Am I getting something wrong? (thinking about OOP)

Maybe I am totally wrong but here is what is in my mind. Most of the books that describe object oriented programming, architecture or whatever are making examples using “objects” like person, cat, mammal and then big hierarchy of classes. Of course, more advance books are explaining why huge hierarchy of classes can be wrong and why it is good to use composition. I will not even try to explain that in this post.

And then having these classes you can read about different aspects of OOP. Some of the examples can be:
dog.bark()
person.walk()
person.openDoor()
engine.start()

And I agree that these are almost great examples (except person.openDoor() where I will come back later on).

So let me try to explain where are I am aiming with me question (in the caption of the post).

For learning OOP these may be good examples but from my experience so far these are cases that I don’t meet so often in practice.

Let try one example. Imagine class Can (not verb but noun). Coming from the examples above one could model method: Can.open(). Uhmmm, is it really possible that Can is able to open itself? I wouldn’t say this is reality.

So what is solution here? Quite straight forward. Model a class CanOpener. Then model method CanOpener.open(Can can). This is now much closer to reality.

But what is Can and what is CanOpener from the programming point of view? Well I would say:
Can - is data
CanOpener - is service

And in most of the projects this is what I meet. Most often you are working with data and then perform something on that data. If you try to model your solution as explained at the beginning of the post you will finish with domain classes that have hundred of methods and probably thousands of lines. But very often domain classes are just data while services are actually performing real work. But be careful not to fall into trap of procedural programming.

So come back to example from the beginning: person.openDoor(). As I mentioned this is not good example. And again I would model this quite differently:
Door
DoorOpener (interface)
Person (implements DoorOpener)

It is clear that doors can be opened by person, but they can be opened by engine or wind. So “item” that is able to open door is again service while door is just class keeping data (entity). And yes, you need to add code to open door into Person but again this can be great situation to use composition.

I hope I successfully explained how I try to model solutions for programming problems.

And just short note at the end. Please do not add Service, Manager or similar words at the end of class name. It can easy trap you into procedural programming as you will place too much responsibility into those “managers”.

Starting with Startup - Agile Acceptance Challenges

When starting with the agile development (Scrum as base in our case) there are always some challenges that you will meet at the beginning and during the road.

I will try to explain structure of the team and acceptance of different agile parts.

Team

We have started with team of 6 (including me). Two of us already had experience with Scrum, one of us had experience with classical water-fall models and three had no experience with project management models. Few months later the team was extended with the tester.

The structure of the team was (is) following:

3 senior developers - 2 with agile experience and 1 with water-fall experience

1 intermediate developer - experience only with ad-hoc project management model

1 junior developer - no experience with any project management model

1 designer - no experience with any real project management model

1 tester (few months later) - experience with water-fall models

So let see how this team went through agile adoption.

For each part I will split acceptance into three parts:

- with agile experience - acceptance of the team members who had agile experience

- no experience -acceptance of the team members that had no experience with project management methodologies

- water-fall experience - acceptance of the team members that had experience with water-fall project management models.

Writing requirements (user stories)

With agile experience

Team members that already had agile experience had no issues in writing user stories.

No experience

Team members without experience with project management methodologies accepted user stories as the form of writing requirements. At the beginning there were some issues to write user story of the right size (sometimes they were too small or too big) but they got the right form very quickly.

Water-fall experience

In the case of developer user stories have never been really accepted. My feeling was that there was no even wish to understand what is advantage of user stories. User stories were constantly too big (e.g. As admin I can do anything). Actually this colleague have never accommodated to agile development and left the company later.

In the case of tester acceptance of user stories came much faster. For him it is much easier to understand what to expect when user story is implemented. It is obvious that tester prefers user stories than complex use cases or other functional specification.

Estimation

With agile experience

Surprisingly here we needed some time to accommodate. The reason was that I have decided to use story points as estimation method. But the team member with agile experience was used to ideal person days estimation. It was confusing for him for some time. But at the end estimation model with user stories was fully accepted

No experience and water-fall experience

After some turbulences at the beginning estimation model was accepted. The most issues were regarding over-estimation and under-estimation. But with help estimation became better and now is constant.

