http://www.agilistapm.com/understand-technical-debt-by-playing-a-game/

The exercise went great even though I was using the audience as guinea pigs to run the exercise for my first time. Below is the slide deck that I used as a backdrop for the presentation.

While  ”Working software is the primary measure of progress” is one of the twelve principles of Agile, working software is not the only measure that software development organizations are using to show progress and to measure the value of Agile to the business. Our own discussions with clients indicate that many try to use velocity and quality (defects) to show that their Agile teams are improving their ability to deliver. A few focus on cycle time or progress to plan. The ‘holy grail’ is to be able to directly connect a software deliverable to measurable business value – improved revenue or decreased business costs.

What metrics does your organization use to measure its Agile efforts?  Learn more about Forrester’s research project, or go directly to the survey to share your views (and receive a free copy of the resulting report).

My presentation addressed the issues of communication between business and agile teams. Traditional EVM makes no sense in software (and is potentially harmful) because claiming value earned based on intermediate work products–without an assertion of quality–does not provide reasonable forecasts. Agile provides an assertable and inspectable quality. Also, by ordering in terms of highest Business Value and risk considerations along with potentially shippable increments, I believe starts to include notions of value. Still, AgileEVM measures performance against plans (that can be re-baselined every iteration if needed). AgileEVM integrates cost management. Doing it well means not giving up what Agile offers: adaptive planning, quality.

Agile teams speak in points and iterations, but project and business managers think in terms of dates and dollars.  This conceptual and language barrier makes strategic business planning, funding, and project status reporting a significant challenge for Agile teams.  Because of these barriers, many successful Agile/Scrum initiatives are discontinued or never expanded.

Many of the findings and the recommendations we make in Cutter technical debt engagements are broadly applicable in concept, if not in detail. There is commonality in the nature of the hot spots we typically find, the mal-practices we identify as the root causes and the ways we go about reducing the “heat.” Granted, your technical debt reduction strategy might dictate investing in automated unit testing prior to reducing complexity, while your competitor might be able to address complexity without additional investment in unit testing. However, the considerations you and your competitor will go through in devising your technical debt reduction strategies are fairly similar.

It is this similarity that we try to capture in this Executive Update. Some of specifics we recount here might not be applicable to your environment. However, we trust the overall characterization we provide will give you, your colleagues and your superiors a fairly good “3D” picture of how the technical debt initiative will look like in the context of your own business imperatives and predicaments.

As a Senior Cutter Consultant, it has been a pleasure working with Cutter to release this Executive Update from which the excerpt cited above is taken. For a free donwnload, click here and use the promotion code DELVING. Let us know what you think about the article in the comments section of this post.

So, without further ado, here are the slides…

If you’ve already started using Agile methods, surely you’ve seen just how much change and adaptation are involved — already at the single team level!

If you’ve already applied Agile methods across a program, or several unrelated teams, you’d have noticed that their performance is constrained by downstream and upstream functions. Your teams are likely saying, “We need marketing and sales and the business units and operations to also act like us in order to really make an impact.”

And if you’ve been using Agile for more than a couple of years, is performance still great, or is it eroding? Are the Agile mechanisms slowly giving way to “business as usual”?

This product goes along with our first product, AgileEVM, to help companies take advantage of Agile software delivery methods at scale for increased business value and reduced risk on project investments.

Impediment Monkey will make removing roadblocks to daily progress fun and effective. Impediment Monkey takes in, notifies, helps in resolving and makes bashing impediments exciting and objective. Additionally, Impediment Monkey will let you assign, follow up, chart trends and even provides services to support your impediment bashing efforts.

Go to the Impediment Monkey web site and sign up to keep informed and potentially become an early beta tester of the product. We are looking for your insightful feedback to make a product that is fun, effective, and provides expertise to the software development industry. Join us in making it happen.

http://www.williamcaputo.com/archives/000310.html

Although I entirely agree with ideas discussed about refactoring and removal of code, I do not think that the blog entry substantiates his claim that software is not an asset. An asset is:

Anything tangible or intangible that is capable of being owned or controlled to produce value and that is held to have positive economic value is considered an asset

Much of the software out there has a positive economic value either in productivity, revenue generation, cost reduction, or other types of economic value. I see removal of code and refactoring code into a more desirable design in order to support changing business needs as essential to countering depreciation of software assets. This was the foundation of Managing Software Debt: Building for Inevitable Change.

