Practices
De wereld van Practices – Wat is een Practice?
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
The Kernel Journals 7: SatNav for Software Development Projects
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.
The Kernel Journals 6: Where to (first/next)?
We all know that we want to “cut to the chase” as soon as we can and start incrementally developing the software product through which we deliver value back to the business. But we also know that there are certain essential pre-requisites to “sprinting”, such as some kind of vision of where we are supposed to be going and the right team and tools to get us there. If we start motoring before we are ready we may head off in the wrong direction or we may find that the wheels come off as we accelerate through the gears. Read More
Scaling Scrum? by Ivar Jacobson
Agile Scrum | October 28, 2008
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Scaling Scrum?
Scrum is excellent for lightweight management of small projects developed by co-located teams. However, it is not designed for large complex systems, or systems that build a SOA (banks, car companies) or PLA (product line architecture for instance Ericsson) or for large organizations with or without outsourcing. Moreover, Scrum is just one practice. You need many more to develop software.
But can’t we just scale Scrum? Scaling is challenging. In the 1970’s people tried to scale to ‘programming in the large’. Later people tried to scale objects to ‘objects in the large’ (mega-programming). Both never made it. Hundreds of books and even more papers were written on the subjects, but it didn’t help. Instead ideas that were scalable at their roots became successful such as components and objects. At Ericsson we never had to struggle with ‘programming in the large’ since we went straight to components and later to objects.
Why is it so difficult to scale? Explaining this is not difficult but takes a lot of space. Instead let me make an analogy. Suppose you have been able to produce a new chemical substance by using a test tube and a Bunsen burner and the new substance helps with an important problem. Now you want to produce tons of the new substance. Nobody would dream of industrializing the laboratory method by simply building a larger laboratory with hundred meter long test tubes and fifty meter high Bunsen burners. Instead a chemical process would be built in which you would not recognize the original method.
Now, why do we need to scale Scrum itself? Why not let Scrum stay the pearl it is. Treat it as one of your practices in your portfolio of practices also including for example practices for requirements to test, architecture, components. Scale by composing Scrum with other practices.
To the fathers of Scrum I would say: Please, don’t extend Scrum with all kinds of other practices such as use cases, user stories test-driven design, etc. and brand the whole soup as Scrum. Doing so will make Scrum heavier and it will threaten the survival of Scrum because of deficiencies in these other practices.
We help companies around the world to adopt Scrum. However, we don’t see Scrum as the center of all you need. Instead, the center is the practices you already have in your organization, the ones your people already have adopted. Replace them carefully with better practices – one by one. Scrum could be one of these better practices but not the only one.
Do you agree with this approach? Now, it doesn’t happen by itself. It is clear that a practice-based approach is what is needed. We have been promoting and working with practices since 2003. Now, even IBM and Microsoft have started to join this movement. And this is really good for the industry. It is very smart!