Debunking some myths about Agile

I think I get quite a few comments on this blog and I publish most of them. Almost all of the ones I reject are spam/graffiti type, people looking to put a link to their site on my blog. Sometime I reply to a comment but not always, it depends on whats on my mind and how much time I have.

Last week a comment arrived on my Failures in Agile process entry from April 2007. Its worth pointing out that the comment has very little to do with what I wrote in the entry. Except for the fact that both my entry and the poster are concerned with “Agile failure” the content of the post seems to have little connection with what I wrote.

What’s interesting is that this post exists. Its a reminder that many people out there still believe a lot of myths about Agile development. The poster is right about some stuff but then just lists a bunch of myths with no supporting evidence or examples.

So lets take the post and dissect the myths:

• “Considering the reasons for failure you named someone may conclude there is no difference between Agile project failure and RUP project failure. In other words the software development approach obviously does not make difference.“

True: indeed I concluded this myself when I wrote: ”Failure of an Agile project looks a lot like the failure of a Waterfall or RUP project.“

The RUP folks increasingly claim that ”RUP is Agile”. There is long post on that subject but not today. If the RUP folks are right then you would expect RUP to fail like an Agile method because it is an Agile method.

There is a stream of thought that say that method doesn’t make much difference. Check out “Amethodical systems development: the deferred meaning of systems development methods” by Truex, Baskerville, and Travis if you want the full details.

It is widely felt that people, not process or method, are the key ingredient for successful software development. So how do you get good people? I think you need to grow them, develop your own developers. And I think the way you do this is through a learning culture. And I argue that Agile development has its roots in Organizational Learning so is better suited than RUP, SSADM, Waterfall, etc. to do this.

For my full argument: Buy the book, Changing Software Development.

• “The main bottleneck I came across is the failure to define good system requirements. In other words: garbage in - garbage out, principle applies here.”

True: Not sure it is always the main bottleneck but I think can be and it is always significant. This is one of the reasons I’ve devoted a lot of blog entried (and the odd conference presentation) to Product Management.

Although most Agile methods say little about requirements I think they do help. By improving deliver they free up management time and energy to think about that they actually want.

• “Agile wins more attention of management becacuse they discovered the way to shift the responsibility and blame for project failure to programmers...”

Not in my experience. I think managers have always blamed developers and developers have always blamed management.

But blame is not a very useful concept.

• “Downsides of agile:”

To the myths...

• “agile may only be used on small projects”
• “maximum 5 developers on project“

False: this myth started because the early writers on Agile hadn’t applied it to large projects when the wrote the first books.

I’m working with a large .com at the moment to introduce Agile to a large (50+) development team. Jutta Eckstein wrote about large Agile projects four years ago.

Software development always goes better with small teams. Since when did RUP, Waterfall, etc. etc. guarantee success? At the very least Agile is no worse than the next best methodology.

One of my personal mantras is: ”Inside every big project is a small project struggling to get out“. To find this project you need to a) be able to deliver, b) actually deliver business value.

• ”all developers must be higly skilled (no learning moments are allowed)”

First part: Highly skilled developers help any project go better. Agile is no different. (With the possible excpetion of Mongolian Hordes I’m not aware of any development technique that claims to do better with less skilled developers.)

Second part: False, Agile is all about learning, there are lots of learning moments. Again, buy the book, Changing Software Development - I’m not going to repeat myself.

• “developers must be in the same physical room with the project owner.“

False: there is a lot of experience with distributed development teams using Agile.
And once again, any development method goes better when teams are in the same room.

Frankly, distributing your development teams is always going to hinder your efforts. Putting them in one room is the most effective way. However sometimes you just can’t do it. And sometimes companies are prepared to take the productivity hit because the cost savings compensate for it.

This came up in the work I did on Conway’s Law.

• ”project owner must be available 24/7 since good programmers also work extra hours”

False: There is no law that says “good programmers work long hours” so the assumption is wrong. In fact, Agile emphases sustainability, you don’t get that by working people long hours.

Lets be clear: Agile does not mean working long hours. If you are working long hours you have a problem and you should fix that.

There is a problem with Karoshi (death by over work) in some cultures but this can’t be blamed on Agile or Lean. Yes it exists, yes it occurs at Toyota in Japan. No I have not heard of any stories of it occurring in Agile Software Development teams or at Lean enterprises like Dell or Amazon. Or even at Toyota outside Japan.

