In early December, I took the train to
Runcorn and a cab to the Daresbury SIC for the workshop on ICT Opportunities in Health Care organised by techcelerate.org. The doors are closing on a decade of failure, and starting to open for agile, lean and open source ideas. I went to raise awareness that change is coming.
Health sector IT is hot here in England, as our NHS starts to open up. I had a great time, hearing about exciting innovations and meeting some interesting people.
“The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. ”
Good design — perhaps a loosely coupled, appropriate blend of expressive, cohesive components — speaks for itself.
When XP arrived, democratising design — empowering the developer crowd — seemed radical. To some it still does.
Agile design bubbles up, just-in-time. Complementary practices, tools and techniques facilitate design evolution and mitigate risks.
“Architecture is about the important stuff. Whatever that is.”
Just-in-time approaches to design fit well into agile development.
Evolutionary design reduces waste from over-engineering and design stock-piling; at the cost of some future reworking — a traditional focus of software architects.
Just-in-time approaches to architecture blend harmoniously with agile.
Let architecture emerge incrementally with no big upfront process.
Pay off pressing technical design debts before they become critical.
“Architecture is the decisions that you wish you could get right early in a project.”
“velocity is a useful long-term predictor but is not a useful short-term predictor”
Story points are an artificial, relative unit of measure for development effort, often combined with timeboxed agile methods to estimate velocity.
Story points are coarse and atomic, arising from intuitive inductive judgement. Trade accuracy for speed, at the possible cost of future rework.
Teams may use tools — such as planning poker — to reach collective consensus valuations.
Estimates for
epics — supersized stories not yet decomposed — are almost always inaccurate.
So avoid unfounded perceptions of precision by limiting point values to a sequence — often inspired by Fibonacci.
“Release Early, Release Often”
Agile development finishes features to a regular cadence, a rhythmic flow of potentially releasable versions.
The DevOps movement seeks a stronger but more dynamic relationship between upstream teams and downstream consumers in operations.
Continuous delivery engineers a pipeline for the last mile, extending from integration through proof to delivery.
“move from delivering services using projects to delivering them as products”
“ Open source is chaotic. With its special magic comes a different reality. ”
Issuing open source an license is not enough. The benefits ascribed arise from opening the development process to a broad community.
Open design extends domain driven, consensual, emergent design beyond the agile team to engage a wider ecosystem.
Community building is non-trivial.
Sustainable communication and cooperation needs space to build and maintain relationships.
Walking the fine balance between technical leadership and openness to crowdsourced design ideas is an art.
“The estimates are a useful by-product, if your organisation values such things, but actually the most important benefit you get from planning poker is the conversation.”
Playing planning poker exploits physicality, consensus and team collaboration to improve agile estimates.
And it's a fun way to get the work done.
Buy, make or take a set of cards.
Numbered each with story points, Fibonacci sequenced or not.
Each player is dealt cards with every number for each hand.
To play a hand, all reveal a card with their private estimate then discuss
outliers.
Until consensus - or timebox - repeat.
“All kanban systems are designed to limit work-in-progress, because the more work-in-progress, the slower the flow.”
Kanban exploits physicality and pull scheduling to improve flow, and so throughput.
Downstream consumer demand pulls through the stages of a processing pipeline.
Progress may be visualised through a grid, visible to all players, showing the work in progress.
To improve flow, limit work in progress by focussing on bottlenecks. Eliminate waste.
A good solution for complicated processes, and a useful tool for complex problems.
“Responding to change over following a plan”
Software development is complex, developers are not an interchangeable commodity and teams scale chaotically.
Domains with these flavours favour
empirical estimation techniques, such as velocity.
This technique extrapolates estimates from historic team velocity — story points done per unit timebox.
Scrum is an agile, iterative and incremental framework for teams developing complex products, that is simple to describe but hard to master.
A scrum team has one product owner, one scrum master and 6±3 cross-functional self-organising developers.
Each sprint begins with one planning ceremony and ends with one review and one retrospective. Every day begins with one daily scrum. These events encourage inspection and adaptation.
Product and sprint backlogs are recorded. The orthodox school insists on burndown charts that are optional in the reformed school.
Rules relate these roles, events and artifacts into a prescriptive but extensible framework.
Of course, this description captures the mechanics but not the spirit.
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