Meaning of DONE

Meaning of DONE in agile is very interesting. You should finish user story in the way that in the future you should not come back to that user story. User story should be ready for production.

With agile experience

Anybody with agile experience should not have problems to get meaning of DONE. At least that was the case with us.

No experience

At the beginning it was not so clear what DONE means. There were questions like: Is it already DONE? Can I improve this? I have such good idea, can I add it?

All the time I have insisted only on implementing user story and focusing on tasks. Very soon they realized what done means and actually realized why DONE is very helpful.

Water-fall experience

Here situation was much more interesting.

Developer with water-fall model experience had constant problems to get work DONE. There were always small tasks that can be easily finished later. There were always some missing features because they were not specified enough in the user story description. The "wrong" influence of the water-fall could be felt most of the time.

But tester was much happier. He read user story and had understanding what to expect from it. This way he can test and easily see if it is DONE. There are no answers like: I will do it later. It quite simple - if you sent user story for testing everything must work.

Testing

Under "testing" I mean writing unit and integration (as we use Grails) tests. Here situation differs from team member to team member. Some of them understand and know how to write good tests and some of the are still fighting to get the tests right. The most common issues are like:

- writing test that tests too much functionality and spread through number of classes or services.

- writing test that tests method not functionality

Conclusion

My feeling is that team accepted agile development very good. For team members without project methodology experience agile acceptance was easy and what is the most important natural. They have feeling that it is the right way to do the work. The most problems had a developer with water-fall experience. But the proof that having water-fall experience does not mean it is impossible to accommodate to agile is new team member that also came with water-fall experience but is accepting agile approach very good.

What is your experience in accepting agile?

Starting with Startup - Minimizing Unknowns

In the previous post I have explained some reasoning why have we selected certain technologies, tools and processes. As mentioned all decisions were made to minimize number of unknowns in the project.

So process was selected in a way so we can adapt easily - means Agile.
Tools and technologies were selected according to project needs and common knowledge of the team.
Hopefully team will get know each other as time passes by and I have believed that everything will go fine (and mostly lucky for us that was the case).

But the biggest unknown was still there - PROJECT.

You cannot start development before you know what need to be implemented. Just having list of user stories would not be enough. You have to understand similar projects, you need to feel similar projects, know what are your main differences and how to use them to be successful.

Or in short - team has to share the same VISION.

And next few sprints were devoted exactly to this. Project investigation. We have been doing 1 week sprints and each project member was investigating different aspects of the similar projects. We have studied things like:

• features
• user interface
• easy of use
• lot of discussion with product owner to get feeling what are his main ideas
  

At the end of each sprint we had demo. Demo was used to present in details what are doing similar companies (should I say competitors :) ). This way all project members (including product owner) were able to better understand what is expected from us and in which direction we should roll out project.

We did couple of week length sprints and when we have feel confident enough we were able to start with the project.

So let summarize steps we did so far:

• process selection
• team educatin
• tools and technology selection
• project investigation

And now we are finally ready to start with the project. So in next posts I will describe some challenges we had during project development. Stay tuned :)

Starting with Startup - Tools and Technologies Reasoning

For those that read 'Starting with Startup' posts I want to apologize for not writing recently but last months we have been working a lot. You know how it is in startups :)

In the previous posts I have explained processes and tools we have decided to use. There were some comments and questions why this and not that technology and similar.

When you start with the startup everything is completely new. The following list captures the most important new things that each member of the startup team meet:

• team members
• project
• processes (you cannot expect that each team member will have experience with the process you select)
  
• technologies (you cannot expect that each team member will have experience with all technologies you select)

As we all know it is much easier to predict result if there is minimum of unknowns. And in the startup company more or less everything is unknown - from the project to the project acceptance from final users. So what you try is to minimize unknowns. And to do that you have to carefully select each aspect of the technology and process.

I would say that selection of agile and Scrum is more or less straight-forward. You want to be able to adapt to each new situation that will come up and what gives you more possibilities for that than agile development.

How to minimize unknowns in the project will be topic of further posts.

