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I've been working on a CodeIgniter project with a friend of mine for almost a year now. We feel that our development process isn't as effective as we wanted to be, and currently we're not employing any software development methodologies. We're 2 man team, looking to have more people to work with us in the future, but we don't have enough people to start on scrum.
Right now, we're both working on this project on the side, would be nice to know which methodologies are best for us, to get our development going faster and more efficient.
Agile and Scrum won't make you faster or more efficient:
Since you tagged this with agile and scrum, I thought I'd mention this: neither agile nor Scrum has as its goal faster or more efficient development as you ask for in your question. In fact, changing to these approaches involves a significant learning curve, but if practiced well contributes toward very low defect rates, software that meets the customer's needs, and a development process that responds to changing requirements. Used long enough, Scrum can provide good data about roughly how much work a specific team can get done in a period of time.
Still, you might benefit from some practices:
All that said, there are a couple practices that may want to try:
Pair Programming and Test Driven Design (TDD)
Continuous Integration
TDD is not easy to learn, especially on your own. See if you can attend a CodeRetreat or similar event.
If you aren't already using a modern software change management tool (SCM) like Mercurial, git, or subversion, get one and learn how to use it.
Get regular feedback from "customer"
If you don't already know (you didn't say in your post), you might ask yourself who you are making the software for. Can you frequently and regularly demo it to that person and get feedback? Find out what they want next and put those items at the top of the backlog.
Try to make your product incrementally useful
Rather than making big product-wide changes, add small useful amounts of functionality. Your design will drift but if you have sufficient automated tests in place you can refactor as needed.
I'm curious why you say you don't have enough to do some form of scrum?
You're both on the team, one of you can own the process and the other or both of you can be the product owner. You do your daily scrum so you can know what each of you are doing - picking the work from the backlog you agreed to do. And as you add members you'll already have an established practice they can integrate into.
You can work in 2-4 week sprints, do sprint planning,review, and retrospective regardless of the number of members.
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Currently we are facing some problems with our Team Lead regarding work assignment hierarchy and responsibility of work done. It is generally seen if some targets are not met by the team the Team Lead openly starts blaming the team and sometimes pin-points some of the developers. Further during the allocation of work to the developers the Team Lead does not properly explains the work to be done but expects us to complete it completely.
The worst part is that the Project Manager and Team Lead are real cousins and the Project Manager always takes the Team Lead side when such issues are put up to him by the developers.
Please guide what best can be done by the developers to make a healthy work environment.
Thanks in advance.
This is double sided, and very objective. It might depend souly on what kind of person the Team Lead is, and if they are open for discussion/questions.
The team lead should be openly addressed about this, BUT also, if a developer is unsure about what to do they should ask.
It never hurts to ask questions, you will be amazed at what you can learn.
Well personal relationships should not not be related with professional life. The developers should first of all organize a meeting with team lead and put forward their issues in a healthy and explanatory way. Also keep in loop the Project Manager with your views. Do not wait for anybody to make a healthy environment for you... start yourself in this direction.
One should be able to adapt to various environments and culture that is different in different organization. Always be with the flow.
I'm not sure that you can avoid conflict! The challenge is deciding what to do so everyone can learn and not too many people get hurt.
A well-run team should run itself. That is to say, the team lead's role should be to get a good framework in place so the team can decide on priorities, techniques, methodologies and even process by talking together.
So good managers will ask team members "OK, so what would you do?" They'll then get the appropriate support put in place so that can happen.
I'd suggest that as a group you
Regularly get together (perhaps weekly) to review progress and learn from mistakes made in implementation.
Make sure that all tasks are given to the team as a whole, not to individual developers. Everyone should know the high-level summary of a job.
Get together daily to very quickly summarise progress. Keep this meeting limited to 10 minutes.
In these meetings it's best to avoid blaming people. Blame the code instead, or the process, but don't get personal.
And if your company culture allows it, try reading up on some of the literature around agile project management: there are many parts of that process that are designed to avoid conflict of this nature. However, it can be quite a hard shift for some organisations to devolve quite so much power to developers...