When we describe software only as a liability then we also provide reasoning to business that those who work on the software are part of a cost center. This is usually not the best way to operate any software development organization. The focus should be on optimizing the value that existing and newly created software assets support. Rather than only a liability, we can think of assets as what they are defined to be:

Assets are equal to “equity” plus “liabilities.”

The equity can still be there but if the liability is becoming so large that it outweighs the utility of the equity then we have a problem. We should counteract this decay in value by Managing Software Debt effectively as we produce new communications between the software and hardware assets we deploy.

For more information on Innovation Games®, please check out:

• Innovation Games® – play serious games to gather feedback and ideas from customers and stakeholders
• Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play – the book

For more information on Cynefin, please check out the following articles and videos:

Hope this gets folks started in looking at Cynefin and methods around complexity. My one suggestion for anyone getting to know Cynefin is make sure that you don’t look at the “Cynefin Model” and misjudge it to be a basic 4-box model. There are actually 5 domains and a fold at the bottom that have tremendous significance in the model. Not only that, the model is about sense-making rather than categorization. With a focus on these suggestions while learning more about Cynefin I think will help make the experience more beneficial.

As for an experience report from the actual client. A company that I was asked to work with wanted a 2-day Certified ScrumMaster course along with a 3rd day workshop to focus on their specific needs. Of course, during the 2-day class we pulled many specific areas of opportunity and ideas that the group had. The participants were about 1/2 Director and above and the other 1/2 were development team members and project managers. There were about 30 folks in the class and the 2-day class was providing plenty of insights.

One thing that I am focused on in every class is not how can Scrum be implemented but what is the most valuable next steps an individual, team, or organization can make starting the very next day. In the 3rd day workshop we decided to focus on the business goals that implementing more agility would help achieve and a strategy to attain these business goals. Overnight I came up with a loose facilitated session with the following exercises:

1. Impediment Management Exercise using basic facilitation techniques:

• Brainwriting: 10 reasons per individual that Scrum and other agility cannot be implemented effectively at company
• Affinity grouping: on a wall place all items and affinity group them with names to provide context and insights into to the data
• Multi-voting: not a scientific method necessarily, but quick way to get feedback on what is most important on the wall
• Debrief actions to take

2. “Give them a hot tub” – an Innovation Games® exercise (http://innovationgames.com/resources/the-games/)

• Used to identify goals and initiatives that would improve business outcomes focused on software development

3. Ritual Dissent – http://www.cognitive-edge.com/method.php?mid=46

• set up tables with 6-7 folks per table
• each table comes up with a strategy for implementing agility to attain business goals and value of agility (20 minutes)
• 1 person is chosen by table to go to another table and present the strategy for 5 minutes – important that all tables have a chair at the end of it to have the visitor form the other table sit at
• folks at the table that are listening to the strategy are not allowed to speak during the presentation
• at 5 minutes the person presenting turns their chair around with back to folks at table and takes out a notebook
• the folks at the table now ritually tear apart the presented strategy (be sure to tell all of the participants before the exercise that this will be occurring and that their duty is to be as cutting as possible) (3 minutes)
• at 3 minutes the person that presented does not turn around and make eye contact or talk with the table of folks and then just goes back to their own table with all of their notes
• the table uses those notes to modify their strategy (10 minutes)
• the presenter goes to a different table 2-3 more times
• you can end with a round where the folks at the table talk about what they liked about the strategy once it has went through 3-4 rounds but we did not do this (this is called “Ritual Assent”)
• Find out more alternatives and ideas on Ritual Dissent at the Cognitive Edge web site

4. Combine Strategy

• at the end it was fairly simple to pull strategy from all tables and since they shared with each other we decided what the combined strategic alignment and implementation would be presented to executive management

As an epilogue to this, the company did implement most of the strategic plan and found effective changes in their organization even 2 years later since I was there. Hopefully this article provided some opportunities for those facilitating strategic decision-making sessions and added some other options to learn about, Cynefin and Innovation Games® in particular, to your facilitation tool belt.