Category Archives: Agile Release Patterns

Deliver early without sleepless nights

by Johannes Brodwall Posted on April 21, 2017

Trailblazing the first delivery of a software system requires courage and conviction, especially on projects that replace existing business critical software. When I’ve been acting as system architect I’ve employed a number of tricks in order to structure functionality and technical solutions in such a way that we can complete these early deliveries without sleepless nights. The most important is to find a subset of functionality that can be used with the rest being completed and investing in bridges from the old to the new.

Next Thursday (April 27th), I share my experience in the keynote for the ARK architecture conference in Oslo. A few tickets are still available if you want to make it.

In this blog post I explore the topic of replacing business critical software step by step.

As an architect I haven’t always have the joy of seeing my projects all the way to completion, but in those projects where I can see the software in the hands of my users early on are those I enjoy the most.

This article is not about streamlining a working delivery team to get from releases every few months to continuous deliveries. Many others talk about that. This is about how to get to production early the first time on a greenfield project. I will illustrate with two of my favorite projects.

Getting to the production the first time on a greenfield project takes courage and conviction, especially when you’re replacing part of business operations with a new system. Project stakeholders have many reasons to wait and often see no compelling reason to delivery a partial solution early. But when you get to production the first time, it’s like the sun has finally risen. The priorities and discussions in the project totally change. Now it’s real!

The first project I want to talk about was with the Norwegian electricity transmission system operator Statnett. We spent 4 years replacing the system that handles all reserve capacity of electricity deliveries on the Norwegian grid, but less than a year after the contract was signed, the users started using our software to control the power grid. Without any sleepless nights. Actually, they considered it such a non-event that they forgot to inform the development team about it!

The second project I would like to talk about is an app for internal mobile workers in private sector. As it is a project which is part of the competitive strategy of my customer, I cannot mention the purpose of the software, but I can describe techniques and technologies.

mobile workforce architecture

The mobile workforce app is especially interesting. Just like with Statnett, we were replacing an existing system in business use and integrated with other business functions. But in this project, we were live with the first users after 3 months, most of the user base after half a year and the remain users after around 9 months.

Here is what we did:

  • Realize that the journey is going to feel long and temporary investments made to ease the journey are often worth it. In both cases, I made sure the new system integrated well with the new system. I cannot stress how much it lowers everyone’s stress level when you can say: Why don’t we try the new system and if you experience problems, you can continue the very same process in your old system.
  • Isolate functionality that is small enough to deliver with a small fraction of the total project effort yet interesting enough to care about. In the case of Statnett we were able to replace the most used feature in the old system (while preserving the path of retreat). Even though the feature was a small part of the system, it was a large part of the usage. In the mobile workforce app, we found a business process that was missing in the old system and implemented this first. The process was interesting enough to the customer that they dedicated a few users to only perform this task.
  • Don’t wait for the rest of the world to complete their work. All projects I’ve been on has been part of a larger landscape of change where several of your dependencies are still under development by other projects. In the case of the mobile workforce app, we were dependent on core data that was to be owned by a system still under development. Realizing that our integration model would in any case be based on synchronizing copies of data, we decided that our copy of the core data would have several sources: 1. A manual CSV file exported by a sysadmin, 2. An automated dump from the legacy source which we established after half a year, 3. A feed from the new system (which is still not completed).
  • Spend effort making your system faster to deploy and easier to monitor. When you make a greenfield project, there is actually nothing that stops you from creating the production environment immediately (as long as you don’t put production data there before it’s hardened!). I’ve never regretted spending a few extra hours making it easier to deploy new version or making my logging smoother. Currently, I receive error logs on Slack with a clickable stack trace and a link to the user who experienced the problem.

When you do a major rehaul of a building, you may end up spending a lot of your effort setting up the scaffold to make sure the work is safe and effective. When you build a new software system, you should do the same!

If you do, you may be able to get users on your new system sooner rather than later without losing your sleep.

And when you get actual users to use your system the primary question of the project changes from “when is it all going to be done” to “what can we do next to deliver value.” And that’s much more fun.

Posted in Agile Release Patterns, English, SOA, Software Development | Leave a comment

Er IT-prosjektenes tid forbi?

by Johannes Brodwall Posted on October 9, 2015

Man kan lese fra moderne tanker på IT-utvikling at prosjekter er en avleggs arbeidsform. For de som har erfaring med utviklingsaktiviteter innen offentlig og privat sektor kan dette virke som en rar påstand. De aller fleste ser behovet for å unngå store prosjekter, men er prosjektet som arbeidsform virkelig avleggs?

Det spør naturligvis pÃ¥ hva man mener: I alle de Ã¥rene jeg har jobbet med IT-utvikling er det en ting som er sikkert. Arbeidet endrer seg til det bedre nÃ¥r man gÃ¥r fra Ã¥ bygge noe pÃ¥ laben og over til Ã¥ lansere programvaren for brukere som benytter seg av den til daglig. Før dette tidspunktet er “kvalitet” en subjektiv og spekulativ egenskap, “fremdrift” er et begrep som mÃ¥ kvalifiseres med mange forbehold og formÃ¥let til hele initiativet er fortatt en hypotese der alle har sin egen tolkning.