If possible, schedule a meeting with the Project Manager and Team Lead. Openly discuss the issues in a mature and positive light. Tell the Team Lead what you do like (as a group), and tell him what you think can be done to improve quality, expectations, deadlines, etc. If critical requirements are habitually missing, let him know that. Although his cousin is the Project Manager, his answers may be guarded and he could get defensive no matter what the real circumstances are.
Ultimately, in my opinion, the PM/TL relation is a formula for disaster. If the problem is the Team Lead, and the Project Manager is part of that problem, then the next logical step is to go to the PM's boss.
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Currently I'm working alone on a small project for University and I wondered: Does it make sense to apply methodologies (XP, Scrum) or parts of it? If only for experience? Or does it produce too much "overhead"? And if it does, which one would fit best?
Methodologies give the approach to tackling a development, to me it would still be applicable if there was one or 100 people on the project. The only difference as you being the sole developer would take on multiple roles within the development.
It's certainly an interesting idea to be able to sprint towards getting a set of goals done in a certain time. It might add some motivation to hitting a deadline, and preventing feature-bloat.
As any skill, project management side of development improves with practice, so I'd say it's worth trying out.
Worth noting that XP and Scrum are development methodologies not project management methodologies.
Development methodologies (such as XP and Scrum) govern areas such as requirements gathering, development techniques, testing and release.
Project management methodologies (such as PRINCE2) cover elements such as scheduling and planning, risk and issue management, project scoping and business case management.
But the accepted answer is right regardless. Unless you're the only person who will ever see the software, input into it, code on it or interact with it in any way at all, methodologies of both sorts will absolutely have something to offer and should be looked at. Even if you are the only person they can still be useful.
Some of this depends on where you intend to go with your work: you're working alone today, but are you planning (or at least hoping) to build something big enough that you will need help? If so, then it is good to get some practices in place upfront - not so much that it will slow you down, but something that you can build on when you create your team.
A colleague of mine, who has left architecting high-volume trading systems to build software for the iPod and iPad, has done some thinking about this now that he is a team of 1. You might find it helpful:
link text
If you are working alone, then pair programming may be a bit of a challenge. :) At the same time, having a story board and moving cards may be useful for others to see if they are connected to your project,e.g. end-users or project managers. My suggestion is to read up on various approaches and if it seems like it may work, do a trial and see how if it makes things better or not.
I have worked on projects by myself and you definitely need to play multiple roles. I'm a better developer now than before I worked on my own, and definitely I can integrate to any development team working with XP and Scrum since I made sure than when I worked by myself I would do the best practices XP and Scrum suggests.
The only thing you couldn't apply is pair programming. Besides that everything is possible playing multiple roles, it will enhance your development for sure.
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We have a four person development team that is in need of a formalized project management system. I have a general understanding of Scrum and Kanban but it's hard to truly understand until it's been tried. We don't have the luxury of trying one for a few weeks and then switching to another so I was hoping that someone out there in a similar situation might have thoughts on which worked better for them and why. Also, any other systems for managing development that worked would be great to hear about.
Another note: there's the possibility of the team growing, of course, so we would need a system that scaled well.
Yet another note: We work on three separate software applications in Windows all of which are based on a central library which we also wrote (so i guess you could say four projects)
Both Scrum and Kanban are really process "skeletons". Neither is specific to software development. Scrum was popularised by software development organisations but is positioned as general management technique rather than a software project management technique. Kanban emerged from manufacturing and has been adapted to software development, initially by maintenance teams. Both Scrum and Kanban aim to manage the flow of units of work through the team that is doing that work, measure how fast work flows so that estimates can be made more and more accurately, and make bottlenecks highly visible so that they can be addressed.
Because neither is specific to software development, teams using Scrum and Kanban add software development practices to the process to help them incrementally and iteratively release and improve the software. Most teams, whether working within a Scrum or Kanban process, adopt the technical practices of XP and reflective practices of Crystal.