And at the end comes technology. And here is reasoning similar. You select what suites the best for the team and the project that is in front of you. And that is reason why we didn't select some upcoming technologies like GIT. We have created list of tools we need and then selected those that are the most known to all of us. And the result of selections are in details explained in the previous post.

Starting with the Startup - Setting Up Development Environment

After we have set basics for using Scrum we can start with our first sprints. Our first sprints were devoted to choosing and setting up development environment.

So let explore what do we know so far about the project (of course I knew much more than I can write in this post).

* Our main focus are desktop and mobile web applications

* Our core business is in the field of affiliate networks

* We will use agile process or to be more specific Scrum

So I will jump directly into decisions we had to make and what have we decided:

Web development framework

Basically we have been deciding between two choices: Grails and Wicket. Who is reading my blog from time to time probably already knows answer to this. We have decided for Grails.

Build process

Although Grails have nice build commands we needed something that is easier to integrate with the builds of other projects. Basically we have been deciding between maven and ivy. As Grails supports ivy much better than maven we have decided for ivy.

Continuous build process

More or less we have not been thinking too much here. We have decided for Hudson. Hudson is easy to install, has great front-end for management and number of very useful plugins. One note: although Hudson has Grails plugin we are not using it. We are using ivy in the Hudson to build the Grails projects.

Bug tracker

Although we would be happy not to have bugs that is not reality. So we needed bug tracker. As most of us had experience with Mantis we have decided that our bug tracking tool will be Mantis

Libraries repository

We will be depending on some external libraries. As we don't want to have them stored on Internet we needed some tool that handles dependencies. We have decided for Nexus.

Source code control

Although there are new source code control system like git we have decided to use probably the most common one Subversion

Mobile web development framework

After lot of investigation you find out that the market with the mobile web application frameworks is quite poor. The only available and really useful open source solution is: WALL NG. Luckily we have managed to almost fully integrate WALL NG with the Grails.

IDE Tool

Although we didn't have any experience with InteliJ Idea as this is currently only tool with good support for groovy/grails we have decided that our IDE tool of selection is InteliJ Idea.

In-house Grails plugin repository

As Grails has number of useful plugins and we knew we will be using them. This leads that we need local Grails plugin repository. Grails repository is set in the Subversion.

Having setup like the one mentioned above should give you fluent build process that is easy to repeat in the any moment. Additionally Hudson will ensure that your build is in the fit condition because it will report all build and test breaks.

Starting with the Startup - Start Using Scrum

After Scrum has been selected as process and the team have been educated about agile and Scrum we can start with setting up development environment. Very important thing to notice is that we can start using Scrum right away. Yes, Scrum can be used for tasks where you need to make decisions, investigation, setup of development environment and similar tasks.

As quite often those tasks are not too much time consuming and you want to review current status more often it is best to start with short sprints. E.g. we decided to make one week sprints. This means that you can review your progress, adapt to new findings and adjust your directions on the weekly basis. When you are deciding about length of the sprint you should ask question: For what time period can we be sure that we will not change our minds?

The first thing we did was not part of the sprint but we did that with the purpose. We wanted to select some Scrum tool.

More or less there are two basic options:

* Using excel for product backlog and sprint backlog
* Using some of existing (commercial or open sourced) Scrum tools

We have decided to use ScrumWorks basic edition with the addition of the big pin-board.

ScrumWorks enables you to have product backlog, sprint backlog with the burndown chart, and some advance reporting options. Pin-board is used for user story cards. Idea is to split the pin-board in columns (e.g. todo, progress, testing, done) so everybody can see the status of the current sprint by simply looking onto it. If you are asking: isn't Scrum tool enough, I would say no. The reason is that if you are not part of the team, to check the status of the sprint it is enough to check the pin-board. Without pin-board you would had to open Scrum tool and this is already enough to give it up on checking status of the sprint.

One of the most important features of the agile and Scrum is transparency. We want to be aware of the real situation in each moment. If the project or sprint is late we want to find it out as soon as possible.

So we have prepared our Scrum tools and now we are ready to start sprint(s) for setting up development environment.

