Question

Basically we have rows upon rows of programmers that do mundane tasks every day. This would involve writing code that is not very effective, is not unit tested, and often integrates poorly with the application. Not to mention that there is no accountability in terms of hours spent versus hours worked. I am not trying to get people fired or make life miserable for anyone. All I want is a stream line agile (word is banned in our company) process.Would this involve setting up something like a Hudson integration server? Version control that is tied to project management software?

Answer 1

This is the perfect question for a plug of the Seven Principles of Lean Software Development:

1. Eliminate Waste
   • Provide market and technical leadership – your
     company can be successful by producing
     innovative and technologically
     advanced products but you must
     understand what your customers value
     and you know what technology you’re
     using can deliver
   • Create nothing
     but value – you have to be careful
     with all the processes you follow i.e.
     be sure that all of them are required
     and they are focused on creating value
   • Write less code – the more code you have the more tests you need thus it
     requires more work and if you’re
     writing tests for features that are
     not needed you are simply wasting time
2. Create Knowledge
   • Create design-build teams – leader of the
     development team has to listen to
     his/her members and ask smart
     questions encouraging them to look for
     the answers and to get back with
     encountered problems or invented
     solutions as soon as possible
   • Maintain a culture of constant
     improvement – create environment in
     which people will be constantly
     improving what they are working on –
     they should know that they are not and
     should not be perfect – they always
     have a field to improve and they
     should do it
   • Teach problem-solving
     methods – development team should
     behave like small research institute,
     they should establish hypotheses and
     conduct many rapid experiments in
     order to verify them
3. Build Quality In
   • Synchronize – in order to achieve high quality in
     your software you should start
     worrying about it before you write
     single line of working code – don’t
     wait with synchronization because it
     will hurt
   • Automate – automate
     testing, building, installations,
     anything that is routine, but do it
     smartly, do it in a way people can
     improve the process and change
     anything they want without worrying
     that after the change is done the
     software will stop working
   • Refactor – eliminate code
     duplication to ZERO – every time it shows up refactor the
     code, the tests, and the documentation
     to minimize the complexity
4. Defer Commitment
   • Schedule Irreversible Decisions at the Last
     Responsible Moment – you should know
     where you want to go but you don’t
     know the road very well, you will be
     discovering it day after day – the
     most important thing is to keep the
     right direction
   • Break Dependencies – components
     should be coupled as loosely as possible to enable
     implementation in any order
   • Maintain Options – develop multiple
     solutions for all critical decisions
     and see which one works best
5. Optimize the Whole
   • Focus on the Entire Value Stream – focus on winning
     the whole race which is the software –
     don’t optimize local inefficiencies,
     see the whole and optimize the whole
     organization
   • Deliver a Complete
     Product – teams need to have great
     leaders as well as great engineers,
     sales, marketing specialists,
     secretaries, etc. – they together can
     deliver great final products to their
     customers
6. Deliver Fast
   • Work in small batches – reduce projects size,
     shorten release cycles, stabilize work
     environment (listen to what your
     velocity tells you), repeat what’s
     good and eradicate practices that
     creates obstacles
   • Limit work to
     capacity – limit tasks queue to
     minimum (one or two iterations ahead
     is enough), don’t be afraid of
     removing items from the queue – reject
     any work until you have an empty slot
     in your queue
   • Focus on cycle time,
     not utilization – put in your queue
     small tasks that cannot clog the
     process for a long time – reduce cycle
     time and have fewer things to process
     in your queue
7. Respect People
   • Train team leaders/supervisors – give team
     leaders the training, the guidance and
     some free space to implement lean
     thinking in their environment
   • Move
     responsibility and decision making to
     the lowest possible level – let your
     people think and decide on their own –
     they know better how to implement
     difficult algorithms and apply
     state-of-the-art software frameworks
   • Foster pride in workmanship – encourage passionate involvement of
     your team members to what and how they
     do

My point is that you can certainly adopt engineering practices like automated testing, refactoring, coding standards, pair programming, code reviews, continuous integration, etc. They will definitely not hurt. But they should be part of a bigger plan that involves organizational practices and, ultimately, the way your company drives the business. Agile is actually a business oriented thing, engineering practices and tools are just a small part of the story and won’t be enough by themselves to save hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In short, whatever you’ll use, if your current (probably sequential and defined) process produces poor results, not changing the process won’t drastically change the results.

I thus believe that enabling “inspect and adapt” cycles and feedback loops would be the most important thing to do.

But change usually involves the management.

See also

• Lean Software Development
• Scrum (a simple inspect and adapt framework)
• Extreme Programming