I dag er den ingen gode grunner til å levere programvare gjennom et prosjekt som sitter flere kvartal eller år og bygger noe som så skal være klart til en stor lanseringsdag. I den betydningen er prosjekter en avleggs modell.

Men noen ting har ikke endret seg: Mange organisasjoner vil ha behov for et team som er større i en periode – et prosjektteam. Mange organisasjoner kunne ha verdi av leverandører som kan ta ansvar for at det arbeidet som gjøres er av god kvalitet og har en rimelig kostnad.

Men organisasjonen gjør smart i å koble dette prosjektteamet tett opp mot den mer permanente organisasjonen. Linjeorganisasjonen kjenner behovet og rammevilkårene bedre enn den midlertidige organisasjonen og vil ta over forvaltningen av produktet på sikt.

Og nye produkter vil ikke lanseres dager eller en gang uker etter at de har blitt påbegynt. Ved å levere så ofte som hver uke eller endog flere ganger om dagen kan organisasjoner heve kvaliteten og redusere arbeidet og bekymringen i forbindelsen med nye leveranser. Men det er ikke gjort på en dag. Dersom man skal etablere et nytt prosjekt kan man med fordel drifte dette (for eksempel i en skybasert løsning) allerede etter få dagers utviklingsjobb. Men det vil ta noen måneder før man har nok funksjonalitet til at man ønsker å invitere noen utenfor prosjektet til å bruke løsningen.

Er IT-prosjektenes tid forbi? Jeg håper vi ikke lenger vil se initiativene som bruker titalls eller hundretalls millioner kroner før man lanserer noe for brukere. Men organisasjoner vil fortsatt måtte benytte seg av økt bemanning i satsningsperioder. Og nye produkter bygges ikke på en dag før de kan lanseres.

Posted in Agile Release Patterns, Non-technical, Norsk, Software Development | Leave a comment

“Slice!” Making meaningful progress visible

by Johannes Brodwall Posted on October 18, 2010

What if you had to report daily your progress on the tasks you’re programming in your project. Wait, you say: “I already do that in my daily standup meetings“. But if your standup meeting is anything like most standup meetings out there, you’ve got a serious blind spot.

What if I said that writing code doesn’t constitute progress. Code is effort, not value. In order to demonstrate value, you have to be able to show your progress to someone who doesn’t care about code. You have to demonstrate actual functionality, all the time.

In this blog post, I want to explore what happens when you demand that you plan and develop your project solely based on slices of functionality with business value, and what happens if you demand that these slices should become ever thinner: You know where you’re going, your customer knows how far you’ve come, and you’re always ready to ship.

Elephant Carpaccio

The more frequently you want to demonstrate progress, the more aggressive you have to be about how you break up your tasks. The most extreme version is perhaps the one demonstrated by Alistair Cockburn in his Elephant Carpaccio exercise (video). In it, the workshop participants are asked to develop a software system that does the following: “Register the unit price, quantity and US state of a purchase. Produce the total price, tax amount (state dependent) and discount (%-rate depends on total price). If there’s time, also produce reports of all sales per month and per state.”

The goal of the exercise is to divide this task into as many small feature slices as possible. In a 90 minute workshop, the teams each complete five iterations with a demo of new functionality at the end of each. In the video, you can hear teams frequently shout “Slice!” as they perform an internal demo of a functional slice several times in each iteration.

To complete the exercise, the participants develop a battle plan for how to deliver the smallest possible feature slice. For example: Input a sale, calculate and display the total price. “Slice!” Calculate the sales tax for a single state. “Slice!” Calculate the sales tax for three states. “Slice!” Introduce a table with tax rates to calculate the tax rate for any state. “Slice!” Give 3% discount on sales above $1000. “Slice!” And so on.

When you look to slice up the stories on your product backlog into tasks you should complete the next iteration, a few of the same approaches can be useful: If you need a screen to register some data, how about starting with registering just one field? “Slice!” And then register all fields, but without layout or validation. “Slice!” And then add validation. “Slice!” And then create a good layout. “Slice!”

If you split your next story into feature slices, your customer is probably going to be much more interested on your stand-up. If she learns of something she can test right after the stand-up meeting is done, she will probably feel much better about your progress as well.

If you create a carpaccio-style battle plan for how you want to solve the next story on your backlog, you will probably notice the old adage: “Plans are useless, but planning is essential.” Even though you have to rewrite your development battle plan, it will help you to know what to do and to always make progress towards a meaningful next goal post.

Finally, if the tasks you complete all mean progress towards the business goal of the project, you’re always ready to ship. Even if a vicious flu takes out the team for half an iteration, Christmas sneaks up on you as it always does, or, god forbid, the project runs out of money: You will have something you can ship.

One word of warning, though: Alistair Cockburn reports that during the Elephant Carpaccio exercise, people create crappy code. If you want to be able to deliver tomorrow as well as today, you must avoid the temptation of forgetting good engineering practices in order to ship something earlier. Start each slice with a bit of refactoring to get the code ready for a clean addition of functionality. Always write tests for your slices. And keep the code clean: You code may not do everything yet, but what it does do, it should do properly.

Are you ready to create a sprint plan that’s meaningful both to the developers and the product owner? How thin can you slice that elephant?

Posted in Agile Release Patterns, English, Extreme Programming, Software Development | 2 Comments