Understanding the potential barriers to change will help you make the right choices of timing, project, and approach. Some of the more important questions to ask include in the following:

• How supportive is senior management of the change? The measurements and milestones
  they establish can easily derail an iterative approach, as is the case when they ask even seemingly
  innocent questions such as “When will the design be completed?” or “When will requirements be
  signed-off?”
• What is the scope of your authority to make changes? How much of the development lifecycle
  are you responsible for? For example, the requirements might have already been specified in a
  format and to a level of detail that would make it more difficult to adopt an iterative approach.
• What are the team’s feelings about the changes? How enthusiastic is the team about iterating?
  To achieve the transition to iterative development, you will need the support of the team,
  especially the other members of the leadership team.
• What else does the team have to do? How many other projects and initiatives is the team involved
  in? If the team is not focused on and dedicated to the project, the transition to iterative
  practices will probably be slower and take more time and energy to complete.
• What capability do you need to improve? It is important to understand the capability of the
  team and how well the current capability supports the proposed iterative approach. For example,
  is there any testing capability in the team? Testing will be needed from the first iteration, which is
  often a problem in companies organized around the phases of a waterfall approach. Read More

The Software Development Process Challenge

*The first post in this series can be read here

Before I describe the deck of cards, I’d like to set the stage for using the cards. We can view software development from three time-scales (see Figure 1). Successful software development process is in essence, being able to coordinate the three time-scales effectively.

• The broadest time scale covers from the beginning to the end of a software development cycle which is marked by several key business decision making milestones. This is of great interest to stakeholders and decision makers on whether development can proceed or whether the software is suitable for release.
• The next time scale breaks the lifecycle into time-periods – months, or weeks, or what is known as an iteration. It is a fixed time-box where a number of target objectives are to be met by a development team. If there are multiple teams, then each team would be assigned their specific set of objectives. This is where team leaders operate.
• The lowest time scale is what a team member does. The work done here can be in terms of hours or days depending on the complexity of the work.

Figure 1:The Three Perspectives to Software Development.

A major problem I see in many development organizations is the serious disconnect between the three levels. The objectives set at the higher level do not easily translate to work at lower levels. Lower levels are unable to see their contribution to higher level objectives. There is a  miscommunication between the levels, and poor coordination within the same level, which leads to blockages which should not even happen. We need to solve this.

One of the frequent questions we are asked is "how can I get the time to explore needs when the business says that it is already done - "it's in the business case", even when it is obviously not complete?  This is actually a pretty common occurrence - nobody wants to take time to understand needs because they think it has already been done. Read More

Most project management approaches address risk in a fairly superficial way: risk mitigation is viewed as an important activity, but one that is largely a distraction from the main effort of the project. Risks are identified at the start of the project, they are usually assiged to someone to address the risks, but these risk-mitigation activities are largely viewed as things that take away from the project work. In practice the risks are only identified once and then they are largely forgotten in the large amount of work to be done.

On a traditional project, change is viewed as a bad thing, and great efforts are undertaken to prevent it. Change disrupts the original plan, and it is the plan (and not value delivery) that is sacrosanct on a Traditional project.

Similarly, change must be embraced. Change results from new information, from feedback that something in the original plan will not result in the desired end result. Change is something that will occur as people get new information, but change is a good thing: it means convergence on the right solution. Read More

In the previous kernel journals we have looked at the many practical applications of a process kernel that is based on the key software development entities (known as Alphas) that software projects add value to by progressing through their value states. We have seen that there are many advantages to separating these “whats” (progressions) that we are trying to achieve, from the many possible “hows” (software processes and practices) that describe how we might achieve and evidence these progressions, including the ability to set objectives and track progress in a common and consistent way irrespective of what specific practices a project happens to adopt.

Read More

As technologists, we tend to collect very detailed information and present it in a very technical way.  We talk about things like process maturity levels, and productivity indexes. I have even seen some measurement data about Agile maturity models that attempt to show how agile we are.  The problem with this kind of approach is it doesn’t provide anything that the business and the customers can relate to. 