The original XP project, C3, did cause the near nervous breakdown of the first “Customer” - Business Analyst or Product Manager really which was a failure in C3. However, this does some way to supporting the view (held by myself and the poster) than knowing what you are doing (requirements) is important and thus you need more effort here.

To work someone to death or a breakdown is a problem that needs to be fixed.

• “agile does not support use of virutual teams or outsourcing constructions“

False: Where does this idea come from? I’d love to know so I can understand what to disprove!

OK, lets try...

”virtual teams“ - see above.
”outsourcing“ - ThoughtWorks has built a pretty big business as an Agile outsourcer.

• ”agile provides poor quality of software since documentation usually does not exist. If it does - it is written in "reverse engineering" style.”

False.

I have never seen any evidence that documentation leads to high quality software. Year ago I worked on rail privatisation, we had lots and lots of documentation, and then some more. The software was rubbish.

Agile provides high quality software because it simply wouldn’t work without quality. Look at TDD, pair programming, customer involvement, etc. etc. Its all about eliminating re-work, i.e. improving initial quality.

The tests produced by Agile developer are documentation, executable documentation at that but documentation all the same.

And reverse engineering documentation is actually the only sort worth having. Since design and requirements are emergent anything written in advance will change.

• “selling "agile project" as "fixed price & fixed scope" is mission imposible since scope of the project is not defined.“

False: it just means you need a different type of contract.

If Anonymous would like to reply to me please do, but please, next time you make some of these wild claims please explain your thinking or cite your evidence.

A book review of Changing Software Deveopment

The Agile Journal has a book review by Brad Appleton of my book, Changing Software Development. Thanks Brad! I think he put his finger on it.

Changing Software Development isn’t just another book about how to do Agile methods and techniques, its book about change and putting Agile development in the context of learning and knowledge.

Offshoring becoming more expensive

An interesting analysis in McKinsey quarterly about the increasing costs of off-shore manufacturing - Time to rethink offshoring. As is so often the case this piece is US centric, and it is about manufacturing not services, still, some of the data and analysis are worth looking at:

• Wage rises in China mean manufacturing workers now earn $4,140 a year up from $1,704 in 2003
• Weaker dollar also erodes the advantage (and since the pound is low at the moment the same is true in the UK)
• Higher oil prices mean getting raw materials to China, and finished products from there is also more expensive

They also hint at the delays in supply when you ship from China - because you have to order so far in advance and get stuff shipped.

In short, manufacturing high-tech products in China isn’t clearly cheaper any more.

And to proove the point, yesterday’s FT reports: “The latest cheap manufacturing site for European companies is not in Asia or eastern Europe but the US”. (Its a little more complicated than that but have a read for yourself.)

So what of the software industry? Lets apply this thinking, and extend it to India and elsewhere.

• Wages have been rising here too, I don’t know how much by but is manufacturing staff have more than doubled their pay IT workers can’t be far behind
• Weaker dollar has erodes the advantage (ditto the pound sterling)
• Higher oil prices mean flying staff between your offshore development centre and your actual location is more expensive

And of course you have the supply chain delays too. McKinsey doesn’t go into this angle greatly but there is a good analysis in Womack and Jones Lean Solutions: did you know stores have to order their Nike’s a year in advance? Bottom line: you can have lean manufacturing on the other side of the world but you face challenges if you want a lean company spread over that distance.

Regular readers will know I’m all in favour of developing software in India, Malaysia or wherever. However I think the benefits are exaggerated. Or rather, the downsides aren’t appreciated. Somewhere there is a balance.

Optimor: Mobile phone tariff comparison

Long story, I know a guy, who knows a guy who... gets us to Optimior. Their technology evaluates your mobile phone bills and recommends a operator. Their system is in alpha test and they’ve just analysed my phone bill. I won’t be changing operator soon but it looks good.

Tuft, Conway and PowerPoint

People I know who know about graphics and data visualisation tell me Edward Tufte is The Authority. I also hear he is a great presenter and his tutorials worth attending - if you into graphics and visualisation that is. So when I see his name on something I pay attention.

As regular readers know I have a thing about Conway’s Law. So when Tufte’s name came up in connection with Conway’s Law on a recent search I paid attention. Tufte’s point is actually about the inadequacies of PowerPoint.

I agree with him. I really dislike PowerPoint and wish I could give it - and similar tools - up. I’ve blogged about this before. I should report I have failed to give it up. I have two up coming presentations - BCS Project Management and Oredev - and I’ve prepared PowerPoint decks for both.

