A common debate in software development projects is between spending time on improving the quality of the software versus concentrating on releasing more valuable features. Usually the pressure to deliver functionality dominates the discussion, leading many developers to complain that they don't have time to work on architecture and code quality. This debate is based on the assumption that increasing quality also increases costs, which is our common experience. But the counter-intuitive reality is that internal software quality removes the cruft that slows down developing new features, thus decreasing the cost of enhancing the software.

In their ideal state, product-mode organizations are formed of loosely coupled, autonomous teams that respond rapidly to articulated and unarticulated user needs. On occasion however, opportunities arise that require a response involving coordination across multiple teams. If not managed effectively the outcome will result in missed revenue, unsatisfied customers and wasted team capacity. We refer to the organizational initiatives that respond to these opportunities as programs. In this article, we’ll share our experience managing programs in product-mode organizations through an example of a program gone bad.

Management love their metrics. The thinking goes something like this, “We need a number to measure how we’re doing. Numbers focus people and help us measure success.” Whilst well intentioned, management by numbers unintuitively leads to problematic behavior and ultimately detracts from broader project and organizational goals. Metrics inherently aren’t a bad thing; just often, inappropriately used. This essay demonstrates many of the issues caused by management’s traditional use of metrics and offers an alternative to address these dysfunctions.

An inception is an activity done at the start of a project to gather together the people involved and set a common direction and working style for the on-going work. The lean inception is a focused form of inception, which can be done in a single week. During this time we understand the key features and customers for the product, and build a canvas to formulate the characteristics of a Minimum Viable Product.

Alignment maps are organizational information radiators that help visualize the alignment of ongoing work with business outcomes. The work may be regular functionality addition or technical work such as re-architecting or repaying technical debt or improving the build and deployment pipeline. Team members use alignment maps to understand what business outcomes their day-to-day work is meant to improve. Business and IT sponsors use them to understand how ongoing work relates to the business outcomes they care about.

We see so much emotional discussion about software process, design practices and the like. Many of these arguments are impossible to resolve because the software industry lacks the ability to measure some of the basic elements of the effectiveness of software development. In particular we have no way of reasonably measuring productivity.

Continuous flow is an approach to scheduling work, often associated with agile software development. The team breaks down the features of the software into User Stories. They then prioritize these stories into a crude list. The team then takes some of these user stories and works on them, when they complete one, they pull the next one off the list.

Cycle Time is a measure of how long it takes to get a new feature in a software system from idea to running in production. In Agile circles, we try to minimize cycle time. We do this by defining and implementing very small features and minimizing delays in the development process. Although the rough notion of cycle time, and the importance of reducing it, is common, there is a lot of variations on how cycle time is measured.

In the DesignStaminaHypothesis, the design payoff line is the amount of functionality below which it is possible to trade off design quality for time to market.

TechnicalDebt is a very useful concept, but it raises the question of how do you measure it? Sadly technical debt isn't like financial debt, so it's not easy to tell how far you are in hock (although we seem to have had some trouble with measuring the financial kind recently).

You can't put ten pounds of shit into a five pound bag

-- Anyone who has tried

When Kent and I wrote Planning Extreme Programming, we included this whimsical quote to help get the essence of what planning is about.

Many people belive that you can't do a fixed price contract in an agile project. Since the whole point of an agile process is that you cannot predict the future, this isn't an unreasonable supposition. However this doesn't mean you can't come up with a fixed price agile contract, what it really means is that you can't come up with a fixed scope contract.

Many companies like the idea of writing a contract that fixes scope and price because they think it lowers their risk. The mirage says that their financial obligation is fixed at the price of the deal. If they don't get satisfactory software, then it won't cost them.

A common question is whether large projects can be done with agile techniques. After all many agile approaches are designed for smaller projects and the heavyweight ideas that they resist are more needed on bigger projects.

In my recent client engagement, I foresaw that serverless architecture was a perfect fit. The idea of adopting serverless architecture, though, didn’t fly to our client well due to the fear of vendor lock-in. It was an interesting time for retailers as staying in AWS might mean that Amazon, as another retail business, will be given a competitive advantage. Given the idea of not supporting a competitor, my client was interested to ensure that the solution chosen by us is fully portable to other cloud vendors.

One of the good things about software is that people seem to want it, and want it quickly. It's usual for organizations to ask teams to speed up production of software and from time to time the organization seeks to help in the way that really shows its commitment - by spending money to add more people to the team.

My first encounter with agile software development was working with Kent Beck at the dawn of Extreme Programming. One of the things that impressed me about that project was the way we went about planning. This included an approach to estimating which was both lightweight yet more effective than what I'd seen before. Over a decade has now passed, and now there is an argument amongst experienced agilsts about whether estimation is worth doing at all, or indeed is actively harmful . I think that to answer this question we have to look to what purpose the estimates will be used for.

A key property of agile development is figuring out how to make a system go live with a small subset of features. We build software for the business value it offers, the quicker we go live, the faster we get at least some of that business value.

One of the basic tenets of agile development is that requirements changes aren't just expected, they are welcomed. This poses a particular challenge when an external company, like Thoughtworks, is doing work for client. Many clients want a FixedPrice arrangement, which is really fixing scope because they see the FixedScopeMirage. But a fixed scope contract is totally at odds with agile development, so what is a company like us to do?

A common approach with Timeboxed Iterations is to allocate as many UserStories as possible to each iteration in order to maximize the utilization of the staff involved. Slack is the policy of deliberately leaving time that isn't allocated for stories, using that time for unplanned work. Although this seems inefficient, it usually yields a significant improvement for the productivity of a team.

I've heard a couple of questions recently about coming up with a standard story point mechanism for multiple teams using extreme programming's planning approach. The hope is have several teams all using equivalent story points, so that three story points of effort on one team is the same as on another.

I think trying to come up with this at best of limited value, and at worst dangerous.

If you're using XP style planning, you need to get rapid consensus estimates from developers. Throwing the estimates lets you quickly tell when developers have same similar views on an estimate (so you can note it and move on) or if there is disagreement (when you need to talk about the UserStory in more detail.

Timeboxed Iterations are a way to divide and schedule up the work on a project, particularly associated with agile software projects. The team breaks down the visible features of the software into User Stories, and breaks down time into fixed periods (e.g. one week), called iterations. They then schedule the stories by allocating them to the iterations. Stories are roughly estimated so that the team can figure out how many stories fit in an iteration.

Velocity is a notion that helps calibrate a plan by tying broad statements of effort into elapsed time. Velocity is a statement of how much stuff a team (or a person if it's personal velocity) gets done in a time period. You should usually determine velocity by measuring how much got done in past periods, following the principle of YesterdaysWeather. A typical approach is to average the velocity the past three time periods to determine velocity for future time periods. Velocity was originally formed as part ExtremeProgramming but has since spread and is now used widely in agile software development of all flavors.

Yagni originally is an acronym that stands for “You Aren't Gonna Need It”. It is a mantra from ExtremeProgramming that's often used generally in agile software teams. It's a statement that some capability we presume our software needs in the future should not be built now because “you aren't gonna need it”.

This is the principle that says you'll get as much done today as you got done yesterday. In iterative projects it says that you should plan to do as much this iteration as you did last iteration. The term comes from the Extreme Programming community.