So how we set up development environment will be described in the next post.

Starting with the Startup - Educating the Team

In the previous post I have explained why we have choose agile approach or more directly Scrum. But before you start using agile approach it is very important to explain what is agile and Scrum to the whole team and of course to the management.

In our case we are lucky because we have full support from the management. It means there are no "artificial" obstacles in implementing Scrum. The only real obstacle are we. So before going on I made presentation about Scrum, team members did some reading and then we discussed about the whole approach.

So when you are educating team do not forget to explain to them:

• Cores of the agile and the Scrum

And especially take care to explain:

• Why everything in Scrum is time-boxed
• What is user story and what are the differences between user story and use case
• What means DONE
• What is goal of the sprint
• What is velocity and why it gives better estimation when things will be done than "classical" approaches
• Why testing is so important in the agile approach
• What is burndown chart and how it helps the whole team

It may be clear why these points are important but I will shortly explain why I think it is important to take care there is full understanding of them.

Time-boxing - very often developers are used to implement some tasks as long as they want. Even after deadlines. In Scrum everything is time-boxed because this way everybody have to be focused that features have to be finished in proposed time. So it is not possible to change architecture forever. In one moment you have to decide and do implementation.

User story - in lot of companies and even in schools developers are used to thing in use cases. While use cases are good very often they put limitation that need not to be set in given moment. Classical examples are: then user clicks the button.... How the use case knows there is .... button. User story explains functionality that user wants to achieve without too much details.

Done - Done must mean: I am confident that feature implemented can go online. It is tested, written in good quality and I believe there are no bugs. This should be approach for all features that are marked done. You should not return back to this feature.

Goal of the sprint - you have to set goal if you want to have good feeling at the end of sprint. How could you know if your sprint was success or failure without clear goal?

Velocity - velocity is number that based on the experience (yesterday's weather) tells you how much team can implement in the given period of time. Velocity is better than "classical" approaches because it covers meetings, phone calls, unexpected bugs and everything that is happening more or less regulary.

Testing - if there are no tests how can you change the code and be sure that you didn't break any of the existing functionality. Well you cannot and you have to check everything after each change. If you have lot of tests you just run them and find out immediately if you have broke some existing functionality.

Burndown - is great tool that tells you without mercy you current status. It will tell you if you are doing good or if you are doing bad. Just have it in front of eyes.

Conclusion: If you have decided to take agile approach do not forget to educate developers what is agile. It is better to do it at the beginning then fixing problems in the middle.

Starting with the Startup - Selecting Processes

In the previous post about Starting with the Startup I explained that as our first step we have decided to choose processes. Of course one of the most important decisions to make is to choose right management methodology (framework). The product owner (managing director) was coming from the company with the strong full life cycle (waterfall if you prefer this way) process. He had no idea about any other processes and he was used to work in that way. Even all the next steps he planned were in that direction. There was plan to hire external consultant that will more or less write "book with the boxes" that we will implement. And that will be our solutions.

The good thing is that although he didn't know for something else than waterfall methodology he didn't like waterfall approach.

So as you may guess it was not hard to explain him what is agile, what is scrum and what are advantages of the agile approach compared to waterfall approach.

For those who don't know difference just shortly: in waterfall you define and plan the whole project in advance and then just implement what was planned. No changes are allowed or complex change request processes are defined to introduce new requirements. In agile style you create vision and rough plan of your project and then implement your project in increments and iterations. You allow project to grow and change in the way according you new discoveries or business needs.

Selecting agile approach out of the box would be mistake because for any decision you should have a good reasons. So let analyze situation we have.

• We are startup company with small number of developers.
• We have rough idea what is our goal
• Our main focus are desktop and mobile web applications
• The market where we are moving is changing rapidly
• We are not sure and not aware of all the features we will need in our applications

Possibility 1: Waterfall (or similar strong processes) - if we choose this path it means that we need to define all the features of our applications. Oops, we are still not sure how many applications we will have. Not to talk about features of those applications. Ok, but if we analyze problem carefully maybe we would be able to define all the features in all the applications. But the next problem is: market is changing rapidly. Are we sure we want to create detailed plans too far in the future knowing that market will change in the mean time. Decision: this is not the way we should go.

