recursivefaults-blog

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Ahhh

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Even Amundsen

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Scrum's Missing Questions

Scrum is probably the most widely adopted agile practice today. It has a lot of seemingly simple practices that can actually be devilish to get right. Some of it's features that exist, for better or worse are:

15 minute stand up meetings

Fixed length iterations

Story points for estimation

Velocity as a metric

Retrospectives

The problems I've seen from years of doing scrum, and, "Scrum-but," are pretty simple:

The belief that if you do the work, you obviously added value.

If you do retrospectives you obviously are improving.

I want to talk about that last one.

Improving is hard. It necessitates that you understand that you're not good enough yet. People don't like acknowledging those deficiencies. People really don't like finding out that their action item from retro also didn't help.

You need evidence to help make the conversation impersonal. Scrum doesn't have a lot of obvious metrics, but it does have some, and allows for more.

Enter the concept of heijunka. Heijunka is a simple visual system that attempts to even out the work to be done according to time and product. Heijunka isn't ideal, it's just a tool. It's a tool that allows certain questions to be asked to drive improvement.

"What is preventing us from accomplishing this today?"

If this seems out of left field, let me connect some dots. Scrum works in fixed iteration lengths and software has a notion of products/work types (Stories, Defects, etc).

Scrum usually also has a commitment, which makes a team promise to deliver the work that was groomed into the backlog.

So, just to go full circle, Scrum and Heijunka have a lot in common. So let's see how we can take some of the goals of Heijunka and put them to Scrum.

You have a new metric now, which is committed vs accomplished work. That with velocity helps to inform you of problems. I say both metrics because if you look at just one, it gives a broken picture. An even better one would be related to customer demand, but let's not go crazy.

So a sprint ended. You go to retrospective. Ask the question, "What kept us from achieving 100% of our work without losing velocity?" Not, "What worked, what didn't," or any of those other silly, wild-ass, retro questions (SWAR, I made that up).

Then, you can have a retrospective about things that actually went wrong, and you can actually begin to see if the countermeasures work or not.

If somehow you have a stable or increasing velocity and a perfect sprint delivery, tweak the parameters of how you level your work. Expose more problems.

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Isometric Pixel Art

Created by Megapont

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Farming and Flow Efficiency

Meet Joe the farmer.

Joe lives in the fictional game world of Stronghold HD. He has a simple life. He tills his field, plants his wheat, harvests it, brings it to a stockpile, and eats food from the communal food store.

Life is good for Joe. In fact, it would be exactly accurate to say that Joe is happy if he is fed.

Joe wonders sometimes, in the lonely expanse of his life, big questions. Where did I come from? Where do I go when I die? Can I have children? Why do I live in a shack and not a house? But mostly he thinks about this: Where does my bread come from?

Well, once Joe drops his wheat off at the stockpile, boys from the nearby Mill collect it and mill it.

(It's not a good screenshot, but the mill is on the right, the stockpile is the white stone floor, and the little ginger looking kid with a green shirt is a boy picking up wheat)

The boy, after having milled the wheat, drops a sack of flour off at the stock pile for a Baker to collect.

The Baker bakes bread and delivers it to a Granary for the population to eat (Joe's favorite part).

Joe isn't real. Joe is an animated sprite on my screen. He represents a mouth to feed and a way to gain materials to feed him and others.

As a player, Joe doesn't really matter. A player can make 30 of Joe. The player has other things to think about, like walls for his farmers and building an army for protection.

But all of those little sprites gotta eat. A player will very quickly realize that a Baker won't bake unless there is flour, and if there is no grain, the boys won't mill it.

So, most players will build lots of Farmer Joe, make sure there is a lot of grain for the boys to mill so there is lots of flour for the baker. They will add more of each, ensuring that there is always a stockpile of these materials to process.

Joe, the Baker, the Miller boys have a lot of work ahead of them.

This is how most of us work.

Plenty of work to do means you're doing plenty of work.

But is Joe getting fed any faster?

Let's consider this question for a moment. By building lots of Joe, Bakers, and Millers I have lots of food streaming in as a player. Everyone is well fed. In fact I have so much food, as a player, I can sell the excess for money.

But for the sake of the voice in my head nagging me, I'll look at what I've actually built.

Pulling out my stop watch (What a freak!). I note the following: From the instant Joe starts farming, until he can eat it, it takes 4 minutes and 32 seconds. Now, that's not terrible, especially since I've built so many of them that food is coming in every second or two.

Then I notice something else. 2 minutes and 50 seconds are all it takes for the Farmer, Miller, and Baker to actually do their work. The rest of the time is spent walking around like a bunch of idiotic sprites.

Maybe I can be better. Maybe I can feed Joe faster. If I feed Joe faster, I feed everyone faster. If I feed them faster, I don't have to build as much.

I build all of the buildings needed to create food as close as the game allows and start my stopwatch again.

Here's what I found. The total process took 3 minutes and 30 seconds. I was able to eliminate an entire minute of work that didn't matter out of this equation.

That means, that as a player, I can build layouts like this, and generate food much faster and cheaper than my old way of just piling more on to keep them all working and busy.

This, though trite, and silly, is an example of how looking at things from the perspective of an item of value (Food), instead of from the perspective of resources (Player), can increase your overall efficiency and flow.

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I love stuff like this. It affirms my utter lack of talent and ability in a simple, approachable way.

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My trip to Seattle through negligent picture taking.

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The Apple of my Eye

About two weeks ago Apple contacted me to see if I would be interested in joining their iOS developers.

It shouldn't be hard to imagine how excited I was. Mainly because they contacted me. I wasn't looking.

This is a job that would require relocating to Cupertino, which is a big deal. My wife will be finishing school in May. If the process goes well they'll fly me out there and put me in corporate housing until my wife can follow. Crazy.

If I get and take the job. My resume will have on it this big shiny thing that says, "Apple," on it. I doubt there will be many doors that remain shut to me if I want a job as an engineer.

The question is, do I want to keep being an engineer? I've felt for a long time that while I am plenty competent as an engineer it isn't quite where I find my interests lining up. I used to think I should be a Scrum Master, but that's an impossible and thankless job in most companies. Then I thought Product Owner, but that has similar pitfalls. Maybe I'll be a manager. I don't really know, but I know my time as an engineer is running out.

Should I find what that next step is here, or do I leap to Apple and hope to find it there?

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Looks like it could be a scene from any movie worth seeing.

Morning On Mars

 Martian sunrises, as seen by the HiRISE orbiter

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I never knew how much better Christmas could be with a few more explosions.

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ROORRRYYYYYY

WHO THE HELL MADE THIS?! I LOVE YOU!

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So many feels.

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One orc