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http://verraes.net The project was of to a bad start: an inherited legacy codebase, a waterfall contract, and a projected loss. The promise of Kaizen or Continuous Improvement seemed very appealing. But when we tried to incorporate this into our process, it didn’t catch on. Biweekly retrospectives didn’t seem to expose any problems we could improve upon. The ceremonies we tried, like Deming’s Plan-Do-Check-Act cycles, added too much overhead. We were doing something wrong. Continuous Improvement implies that you know exactly where to focus your efforts. Like scientists, we started to experiment, without deciding upfront what we expected the outcome to be. The rules? Make every experiment as small as possible. No meetings, no consensus, no cumbersome evaluation process. We let the results speak for themselves. This talk explores the successes and failures of a team that went from survival mode to learning mode over the course of a year.
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smallcontrolledexperiments
@mathiasverraes
smalluncontrolledexperiments
@mathiasverraes
Mathias Verraes
Independent ConsultantValue Object Comm.V
Student of SystemsMeddler of ModelsLabourer of Legacy
verraes.net
Fitness landscape
Continuous Improvement
"When changing teams or organizations, the trick is not to try and push them out of their current behavior. (...) A better idea is to change parameters in the environment so that their current situation becomes unstable and disappears all by itself."
4 Jurgen Appelo6
6 Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders
Heavyweight
Retrospectives are too slow
Unproductive pressure to improve
Daily
Two minutes, after standup
Brainstorm rules
"Yes, and... "
DivergenceConvergence7
7 "Thinking in New Boxes", Alan Iny & Luc de Brabandere
Avoid upfront consensus
"A meeting is where ideas go to die"Experiments over opinions
"If we have data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine."4 Jim Barksdale
Avoid upfront expectations
Expectations determine outcomes
Low impact
Small, cheap, reversible, low-risk
No backlog
Backlogs kill motivation
Timeline
Stickies
Guarantee veto
Everybody must be heard
Measure selectively & intentionally
Avoid optimising for the metrics
Accept uncertainty
Non-scientificExposes invisible problems
Accept gut feeling
Emotional response is fine
Accept failed experiments
Welcome failures as new data points
Kaizen Mind
The urgency to improve
Climate of Doubt
Assume everything is broken and fixable
"If an idea is obviously bad,find a quick way to test it,because if it's not bad,then it's really interesting."4 Kent Beck
Experiment
Deliverone story a day
Experiment
Atomically scoped stories
Experiment
Start every storyin pair
Experiment
Testers deploy independently
Experiment
Core Protocols
Experiment
Syncing physical boards
If it's noton a wall or a board,
it's not visual.
Experiment
Measure by hand
Experiment
Hide the estimate from the board
Experiment
No moresprint deadlines
Experiment
No interrupts after lunch
Experiment
Vizualize cost of interrupts
Experiment
Wall ofTechnical Debt8
8 http://verraes.net/2013/07/managed-technical-debt/
Use experiments todetect problems
@mathiasverraeshttp://verraes.net/2014/03/small-controlled-experiments/
http://verraes.net/workshops