Possibility 2: Agile (Scrum) - I would say this is the direct hit. Agile approach is good to use if you have clear vision but not clear plan. If you have small (up to 9 persons) collocated team. If you requirements can change fast according to new discoveries and you need to adjust your goals according to market changes. Well if you check the list above agile is covering situation we have.

Decision: So actually it was not so hard to make the decision. We have decided to take agile approach implemented with Scrum.

Starting with the Startup

Few months ago (October last year) I have joined the startup company. An what is the real luck I have joined them really at the beginning. So when I came on my first working day there was server room prepared, tables with computers and few developers that joined the company a month before me. The core business of the company is (will be) affiliate networks and mobile web applications. It is quite young and very innovating area of the current industry trends. If you don't believe me Google it :)

The great thing in joining startup right from the beginning is that you have big influence on the whole process. It is never boring and commonly it is taken care that the team is created from great people and developers. And of course it does not mean that big and small companies do not have great people and great developers.

So when the team is established, servers are prepared and there is rough idea what needs to be implemented you can jump right away into development. You install Eclipse, and start writing code. And doing it this way you will fail in a few months :)

First steps to be done are to establish some basic processes. As my part is mainly considered to development processes I will go through development processes and development environment setup.

Well our decisions I will explain in the coming posts.

Hope to have more material for blogging

I am aware that last few weeks I was quite lazy with blogging but as I was changing employer so lot of responsibilities have been in front of me. Of course, important part was knowledge transfer. From the October I am in my new company.

First I would like to thanks my previous company for having a chance to work on interesting and exciting projects.

In the new company I am coming to the position of Head of Software Development. It is a small start up company and we are working on the green field project. Yes, you see it right, its green field :)

As my future work will include some new technologies and different market I hope that I will have lot of materials for blogging. We will mainly work with affiliate networks and mobile web development. As this is quite new field for me I believe I will be able to share a lot of interesting discoveries.

As the field we will be working in is very dynamic we are of course on Scrum and agile software development. Dynamic projects and agile software development create great combination. I am very sure we will have lot of fun.

Agile, TDD and upfront desing

As TDD and agile software development are emerging as more and more used technologies for software development lot of software developers are jumping into it without having real knowledge.

From my point of view one of the misconceptions about TDD and agile is that you don't need any design and architecture upfront. TDD with refactoring will give me the right architecture in all cases.

Although I am big fun of agile software development I don't believe this is idea of the agile. Agile is here to help develop better software for better customer satisfaction. But it in no cases claims that you should forget about big picture, about documentation and about having at least basic understanding of your system design.

From my point of view you need to do basic design at least at the high level. Then for important parts you need to go to lower levels (if really necessary). And then agile together with TDD will help you to really get it right. To separate concerns, to make separation between domain objects in different tiers and so on.

So as conclusion, agile does not mean no more thinking. Agile means think about the problem, do basic planning and then use TDD and other agile tools to get it right.

Book Review: Becoming Agile

When I started to think that majority of agile books are somehow breaking DRY (don't repeat yourself) principle I was lucky enough to get a copy of the book Becoming Agile: ...in an imperfect world.

Introduction

What I liked the most in this book is that it is completely oriented to the real world. Therefore it will not try to teach you any of the existing agile frameworks but will help you to make your company (team) agile taking into account all constraints surrounding you. Book is oriented around agile principles and authors consider you environment agile if you are following agile manifesto principles.
Another value of the book is that agile introduction is taken from the complete beginning. From company readiness assessment up to the project deployment and spreading your agile process through out the whole company. The whole project lifecycle is covered. From the vision, through adapting idea to the deployment. This is something that I was missing the most in lot of books about agile.

Book follows imaginary company Acme media and its move toward more agile environment.
Getting started chapter will explain how to check your company readiness to adopt agile processes, ensure buy-in and inject agility into your existing process. When you have selected pilot project you are moving forward.

