly none of the best, but I wasn’t up on any other methodology besides Ad-hoc (also known as “play it by ear”). We’d hired Carmine Mangione as our software architect and he came in spouting all this stuff about “Agile” and “XP.” While I was definitely ready to try a different style of development, it all sounded a bit unstructured to me. Carmine convinced me to try eXtreme Programming, promising that if it didn’t work, we’d drop it. We bought a stack of Kent Beck’s book for the team and jumped into it. I went from Development Lead to XP Coach and quickly became a convert.

We achieved a ton of stuff using XP at Bootleg very quickly with a relatively small team. That short stint really changed my mind on how professional software development could be done. Ever since then, I have found ways to incorporate as many aspects of agile methodologies into any place I’ve worked.

I ended up back at Microsoft a couple years later. The situation there had changed quite a bit. While most of the company was still doing waterfall, more developers were aware of Agile and were curious about it (even if their managers weren’t). I took on a risky new project. It was fixing an ancient set of code written originally by Microsoft, but completely eroded over the years by a series of contractors. It was a mess: full of bugs. Customers didn’t like it. Rather than try to fix it, I convinced them to let me and a small team rewrite it from scratch to clean it up and get the new functionality needed. Program Management was skeptical, Quality Engineering was dead-set against it. I put my neck out and promised that we’d bring it in on-time with a high-level of quality that would be instantly verifiable with a battery of developer-written unit tests. We got some initial buy in and we went to work. We followed as much of XP as we could with an undersized (4 person) development team. Needless to say, we got it done and it shipped as part of WinCE 5.0.

I left Microsoft to join Adobe and was really happy to see that Agile was not only acknowledged, but embraced across many groups in the company. There were many different flavors being used, including several custom ones. Scrum was fairly common though.

I was certainly aware of Scrum, but didn’t have too high an opinion of it. Everything I’d read and heard about it made it seem like it had nearly no process or structure. Looking at how different teams “followed” scrum practices, it seemed like it was just an excuse for Cowboy Coding with a tiny amount of coordination involved. It seemed like a parody of Agile to me at first.

At Adobe, I was lucky enough to be able to build a completely new team. For various reasons, the team ended up being split between two different offices. While I wanted us to follow an Agile methodology, after a lot of research, I couldn’t identify one that would really work for us wholesale. Instead, I took the pieces that made sense and incorporated them as I could. We ended up with a unique process that subsumed bits of Rational (short sprints at first, longer sprints in the middle and short sprints again at the end; co-located functional teams), XP (test-driven development, occasional paired programming, be able to deliver at the end of each milestone, constant refactoring and narrow focus) and Scrum (demo-able at end of each sprint). That was the goal process. Of course, we didn’t always get there. We were pretty open and made a lot of changes along the way to incorporate new best practices and dump the parts that didn’t work. This evolving process worked fairly well and we have had three successful product cycles over several years using it.

For all the good of our existing cobbled-together development framework, we were always finding the seams, the edges that didn’t quite meet. There were other issues too. Having co-located functional teams meant that each team had good velocity, but it also meant that cross-site communication was always a problem and it made collaboration difficult as well. The team was getting too silo’d in my opinion. I wanted to really mix things up for our next cycle and try something totally new.

Over time, I’d gotten over my initial knee-jerk reaction to Scrum as I encountered more teams using it in a more deliberate and successful way. One weakness I still saw was the difficulty of using Scrum in non-co-located teams, but I met teams that came up with ways to manage this.

I decided that we would try Scrum for our next cycle. If it worked for us we would continue to use it for future cycles. If it didn’t, we would incorporate whatever worked for us back into our old process. Luckily, Adobe has a full-time Scrum trainer in the company. We did our scrum training a couple weeks ago, and we start our first Sprint tomorrow.

I’ve decided to document this on my blog for a few reasons:

  • It is something about Software Engineering that I can write about without fear of divulging corporate secrets
  • It might be interesting for other folks in similar circumstances
  • It is too long to tweet 🙂

My plan is to document our transition as much as I think might be interesting to others. Our situation is a little different from most since we are transitioning from a different Agile process to Scrum instead of from a non-Agile process. My team is also somewhat unusual since most of our clients are internal to the company who each use a different methodology (most Scrum, but some waterfall and some other Agile), but we also deliver our technology straight to Adobe’s customers on both long and short cycles. So we have a lot of impedance matches to account for. Some things may need to wait until the cycle is over for fear of disclosing too much, but by focusing on the process, I hope to be pretty open.

I’m not going to go too far into the mechanics of Scrum here since there are a zillion better places for that and because I’m still learning it myself. If I use a term you aren’t aware of and you can’t find a good answer on Google, ask me in the comments and I’ll try to answer it for you.

A bit on the details: My team doesn’t have a “Product Manager,” so I will be taking on the role of Product Owner even though I am the Engineering Manager. I’m not planning to act as a Scrum Master, that role will be taken by the QE manager of the team. If I have some free cycles I can use for development, I will act as a Scrum Team member, but I will not participate in Planning Poker as an estimator. We will have two scrum teams, each team incorporating developers and QEs from both of our sites. We’re going to do short sprints so that we can make changes quickly to our process.

I hope to create a little series here if I have time to keep it up to date.

Stay tuned.

some code for a change

I’ve written this function a zillion times, so I decided to post it on my blog. Yes, it could do more error checking (what if that new returns a NULL? what if an exception is thrown?). But it does more than zero error checking, so there you go. This is super useful if you are getting ANSI code paths from legacy APIs or if you are using boost::filesystem::path to store paths in a platform independent way (until the new boost comes out).

This particular version isn’t battle tested (yet), but it does work.

// convert a path from ANSI to UNICODE on windows using std::strings
// useful for converting a boost::filesystem::path into a wpath,
// until those APIs get merged
std::wstring convertStringToWString( std::string in )
{
    if (in.length() == 0 )
    {
        return std::wstring();
    }

    UINT wStringLength = MultiByteToWideChar( CP_ACP, 0, in.c_str(), -1, NULL, 0);
    if (wStringLength==0)
    {
        return std::wstring();
    }

    LPWSTR widestr = new WCHAR[wStringLength];
    wStringLength = MultiByteToWideChar( CP_ACP, 0, in.c_str(), -1, widestr, wStringLength );
    if ( wStringLength ==0 )
    {
        delete[] widestr;
        return std::wstring();
    }

    std::wstring returnVal = std::wstring( widestr );
    delete[] widestr;

    return returnVal;
}