Agile – Lex Parsimonae

November 11, 2021

Team Topologies and Conway’s Law

Most of the reading I've done lately has been combinatorial in nature; that is, each book I pick up seems to reference another book I feel compelled to add to my reading list. My latest, Team Topologies, has been no different. This book has a pretty dry title but a really compelling pitch: it aims to help companies finally sort their org charts.

The book is structured with a "choose your own adventure" feel with an introductory section and a series of deeper dives that can apply more or less to different scenarios. In this way, a reader can skip straight to a section that's likely to apply to a problem they're experiencing. In working through the the first couple chapters, though, I was already experiencing "aha" moments.

A central source of inspiration for the ideas in Team Topologies is Conway's Law, which features prominently in the foundational chapters, Conway's Law suggests that organizations build systems that mimic their communication channels, so Team Topologies authors Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais believe that the human factors of organizational design and the technical factors of systems design are inexorably intertwined, and in digesting this book, I found myself reflecting on scenarios that bear out this premise.

If there's a vulnerability in this book at all, it's that intertwining of organization and technical design. Strictly speaking, it's not a problem with the book at all; rather, it's an inexorable implication of Conway's Law. To the extent you buy into that relationship, it means that no software organization problem is merely technical and no organizational problem can be fixed by sliding names around on an org chart. Ostensibly, this may make change seem harder. In reality, I believe it points out that no change you may have believed easy was ever really changed at all.

Author Allan Kelly has done some writing on Conway's Law, as well, and I believe his assertion here carries deep implications:

More than ever I believe that someone who claims to be an Architect needs both technical and social skills, they need to understand people and work within the social framework. They also need a remit that is broader than pure technology -- they need to have a say in organizational structures and personnel issues, i.e. they need to be a manager too.
https://www.allankellyassociates.co.uk/archives/1169/return-to-conways-law/

Perhaps this connection of technology and organization helps explain the tremendous challenges found in digital transformation. I'm reminded of a conference speech I attended several years ago. The speaker was a CTO / founder of a red-hot technical startup, and he was sharing his secrets to organizational agility. "Start from scratch and do only agile things," to paraphrase, but only slightly. Looking around the room at the senior leaders from very large corporations in attendance, I saw almost exclusively despair. While a neat summation of this leader's agile journey, that approach can't help affect change in the slightest.

Does Team Topologies help this problem? Indirectly, I believe it can. Overwhelmingly, just highlighting the deep connection between people, software, and flow is a huge insight. Lots of other books and presentations kick in to address flow, but the background and earlier research docuented by Skelton and Pais in the early chapters of the book helped create a deeper sense of "why" for me. The lightbulb moment may be trite, but it's appropriate for me in this case. I found the book really eye-opening, and it's earned a spot on my short list of books for any business or technical leader.

February 23, 2020

A whole lotta chickens

You may be familiar with the old joke about the chicken & pig's relative contributions to breakfast -- the chicken, of course, being involved by virtue of providing the eggs, and the pig being committed vis-a-vis the bacon. The origin of this saying is now lost to antiquity, but it has been adopted as an illustration of dedication by sports personalities and business coaches because it manages to capture these relative levels of engagement succinctly and powerfully.

I found myself reaching for the chicken & pig business fable this week in the context of Product Ownership. We've got a back-office product that's just not getting a lot of love from the business -- lots of people who want to provide input, but nobody who's interested in taking ownership.

This isn't unexpected or unreasonable. Product Management as a professional discipline is still largely nascent. On top of that, initiatives that raise the top line are always an easier sell than back-office cost-center programs. For these reasons, I'm not sure that accounting, billing, document-management and other cross-cutting infrastructure-like programs are likely to lead the way in agile adoption or digital transformation, but transform they must -- eventually.

July 10, 2018

Agile Enterprise, Part 1

I’ve recently had occasion to see the same challenge pop up in a couple different settings -- namely, bridging the gap between agile development and integration into an enterprise. In both of the cases I saw, development employing agile practices did a good job of producing software, but the actual release into the enterprise wasn’t addressed in sufficient detail, and problems arose - in one case, resulting in wadding up a really large-scale project after a really large investment in time, energy, and development.