Kicking off chapter explains how to make feasibility study and how to decide if you should continue or stop with the project.

If you decided to continue with the project Populating the product backlog chapter will show how to create product backlog, what means "just enough" for a feature card and how to estimate and prioritize the product backlog.

Enough information for scheduling creates release plan and explains in how much details you should plan your iterations. And don't forget that having plan is not enough. What you need is planning because during the project your plan will change for sure.

When you have release and iteration plan you can move to the Building the product chapter. You will see how to welcome change, how to apply agile principles into development and how to ensure that you have working software at the end of iteration.

Embracing change chapter cope with adapting to change requirements. It explains common reasons for requirement changes and how to adapt to them. Next parts of this chapter will show you how to plan deploying and how to improve your process using retrospective.

If your pilot project was successful you will want to spread the agile process throughout the company. The Moving forward chapter will help you with this process.

Rest of the book explains the whole process from two different points of view. In one chapter the overall diagram of the project lifecycle is displayed and shortly explained while another chapter contains text description of the overall process.

Conclusion
Although at the beginning I was not sure if I want to read this book I must admit I have really enjoyed reading the book. I believe that this book must be mandatory read for anyone who want to become member of agile community.
The only downside of the book is that it covers really wide area (complete project lifecycle) and thus after reading this book you will need to read other books to improve your knowledge about e.g. estimating, testing, writing good user stories...

I really recommend this book to everyone that already are or want to enter the agile world.

Don't forget to ask "why"

Recently I was browsing through stackoverflow searching for interesting questions and answers.

Question that raised my interest was:
"What you don't like in agile development?"

And the answer with the most votes started with: "I don't like seeing people focus on "what" and missing "why"."

You can have a look at the full thread here.

And actually asking "why" is one of the main attributes of the agile software development. But as hype was created around agile methodologies everybody are happy with the fast delivery and smaller number of bugs. And some agile teams had adapted to this style. They are developing everything that is thrown on them for the given iteration. Sometimes request does not give sense but it is implemented anyway.

But we should not forget that idea of the agile methodology is to help customer build better software. And we can build better software only if we ask customer "why?".

So next time when you meet strange requirement ask the customer "why?". And keep asking "why" as long as you don't get to the core of the problem. And don't expect that you will get easy to the core of the problem. But when you are at the core of the problem there is big probability that you will be able to propose better solution and thus help customer to build better software.

Don't forget that software development should be fun.

Even Agile Projects Need Vision and Concept

So you have heard about this strange word - 'Agile' . After some googling, reading some blogs and maybe some books you hear only promises how you will implement majority of your projects easily, in time and within budget. All you need is to put some team together, write some user stories, estimate them and start doing iterations. You track your velocity, write unit tests and more or less follow best agile practices while coding. And somewhere in the middle you find out that you are lost and not sure what is happening. Then you start to ask your self what had happen?

This is happening probably more often than we would expect. And the reasons are different. I will not try to find those reasons as lot of them are already described and you can find out how to prevent them.

I will concentrate on one that is for unknown reasons rarely mentioned in blogs and even agile books.

Even when you are doing agile software development (XP, Scrum) what you need is concept or vision for the project. But not only in the head but also on the paper. This needs not to be hundred pages document but document that clearly states what are the goals of the project.

In the number of agile posts, your project is starting with writing epics, stories and/or roles. But it is little bit confusing how to get those user stories. Advice you find the most often is to make user stories writing session where moderator guides meeting and the goal is to write as many user stories as possible. But how you can write user stories if you are not aware what is the main goal of the project? To be able to write good user stories (even epics) you must have clear idea what is the vision of the project.

To be able to write good user stories you must have vision document.

Some of the attributes of the good vision document are:

• It is short
• It clearly states goals of the project
• It is read and understood by the software development team (and all other interested parties)
• It is always up to date (changing with the project)

I believe these attributes state that vision document is agile. 