XP is basically Scrum applied to a single team plus guidelines about what makes code "high quality" and how programmers can achieve that. Crystal Clear also applies to small co-located teams but is more flexible about programming practices although it also recommends the XP practices (the book describing the process is excellent and full of invaluable advice, whatever process you decide to go with). Scrum teams also usually adopt the reflective practices of Crystal: regular "heart-beat" retrospectives and larger retrospectives after every major milestone. Kanban requires continual reflection and improvement but some teams use retrospectives too.
If you want to start applying an incremental/iterative process in a small programming team, then I think XP is a good process to start with because it sets the bar pretty high for technical capability and is very well documented. How continuous-flow and Kanban best applies to different areas of the software development industry is still being debated on the kanban-dev mailing list and elsewhere.
I would recommend also performing regular retrospectives to improve the process and adapt it to your specific situation.
The most important part is to have a reflection/retrospective mechanmism in place which facilitates continuous improvement. Start with some process model and evolve it over time for your needs. Stop doing things that are not worth doing. Keep on doing things that bring in high value. Try new things that you think could be valuable or address specific problems.
I think Scrum works for small to medium team. Compared to XP it leaves out some details, so you can borrow from XP or do something that makes sense. Either methodology you pick, you have to consider the role of chickens(customers/managers/stakeholder/domain experts) role. Sometimes you have to play the roles yourself, but many agile methodologies work because there's external pace car with grounded knowledge of the domain.
Other key aspects are the communication level among your team and some form of quality assurance mechanism. It's hard to do pair programming if you are not located in the same building. Scrum tries to get a feature to acceptance within a sprint cycle, and XP tries to get the feature integrated within the day using unit tests, code review, and continuous integration.
*) Sprint can range from 15-30 days.
What is you question ? Is it which methodology would be most suitable ?
You don't get much benefit from all the overhead that a formallised system will impose with that size of team. Instead, try a good management technique to make sure everyone is listening to each other and blocks are removed.
I've worked with a team of that sice and even bigger on two teams that shared some common libraries. Scrum worked well for us. Now I work with a team with 6 members and we use XP and I think it works as well. The first team developed a product and the influences from 'the outer space' were not that big. So longer iterations worked fine. No we develop a customer project and therefore shorter release cycles are better for us.
But SCRUM and XP are more than that. Now we use TDD and Pair-Programming (both more from the XP world). We also have daily standup meetings that are more SCRUM like. So we adoped XP and SCRUM to work for our project and our situation.
I would start with short cylces (1 week) and reviews of this cycle. It will take some time to adopt a new methodology in your team but if the members are willing to learn and change it will work.
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In the course of my career I've noticed that developers working on new functionality are, as a rule, more cheerful than these assigned to troubleshooting and fixing bugs.
Good tips on keeping business support a happy? Organising business support in the way that team's morale isn’t hurt?
If we start with the assumption that the reason for new function developers being happier is that they get to feel proactive or in control and the troubleshooters are reactive and pushed around by the users one answer comes to mind:
Create a model for those doing troubleshooting to fixes to generalise these from point fixes into broad, consistent fixes for a class of problem. This puts them in the situation of creating new code, even if not new functionality, and they get to think a problem through and anticipate and avoid problems rather than playing whack-a-mole.
In fast moving environments it may also be possible to rotate people through the job descriptions by have them follow their feature from new development into fix and realease and hopefully into version 2 of the feature.
Our organisation has a substantial amount of support work and we've got hit with this problem really hard. The motivation on support teams could dropping down exponentially over the time if you don't do it right.
The principles which worked for us were:
Choose the right people. Some people are happier doing new stuff. Some people are actually much more suited to a steady no-nonsense job. It means that you should have two teams - one for development and one for support. Developers only stay on a completed project until they pass their knowledge to the supporters.
Choose the right leader. Good organisation is make or break here. A good leader would help to organise good relationship with the product users and at the same time will care for his team.
Rotate. We try to keep the support people on the project for a period of less then 2 years and then move them to something new. This helps maintaining proper morale and ensure that their skills don't rust.
Relationship with the customer. Make sure that the support team know how valuable they are. The customers/users should occasionally visit the team or the team should go on-site to have a face-to-face session with the users (a friendly dinner or lunch will also help)
I have seen this too.