Why?
• Because they are a crutch to lean on, parts of me is scared without it
• Because the event organizers expect it
• Because I want the attendees to have something to take home
• Because it helps to plug my book (nice big picture!)

The comments and links on Tuft’s piece are even more interesting. Seems NASA are concerned about engineering by PowerPoint and the US military also have PowerPoint trouble.

All the more reason to redouble my efforts and kick the habit.

New writing, new patterns online

Two new pieces on my website for anyone who’s interested.

I’ve kicked off a new series of articles in the pages of ACCU Overload this month entitled On Management. The first of these pieces, Triangle of Constraints is now on my website. Alternatively it is available in the Overload August download.

After post conference editing my patterns from EuroPLoP 2008 are now online. These four patterns continue my series of business strategy design patterns for software companies. They are: Single Product Company, Whole Product, Product Portfolio and Product Roadmap.

I deliberately entitle these patterns “for software companies” although many people are quick to point out these patterns are applicable to many technology companies and to many companies in general. While I recognise this I stick to the “for software companies” formula for two reasons. First I write from experience, I won’t want to step too far outside my experience zone. Second to do proper justice to the wider context I would need to write longer patterns. I wont to keep these patterns short and readable - I aim for two pages and most of them end up at 4 pages!

Actually there is a third reason: a challenge to the reader. I leave some blanks for the reader to fill in, so the reader can make the pattern their own. I drop hints - some of the pictures and examples deliberately come from other industries - but leave it to the reader to bridge the gap.

The Open Source Software Myth

Once in a while I get asked my opinion on Open Source Software projects. Personally I think Open Source software (OSS) is great: Apache, GNU C++, Linux to name a few. But as a project management or product development technique I can’t say I recommend it. There are two reasons I give for this.

First there is no single OSS development model: Apache has a stack of IBM cash, GNU C++ is largely volunteers with chip makers (and others) contributing expertise and resources to help their own products, Mozilla was seeded by Netscape and has done a good job of marketing itself, etc. etc. Some OSS projects have paid development teams, some have single individuals and so on. It is not enough to say “We will do it open source” you need to be more specific.

Second: most OSS projects fail. “Go look at the number of web browsers on Source Forge” I say - a quick search this morning shows 19,362. There are lots and lots of OSS project that go no where. Commercial projects (famously) fail too but the important point is: OSS is no silver bullet.

So with this in mind I was interested to find and read a paper by Kieran Healy and Alex Schussman from the University of Arizona entitled: The Ecology of Open-Source Software Development. Although from 2003 I think the analysis and arguments probably still stand. (This paper appears in several places on the web so I guess it is already well know, maybe I’m late to the party.)

The authors did some analysis on projects in Source Forge and came up with some interesting results. Basically it turns out that when most people talk about the Open Source model, and successful examples, they are talking about the top 1% or less of all Open Source projects. The true OSS model has a long tail.

Taken as a whole OSS projects follow the Power Law - its that law again! The authors say:

“The median number of developers is one. The 95th percentile is 5. Relative to the whole field, only a tiny number of projects have more than a handful of developers. The median number of cvs commits is zero. At the 75th percentile it is 1 and at the 90th percentile it is less than 100. This indicates that there is little or no programming activity taking place on more than half of the projects. Examining the number of message authors across all forums shows that only projects at the 90th percentile and above have more than two contributing message writers.”

And later:

“In summary, we found power-law type distributions for all activity measures in our dataset. In each case, a tiny number of projects dominate an activity-type when measured by volume.”

The projects which are actively developed (in this study these include Crystal Space 3D, Open CASCASE, gkernal) are not the most downloaded (in this study CDex, VirtuakDubm ZSNES). In fact the authors say:

“Measures of user interest in a project — such as site views and downloads — are not closely related to measures of developer activity on a project.”

So what are we to make of these findings?

Well I think it bears out my initial comments. OSS is no silver bullet.

The papers authors propose three hypothesis for further consideration - and given that the paper was five years ago they may well have developed these further.

First they suggest that the involvement of professional developers is key. Despite the gifted ametuer image of some projects it helps to have professionals along. Second the role of project leader is critical - nothing new here perhaps but more evidence that OSS alone is not enough. (Actually, I was reminded of Fred Brook’s Chief Programmer model while I was reading this.)

And third, most interesting to me: the authors suggest that successful OSS projects with have hierarchical structure between leader and development team. Many OSS proponents (e.g. Eric Raymond) suggest a more chaotic structure in OSS projects which may not be the case (remember Healy and Schussman are suggesting a theory here without proof).