So if you are planning new project and want to do it right way I believe correct order of steps would be (note that very often the first step is left out and I believe it is the first mistake in the project):

• Write vision document and communicate it to all interested parties
• Write epics and user stories based on the vision document
• Create your product backlog
• Start with iterations
• After few iterations review the project
• If necessary change user stories
• If necessary change vision document
• Communicate changes in the vision to all team members so they are aware of the new course of the project

So vision document must reflect all the time your current goal of the project and this goal has to be clearly communicated to the team.

Be careful, doing agile project without clean vision and without adapting during the path is impossible.

Planning Extreme Programming

Few weeks ago I read book Planning Extreme Programming (The XP Series) by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler. To be honest according to the names on the book cover I expected more from this book. If you are professional and already have experience with extreme programming or agile software development this book will not give you too much. If you are new to this style of software development, or planning agile software development at all, I would for sure recommend this book so you can get overview and explanation why agile software development (particularly Extreme Programming) works better than more traditional approaches. Then for sure you need to read additional books to get even better understanding of the Extreme Programming.

In the book there is lot of comparison of planning we are applying in every day life and how to take that approach for software development.

After initial introduction in the few first chapters you are going into planning process more and more .

You will learn how to write user stories, how to do estimations, you will see that there is no plan but the planning process. You will learn why the first plan is the hardest one and then how the process of release planning works. After release plan is prepared iterations planning takes place. Iterations are steps within release that will help you to reach the final goal, successful project.

So for the end, my conclusion would be. If you are new to agile software development read the book as it gives excellent introduction and gives you understanding why agile approaches should work.

If you would like to find out more about user stories that are the base for the planning process you can read my review of the book User Stories Applied.

Scrum: Lessons Learned

It is a year as we have started using Scrum as project management framework. At that time I was starting with a startup company and it was on me to decide and propose next steps. Somewhere at that time I read Scrum and XP from the Trenches and found implementing scrum web site. For me decision was clear. Most of the colleague had some experience with "kind of" agile software development. Unit testing, CI, SVN has been part of life. But Scrum, iterations, user stories have been something new and something we had to learn. Although I have studied lot of books we started with baby steps. Today I believe we are children but we have much more experience than year ago.

During our sprints we have made some common mistakes, we have made some less common mistakes and I will try to summarize what we have learned.

First let me shortly explain our situation. We are small startup company with number of projects. Therefore it is not possible to have consistent team size per project. Further on, very often we are not able to run more than two-three consequent sprints on the same project. Althout these are some Scrum pre assupmtations, I believe Scrum helped us a lot and we wouldn't be where we are if we would go without Scrum.

So what are the most important lessons learned so far:

• Product backlog - although it is stated in all books and articles we very often failed to have prioritized list of features to implement called product backlog. When you don't have product backlog you are never sure about your future steps. So, always have product backlog with features to be implemented.
• Product owner - when there is no real product owner, and this is unfortunately very often case in our situation, somebody else (product owner proxy) must take responsibilities of product owner. It our case it is me (playing role of developer, scrum master and product owner proxy).
• User stories - although Scrum does not explicitly requires to express requirements as user stories, we found out that user stories are the best way to express requirement. It is easy to prioritize them, it is easy to understand them and it is easy to know when user story is implemented. At the beginning we used more generic terms for describing what we want to implement. That got us into position of never ending requirements (requirements that are never implemented).
• Sprint planning - at the beginning we had short sprint planning session. We just listed what we want to implement without discussion. Consequence was that we didn't had common design understanding, we had different opinion of DONE. As we used longer sprint planning sessions (4-5 hours) those understanding got better.
• Unfinished user stories - do not let sprint to finish with not all planned user stories implemented. If this is happening too often somewhere you are doing mistake. Lower your velocity, make better definition of DONE. If team is used that sprint can be finished but not everything is implemented this will repeat again and again. At the end of the sprint everything must be implemented otherwise sprint is failure.
• Code quality - very often you want to finish tasks as soon as possible and therefore underestimating user stories. Then what usually happens is that at the end of the sprint code is not written with production quality and later on you have to return to that code. Actually what happened here is that you didn't finish user story. Therefore, give yourself enough time for user story implementation. Do not forget refactoring, discussions, integration tests, nice user layout and experience. Only if you satisfy all these requirements you will implement user story with production quality and will have potentially shippable code at the end of sprint.
• Estimation - even after a year, we are still making mistakes when estimating. We can noticed improvements but we are still unsatisfied. For this problem for us there is still not solution.
  