Although the circumstances, scope, and impact of problems like this vary from one project to the next, all the difficulties I’ve seen hinge on one or more of these cross-cutting areas: roadmap, architecture, or testing / TDD / CI.

Of the three of these, roadmap issues are by far the most difficult and the most dangerous of the three. Creating and understanding the roadmap for your enterprise requires absolute synchronization and understanding across business and IT areas of your company, and weaknesses in either area will be exposed. Simply stated, software can’t fix a broken business, and business will struggle without high-quality software, but business and software working well together can power growth and profit for both.

Roadmap issues, in a nutshell, address the challenge of breaking waterfall delivery of enterprise software into releases small enough to reduce the risk seen in a traditional delivery model. The web is littered with stories of waterfall projects that run years over their schedule, finally failing without delivering any benefit at all. Agile practice attempts to address this risk with the concepts of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF), but both are frequently misunderstood, and neither, by themselves, completely address the roadmap threat.

MVP, taken at its definition, is really quite prototype-like. It’s a platform for learning about additional features and requirements by deploying the leanest possible version of a product. This tends to be easier to employ in green-field applications -- especially ones with external customers -- because product owners can be more willing to carve out a lean product and “throw it out there” to see what sticks. Trying to employ this in an enterprise or with a replace / rewrite / upgrade scenario is destined to fail.

Addressing the same problem from a slightly different vector, MMF attempts to define a more robust form of “good enough”, but at a feature-by-feature level. In this case, MMF describes functionality that would actually work in production to do the job needed for that feature -- a concept much more viable for those typical enterprise scenarios where partial functionality just isn’t enough. Unfortunately, MMF breaks down when you compound all the functionality for each feature by all the features found in a large-scale enterprise system. Doing so really results in vaulting you right back into the huge waterfall delivery mode, with all its inherent pitfalls.

In backlog grooming and estimation, teams look for cards that are too big to fit into a sprint -- these cards have to be decomposed before they can fit into an agile process. In the same way, breaking huge projects down by MVP or MMF also must occur with a consideration for how release and adoption will occur, and releasing software that nobody uses doesn’t count!

Architects and developers recognize this sticking point, because it’s the same spot we get into with really large cards. When we decompose cards, we look for places to split acceptance criteria, which won’t always work for enterprise delivery, but with the help of architecture, it may be possible to create modules that can be delivered independently. Watch for that topic coming soon.

Armed with all the techniques we can bring to bear to decompose large-scale enterprise software, breaking huge deliveries into an enterprise roadmap will let you and your organization see software delivery as a journey more than as a gigantic event. It’s this part that’s absolutely critical to have embraced by both business and IT. The same partnership you’re establishing with your Product Owners in agile teams has to scale up to the whole enterprise in order for this to work. The trust you should be building at scrum-team-scale needs to scale up to your entire enterprise. No pressure, right? Make no mistake -- enterprise roadmap planning must be visible and embraced at the C-level of your enterprise in order to succeed.

Buy-in secured, a successful roadmap will exhibit a couple key traits. First, the roadmap must support and describe incremental release and adoption of software. Your architecture may need attention in order to carve out semi-independent modules that can work with one another in a loosely-coupled workflow, and you absolutely need to be able to sequence delivery of these modules in a way that lets software you’ve delivered yield real value to your customers. The second trait found in a roadmap of any size at all is that it’s nearsighted: the stuff closer to delivery will be much more clearly in-focus than the stuff further out. If you manage your roadmap in an agile spirit, you’ll find that your enterprise roadmap will also change slightly over time -- this should be expected, and it’s a reflection of your enterprise taking on the characteristics of agile development.

Next up, I’ll explore some ways architecture can help break that roadmap into deliverable modules.

Why Agile Fails in Large Enterprises

The Long, Dismal History of Software Project Failure

September 15, 2014November 10, 2014

What is Craftsmanship?

I was asked recently to define "craftsmanship" in software development, and I thought this would make a great topic for discussion. You can obviously find a dictionary definition for craftsmanship, but much like with architecture, I think that when we attach the additional context of software development, craftsmanship introduces some important ideas about how individual contributors fit into a larger software development organization.