Personally all three suggestions ring true for me. There are wider lessons here too for the Agile and business communitiies.

There are those in the Agile community who see it as a route to emulate the success of OSS. However this study shows that the OSS success if not good enough for commercial projects.

Second some elements of leadership and hierarchy are necessary to have a successful project. In other words, relying exclusively on self-organising teams and emergent behaviour may not be enough. Some element of control is justified.

In the business community there has been a lot of talk in the last few years of applying Open Innovation - that is applying Open Source ideas to business problems and products. Proctor and Gamble have one example, Walkers Crisps in the UK is trying an Open Source type idea at the moment. If the OSS experience is anything to go by open innovation may come up with some good ideas but it is not enough alone.

Talk to the BCS Project Management group

I’ve been invited to speak to the BCS Project Management Group - PROMS-G - subject is “Why and How to become Agile”. Its rather short notice this one, 9 September in Central London. I believe all are welcome but advance booking is necessary.

Value Stream Accounting for Lean

Just to finish off my Financial problems with Lean blog post about the financial problems with Lean.

I read the second half of How to Manage Through Worse Before Better the in the MIT Sloan Management Review and while it was interesting it didn’t give my any more great insights. Basically the second half answers the problem described in the first half.

And the answer is.... Value Stream Accounting. Yes it makes sense, yes it is good, and yes its accounting. Thus I found it a little bit boring and I’m not going to describe it here. If you want to know the details read it yourself. Sorry to be mean, I’m busy at the moment so things have to get my interest to get prioritised.

Financial problems with Lean

From time to time the dark side of Lean surfaces. On the whole a lot of this dark side is bunk (rubbish), Lean gets the blame for something that isn’t really anything to do with Lean. Though Lean is not without its problems most of the well publicised cases (like karoshi, death by overwork) seems to have more to do with (Japanese) society than Lean itself.

But it hadn’t occurred to me until today that there were also financial problems with Lean, or to be specific, the transition to Lean. The summer issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review has a piece about financial problems (How to Manage Through Worse Before Better) which can afflict companies transitioning to Lean.

Although this piece is about manufacturing companies not software companies I think its worth discussing the reasons and how they might also effect software companies:

• Lean companies hold little or no inventory, so a company transitioning to Lean will reduce the amount of completed work held in stock (not to forget raw materials and work in progress). But this stock is also shown as an asset on the balance sheet. So reducing inventory reduces the value of the company.

• It is not only the transition company which hold stocks, so too do customers. As the company becomes more Lean the lead time for orders will reduce so customer no longer need to order so far in advance and hold buffer stocks. They will adjust their orders, rather than ordering 6 weeks in advance they may order 1 week in advance. Therefore sales will appear to reduce as customer change their schedule.

• Although the Lean will make the company more productive in the short run it is difficult for the company to realise this benefit. It is not possible to reduce the work force during the transition because managers and workers need to co-operate so managers can’t fire workers (well you could, but imagine what it would do to the rest of your change programme).

• Neither can the extra productive capacity be used for new manufacturing because the company is still in transition and it takes time to introduce new products to manufacturing and optimise the system along Lean lines.

So what about software companies? Actually I think they do, perhaps to a lesser degree:

• Software companies don’t hold stock, but work in progress could appear on the balance sheet, it all depends how the company accounts for R&D so this could be an issue.

• Customers might delay orders once they know they can, this depends on your sales model.

• Software companies face the same problem in laying off surplus workers, if anything the problem is worse. Even though most software companies I’ve ever seen don’t have enough people to do the work they are asked to it these benefits won’t show on the balance sheet or cash flow statement.

• Finding work for newly available resources is also going to be a problem. I’ve blogged before about the importance of Product Managers and the idea that The Bottleneck has moved - if you have developers who are more productive you need more Product Managers - so costs will go up!

Actually things might be worse in software development because of the quality issue. A Swiss friend of mine claims that his software company was forced out of business when they adopted TDD and improved quality. It seems many of their customers were buying new versions of the software, and paying support fees, to get bug fixes. Improve the quality, reduce the bugs and why do they need to spend more money?

My reply is always: its not much of a business model if you rely on your customers paying for fixes. But the point here is that during the transition phase you loose the revenue before the benefits kick in.

I’ve not read the second half of the Sloan piece yet so I don’t know how to resolve these issues but I think this analysis is helpful in understanding why companies find it hard to transition.