And for the end, remember, Scrum is team work. Scrum master is here to help and protect the team, no to command the team.

Working with User Proxies

My short summary of the book User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn.

In the previous post we saw different possibilities how to gather user stories.

The best way to gather user stories is to work with the users of the software to be developed. But sometimes, you are not allowed to communicated with users directly or in the worst case you even do not have users :)

In this case you have to work with user proxies. User proxy is a person that represents user but is not a user. There are different types of user proxies, and can come from different contexts. So user proxy can be:

• User's manager
• Development manager
• Salesperson
• Domain expert
• Marketing group
• Former users
• Customers
• Trainers and technical support
• Business or system analyst

User proxy can help you a lot, but you must be aware that user proxies do not have all necessary knowledge. So for example, user's manager knows something about system but will use only small part of the system. Risk is that you will develop system that will suite perfect to manager but will not be designed well for the real users. Similarly salesperson usually can explain you high level overview very well but can have problems with details. And there are similar kind of problems with all user proxies.

What is very important to remember: When working with user proxy if possible you should try hard to get your way through user proxy to the real user when ever it is possible.

To produce good software that meets user requirements you have to work with users and avoid user proxies when ever possible.

Gathering User Stories

My short summary of the book User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn.

In the previous post we saw why it is important to define roles and some techniques how to describe them.

When we have specified roles we need user stories. User stories need to be gathered somehow. Of course, the best practice is to gather user stories from user or customer. In any case, one should avoid to try to define user stories without user/customer.

Following techniques can be used to generate user stories:

• User interviews
• Questionnaires
• Observation
• Story Writing workshops

User interview is usually preferred style of user story gathering. Although interview seems simple way, usually it is not so easy. You must be able to lead interview but also to ask right questions.

Questionnaires are not so famous style of user stories gathering but can be useful if you have lot of users. In this case survey can be very good to gather information about features users would like to have.

Observation is simple but no always possible. But observing user how she interacts with your software can give you real understanding about her needs and how software should be changed to help her.

Story writing workshops can be very rapid way for generating number of user stories. These workshops are very productive but quality of workshop can depend on the meeting leader. For me, story writing workshop with right persons on the workshop is preferred way for gathering user stories.

Difference between iterative and incremental development

Do you sometimes also have problem to make clear distinction between iterative and incremental development? What if you should explain difference to customer or friend?

Hopefully these two pictures taken from Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it will help you understand it.

When you work incrementally you are adding piece by piece but expect that each piece if fully finished. One picture is worth of thousands words :)
When you work iteratively you create rough product or product piece in one iteration, then review it and improve it in next iteration and so on until its finished. One picture is worth of thousands words :)
So is Scrum incremental or iterative?

It is iterative by the definition as we are running sprints. We are improving application iteration after iteration.

But I believe it is also incremental because user stories finished in sprint should be of shippable quality and therefore we should not return to them in next iterations.

So Scrum is iterative incremental process.

Is this your opinion too?

User Story - Define Roles

My short summary of the book User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn.

In the previous post I summarized basic attributes of good user stories (INVEST attributes). In this post I will summarize while user roles are important.

In the most of cases in each software systems there are different roles that are interacting with it. Before you start writing your user stories you should think about roles that will interact with your system.

This way you will avoid situation when all your user stories start with "As an user...."
This way you will have better understanding what capabilities you system should have.
Having roles it may very easy happen that you will discover user stories that you would probably forget in the first moment.

How do you come to roles:

• Make brainstorm about initial set of roles
• organize initial set of roles
  
• consolidate roles
• refine roles

Of course, brainstorming should not take more than hour. After this hour you should have better ideas of user roles supported by your system.
Having roles you are able to write better user stories because very often role gives additional clarity to the user story.

There are some additional techniques for defining roles: personas and extreme characters.
Personas and extreme characters can give another view into you system but you should use them only if your project really requires that.