Software as Art

The concept of craftsmanship in general emphasizes the skills of individuals, and connotes high-quality, highly customized work. It is very much the antithesis of mass production.

This general understanding, when applied to software development, implies a very individualized experience -- indeed, if you think about buying a work of art or even something like a piece of furniture, "craftsmanship" would imply that the product you're buying is one-of-a-kind. Nobody, literally, has another item quite like the one you're buying. For businesses commissioning custom software, there's a nugget of truth here, of course -- one of the reasons to write custom software is the presumption that your business requirements are different in some way from everybody else's requirements, and your business demands the flexibility that comes with custom software.

Another key aspect of craftsmanship is the deep and broad skill set of the craftsman. Just as you'd expect a hand-crafted product to be almost entirely the result of one man's work (to the extent that signing the work wouldn't be unheard-of), so software craftsmanship emphasizes individual skill and accountability. And while craftsmanship doesn't necessarily imply apprenticeship, a craftsman is certainly expected to be highly experienced and able to draw on years of work in the field in order to produce the sort of high-quality work that's expected.

Business Implications

While high-quality, highly-customized software sounds very appealing from a business perspective, the deliberate pace and unyielding attention to detail we most often associate with craftsmanship is petrifying. Business software needs to move at the pace of business, after all, doesn't it? I really believe that the implied slowness of craftsmanship acts as an impenetrable stigma against its adoption, which I think is largely unfortunate.

One of the key benefits of the higher-quality code produced by accomplished craftsmen is that less time is spent on an ongoing basis recovering from the sins of shoddy coding as these systems grow and evolve over time. High-quality code not only works better, it's more maintainable, so that initial effort can pay real dividends over the life of a long-lived system. Where we sometimes talk about sloppy code as being high in technical debt, quality code can be seen as an asset for an organization.

Right now, software craftsmanship remains on the fringe of development practices, and thus tends to be favored in smaller shops, as well as in "green-field" projects much more so than in larger, more established environments. It remains to be seen whether it eventually transitions into mainstream use the way that Agile has, but I think a lot depends on the effective communication of the real benefits of craftsmanship, as well as on mature tactics to introduce and manage craftsmanship in the organization.

My Take

Craftsmanship is about individual contribution. It's about taking pride in your work, and it's about a relentless journey of improvement. The scope of these experiences is best-suited to small groups of developers who can help one another grow and hold each individual accountable to the group. This, all by itself, is a tall order. It's not easy for anyone to expose himself to criticism, and that's a huge prerequisite for this sort of culture to form. This sort of open sharing takes huge amounts of trust, and trust takes time to build.

Another critical motivator for a "craftsman-like" organization is the sense that the team is building something that's going to last. When you think of hard goods built by craftsmen, you equate the higher quality to a longer lifespan -- as a consumer, you may be willing to pay a premium for a product that will outlast a cheaper product because you know it'll last a long, long time. In software, this understanding of quality has to be visible to the team as well as the customer, and the team needs to believe that this higher quality is valued. Few things are as demotivating for a developer as seeing a great body of code mangled by someone who doesn't share the same capabilities or desire for quality.

It might seem at this point that I'm advocating an all-or-nothing strategy for software development, or that software craftsmen can exist only in small shops, but I don't believe either of these is necessarily true. I believe that if craftsmanship is going to exist in a large organization, however, the organization needs to understand where it's going to be applied and it must organize its teams to support craftsmanship in targeted areas. I think this prerequisite is well-suited to a component-based Enterprise Architecture, in which well-defined components or services are identified, invested in, maintained with care, and protected, and yes -- this demands an enlightened and skilled application of Enterprise Architecture.

Craftsmanship isn't a magic wand, or a buzzword, or a slogan. Craftsmanship takes hard work, and it demands commitment from organizations and developers. It's not right for every organization, and it certainly isn't right for all developers, but if you need software that stands the test of time, craftsmanship will pay dividends for the lifetime of that software.

Software as Art

Business Implications

My Take

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