Posts Tagged ‘Metrics’
Scrum Teams Prefer 5 over 9
During my ScrumMaster certification, Mike Cohn recommended that the size of a cross functional scrum team should be between 5 and 9. In a recent exercise, we tried splitting a scrum team three ways – 5-6 people in each team - for the next release.
At the end of last year I counted 16 people in a scrum. For most of the release the team size averaged 12, consisting of a mix of product managers, QA, front-end engineers, software engineers and the ScrumMaster. 16? It never meant to get that big, but with an addition here and an addition there, it did. It was too big.
The scrums were starting to take too long, there were too many stories in the sprint for one team to truly keep track and impediments were flying around everywhere. Risk was starting to creep into each sprint and eventually the release.
I put it to the team that they should split in half for the next release and while some members were ok, others really objected to the idea. They felt it would generate unnecessary tension between a team that had grown strong together.
Due to the type of work within the first sprint in that next release the team worked as one again, but agreed tentatively to an unequal split (1/3 to 2/3) for the following two (and final) sprints. It was ok, both teams had a couple of issues mainly down to the fact that they were building three applications which all needed to communicate with one another, but the smaller team certainly preferred being small.
So now they’ve split into 3.
It’s brilliant. The teams are made up of 1-2 QA, 2-3 Engineers and a Product Manager. The teams were encouraged to go through the agile scrum motions how they saw fit. The smaller size enabled intense collaboration during a short planning phase, resulting comprehensive stories. Poker and sprint planning was a breeze, less big personalities to get in the way of proceedings, and it was so much easier to keep on top of the progress during the sprint. The software’s of high quality. It’s done. It contains a good level of tests and the quality of the code is great.
Now that risk is greatly reduced. In the sprints before if something started to go wrong it could have affected the whole team. All members would get distracted by the issue and if it didn’t get resolved and the goal compromised, the team would be left demoralised by all the drama such failed sprints bring. Oh yeah, and the team members love it.
So if it was going good, then the team gets bigger and you start to have problems, or if you’re trying things for the first time and some members aren’t engaging, break it down.
Teams Can Teach Themselves
As part of the transition to agile scrum at one company I worked for some key software engineering considerations: code maintainability, test coverage, extensibility and scalability came under review. Although products were being delivered, problems were being built into them.
As an engineering team we set ourselves the challenge to start practising TDD (Test Driven Development) within a year. This goal would force better code quality and the code would be future proof as it would be designed to accommodate change.
Such a goal isn’t easy to reach. If the engineers aren’t used to building software in a certain way they can’t just start doing TDD. There needs a period of education; engineers need to loose bad habits.
Sending the engineers on a course could be an option, however, aside from the fact there may be no budget for that, to truly progress the adoption of a sustained learning process is far more beneficial.
We set up a series of weekly hour long internal seminars. Both engineers and the business made concessions; the time of the seminar was 1.30 – 2.30, half over lunch time and half during business hours. We booked a room away from the bustle of daily working life, organised a projector and all the engineers week by week presented on topics we believed would improve their standards of coding. We started by examining design patterns, but soon found we needed to revisit the core principles of OOP (Object Orientated Programming), with particular focus on the Bob Martin’s PinciplesOfOod, also known as the S.O.L.I.D. principles.
Armed with a couple of really good books – Bob Martin’s book Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C# is a fantastic teaching aid – and a lot of support for each other, over a period of six months we moved on to look at the TTD approach and the team’s standards started to improve. After those six months, all new work had to be built using TDD. This was partly successful during the following six months because it was not so easy to write tests against legacy code bases.
A year after the comments from the contractor, the team worked on a green field project. After only four weeks the system was complete. Code maintainability, measured using Microsoft Visual Studio’s code metrics tool, averaged 80 points (which is good!). Test coverage was around 50% for the entire solution, but more importantly 80 -100% in the solution projects containing the business logic (a good post for how to write good unit tests). The engineers were practicing TDD 70% of the time, hindered by falling behind schedule due to problems communicating architectural design expectations.
This is a great achievement. Now the team pair programmes most of the time, working with each other to strive for excellence. Subsequent topics for the seminars included looking at “interfacing the ball of mud” in order to create testable code against legacy systems not designed for testability. The team designed strategies for refactoring legacy systems into a testable architecture and began adopting DDD. The internal seminar is a permanent fixture, anything can be discussed, although it is best to select topics relevent to the business.
It took the best part of a year to see real improvements; I don’t know whether you think that is too long? I don’t. It’s difficult for a team to massively shift their practices whilst minimising the effect on their output for the business. The point is, if your business and team are willing to commit the time – the hour a week for the seminar – and your senior team design and constantly review a quarterly syllabus, the team will teach themselves and improve the quality of their work.