The business does not really care how agile we are, they want to see results.  They want to be able to set targets, see improvements, and understand the benefits and the quality of the results being generated by IT. Only then can they begin to put the value of Agility into context – the context of the value and improvement generated by the move to agility. Read More

Iterative development is simple in concept: it is simply breaking a large project down into a series of smaller projects that deliver value in smaller steps. The hard thing about adopting it is that it requires the project team members and stakeholders to adopt a new set of attitudes and behaviors about how they work together to achieve a common goal. This requires subtle but significant changes on the part of all participants, especially if they have been working on conventional projects for many years. In short, these changes include the following:

A new attitude is required regarding the way that projects deliver business value. The project team must start to focus on delivering immediate and realizable value back to the business.

A new attitude is required toward uncertainty and change: teams must recognize that change happens and there are always uncertainties, so in order to be successful they must purposefully work to manage change and reduce uncertainties. Read More

Bij IJI staan we een practice-gedreven aanpak voor. Zoals met veel concepten en principes geldt ook hier dat een goed begrip van wat ermee wordt bedoeld essentieel is om er echt de vruchten van te plukken. Een manier om daar invulling aan te geven is om te kijken naar criteria waaraan je een goede practice kunt herkennen. Maar voor we dat doen, is het goed om eerst te kijken naar de definitie en kenmerken van een practice en een practice-gedreven aanpak.

Onder een practice-gedreven aanpak verstaan we onder meer “het samenstellen van een effectieve manier van werken op basis van relevante procescomponenten”. In plaats van moeizaam te proberen een procesraamwerk toe te snijden op een specifiek project draaien we het om; we selecteren alleen relevante procescomponenten en assembleren die tot een consistent proces. En zo’n procescomponent noemen we dan een practice. Use Cases, User Stories en Iteratief ontwikkelen zijn enkele voorbeelden van practices. Andere voorbeelden zijn Operationaliseren Systeem en Datamigratie. In deze context is het ultieme doel van een practice-gedreven aanpak “betere resultaten boeken met softwareontwikkeling”. Hierbij kun je dan denken aan betere software, goedkoper, sneller en een prettigere manier van werken. Read More

In the last Kernel Journal we looked at the problem that Barry Boehm was aiming to solve back in 1995 when he first proposed his three standard process milestones (which later gained industry prominence as the milestones in the Unified Software Development Process and the Rational Unified Process), namely that “the proliferation of software process models provides flexibility”, but leaves us “with no common anchor points around which to plan and control.” [Barry Boehm, November 1995]. We looked at how a small set of domain entities with simple state progression models (which we call “Alphas”) can make these common anchor points much more practical and useful while ensuring that they remain process-neutral and do not become “document-driven”.

The alphas, when used with common milestones such as the Unified Process Milestones, can actually give us much more than this – they can provide a project status and health dashboard that can be used by the customer and supplier organizations to assess the current status and health of any / all projects, irrespective of which processes or practices they are following. The graphic below shows just such a dashboard, with a set of kernel alphas and a traffic-light status for each alpha, which is derived by comparing where the project is now (the state machine to the left of each traffic light) with where it needs to be to achieve the next project milestone (the state machine to the right of each traffic light).

In Kernel Journal 5: “Making the Invisible Visible” I described how we can easily “skin” a process kernel, by providing a portal for projects to capture, share and agree the essential project information that is needed to achieve each state progression (for example, using a set of templated Wiki pages). Once we have done this, we can make the alpha dashboard much more useful to the project teams themselves, by flagging which sections of the project portal need to be updated and agreed to get the project to where it needs to go next.

This gives us the equivalent of a Satellite Navigation System for our software projects project that enables us to:

• Set our journey destination and waypoints (milestones)
• Track where we are now, compared to where we want to be
• Get guidance on what to do next in order to progress towards our destination.

To ensure that the project is making progress, each iteration is forced to produce something tangible: a “release.” This release can be:

• A prototype that is used to demonstrate some specific capability
• An “internal” release that is used to elicit feedback and that serves as the basis for further development and testing
• An “external” release that is shipped to customers in some form

The following is our definition of release:

Release: A stable and executable version of a system.

The production of something executable during each and every iteration is so important to the iterative approach that some people even go as far as to assert that “The goal of an iteration is an iteration release: a stable, integrated and tested, partially complete system.” Read More