There are few approaches that I can think of:
1. Give some thought to selection process.
Not everyone have same career aspirations. While some people are always dying to work for the latest technology and challenging projects, there are others who are content at a stable work environment. Picking the person with right KSA (Knowledge, Skills, Attitude) is always central to good person-job match. In this case, you just need to put more stress on the Attitude part.
2. Choose the right lead
Team leads play crucial role in controlling the motivation and morale of the team. There must be an open and frank channel of communication with team lead and upper management. Ideally a person from the senior management should be made the owner of the team in formal organization chart. Team lead should actively try to foster a team-culture that suites the nature of the team.
3. Rewards
Rewards off course are key tool for managing motivational issues. Just make sure the person receiving the rewards understand that the nature of job was also taken into consideration in decision to reward. If this point is not addressed, it is likely that the person will not take this factor into account when perceiving internal equity.
Following Bell's suggestion, consider letting new or junior developers cut their teeth on fixes. Promote them from maintenance to the feature team based on their performance and ability.
Healthy competition is also a good motivator, but it must be managed to remain a positive influence.
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There are numerous Agile software development methods. Which ones have you used in practice to deliver a successful project, and how did the method contribute to that success?
I've been involved with quite a few organisations which claimed to work in an 'agile' way, and their processed usually seemed to be base on XP (extreme programming), but none of them ever followed anywhere near all the practices.
That said, I can probably comment on a few of the XP practices
Unit testing seems to prove very useful if it's done from the start of a project, but it seems very difficult to come into an existing code-base and start trying to add unit tests. If you get the opportunity to start from scratch, test driven development is a real help.
Continuous integration seems to be a really good thing (or rather, the lack of it is really bad). That said, the organisations I've seen have usually been so small as to make any other approach seem foolish.
User story cards are nice in that it's great to have a physical object to throw around for prioritisation, but they're not nearly detailed enough unless your developer really knows the domain, or you've got an onsite customer (which I've never actually seen).
Standup meetings tend to be really useful for new team members to get to know everyone, and what they work on. The old hands very quickly slack off, and just say things like 'I'm still working on X', which they've been doing for the past week - It takes a strong leader to force them to delve into details.
Refactoring is now a really misused term, but when you've got sufficient unit tests, it's really useful to conceptually separate the activity of 'changing the design of the existing code without changing the functionality' from 'adding new functionality'
Scrum because it shows where the slackers are. It also identifies much faster that the business unit usually doesn't have a clue what they really want delivered
Scrum.
The daily standup meeting is a great way to make sure things stay on track and progress is being made. I also think it's key to get the product/market folks involved in the process in a real, meaningful way. It'll create a more collaborative environment and removes a lot of the adversarial garbage that comes up when the product team and the dev teams are separate "silos".
Having regular retrospectives is a great way to help a team become more effective/agile.
More than adhering to a specific flavor of Agile this practice can help a team identify what is working well and adapt to a changing environment.
Just make sure the person running the retrospective knows what he/she is doing otherwise it can degenerate into a complaining session.
There are a number of exercises you can take a team through to help them reflect and extract value from the retrospective. I suggest listening to the interview with Linda Rising on Software Engineering Radio for a good introduction.
Do a Google search for "Heartbeat retrospectives" for more information.
I've been working with a team using XP and Scrum practices sprinkled with some lean. It's been very productive.
Daily Standup- helps us keep complete track of what and where everyone is working on.
Pair Programming- has improved our code base and helped remove "silly" bugs being introduced into the system.
iterative development- using 1 week iterations has helped up improve our velocity by setting more direct goals which has also helped us size requirements
TDD- has helped me change my way of programming, now I don't write any code that doesn't fix a broken test and I don't write any test that doesn't have a clearly defined requirement. We've also been using executable requirements which has really helped devs and BAs reach requirements understandings.
kanban boards- show in real time where we are. We have one for the Milestone as well as the current iteration. At a glance you can see what is left to do and what's being done and what's done and accepted. If you don't report in your daily standup something pertaining to what's on the board you have explaining to do.
co-located team- everyone is up to speed and on page with what everyone else is doing. communication is just-in-time, very productive, I don't miss my cube at all.