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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.
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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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I realize that this is a subjective question, so I've marked it as a community wiki. I think that it is pretty specific to programming teams, though, so I've posted it here as opposed to somewhere else.
I'm leading a small game development team (four people) as a side project. We are a disjoint team, with everyone in different places, but we do have some of the mainstays of an organized team.
Source Control
Continuous Integration
Bug Tracking
Document Workspace
Regular Meetings
Calendar / Schedule
How do you keep your small, disjoint teams on-track? I tend to agree with Joel's opinion about when and how to micromanage and know that my team is motivated, but it can be easy to fall off-course when everyone isn't connected in a physical way and doesn't see what other people on the team are doing. Suggestions, feedback, or criticisms are welcome!
Edit: I'm managing the team; I'm not looking for automated tools or anything to do my job for me, just ideas for approach or process that might help everyone feel more "connected" and involved.
You need a Team Leader with specific skills.
Motivator: You have to keep your team Motivated. This is really hard to do, and requires a special personality. Without this skill, small teams like yours are hopeless.
1a. Request thoughtful answers to a controversial question and then after 7 minutes accept one of few answers and go on to something else. This shows that you take the long view and is highly motivating to your contributors
Intelligence: For small projects like this, it's best if the Team Leader knows something about everything. If he knows something about everything, everyone is going to follow him.
Objective: Remaining objective is very key.
Organized: You have to be the most organized out of everyone, because when things get chaotic, people run. And I would say in small projects, this is the skill that most Team Leaders lack.
I have been part of several small projects. I would guess that 90% of them fail. I would say it's primarily due to the Team Leader lacking in certain skills.
BTW. Good Luck. I couldn't be a Team leader. :)
Be a Leader: How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment from "How To Win Friends and Influence People":
Begin with praise and honest appreciation.
Call attention to other people's mistakes indirectly.
Talk about your own mistakes first.
Ask questions instead of directly giving orders.
Let the other person save face.
Praise every improvement.
Give them a fine reputation to live up to.
Encourage them by making their faults seem easy to correct.
Make the other person happy about doing what you suggest.
Those are my suggestions for some helpful tactics, even if they are rather old as the book was written in 1936.
This is an interesting article about that very topic: Gaming the System.
A manager. Someone has to keep track of where folks are at and how their progress fits in the scope and time-line of the entire project. There isn't really a good way to automate this. It must be done by a human.
Edit When I worked for a game industry company, we always had to meet certain milestones to get payments from the publisher. As the manager you can break down each persons tasks into milestones as well. This way you can track the progress of each developer without bothering those who are on track with their features. It also makes it easier for the developer to know what their deadlines are in nice bite size pieces. If they are consultants, you can even pay them upon meeting their milestones. Money is great motivator ;) Another great motivator is to make all milestones open to the whole team. So if one person falls behind, others can jump in and help her meet it.
I've worked in large and small game development teams for many years and I think the most important thing you can keep in mind to hit milestones and stay on track is discipline.
Game Development seems to suffer immensely from the desire to add more and more features or focus too much energy in something that's just not that much of the final experience. Your best tool for keeping the team on track is the word "No"
So far I've been on the development end of this equation, and by personal preference rejected attempts to place me in a managerial position. Techniques I have observed are:
Set very, perhaps impossibly short deadlines. Developers will be so rushed to achieve the goals that they won't have time for any distractions. They won't have time for refactoring, cleaning up code, indenting, code review or anything else either, but as long as their code compiles they can reach the milestone and worry about debugging it later.
Have a technical project lead so dedicated to the project he'll crack the whip on all others until they produce maximum (visible) output. Also, he'll work lots of overtime and encourage others to do the same.
Weekly meetings, all hands. Some of the information exchanged about what other folks are doing and what they've learned can actually be useful.
Provide standardized equipment, software and development environments. They may be awkward to work with and developers will hate it, but at least they won't end up playing with their configuration when they could be coding.
Have a business-savvy administrative project lead who can keep customers off the developers' backs and filter requirements for them. Anytime a customer "helps" it delays progress by many hours.
Daily standup meetings done properly help a whole lot. If you keep it to:
1 what did you do yesterday?
2 what are you doing today?
3 what problems are you having?
it should remain quick and helpful. Keep in mind #3 is just to state it not to solve it. That is done after the meeting and is facilitated by the development manager or project manager.
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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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I was recently working with a team to develop an online system. We had worked for several months and were making good progress when the project got canned. We all felt strongly that the projects completion was important and that it would have great outcomes on our consumers productivity. After being frustrated for a while I thought I should ask some people with more experience.
What is the best way to deal with the frustration of a canned project and move forward so that it doesn't hold future possibilities back?
On a well designed project, some of the code you developed can be reused in future projects, making it worthwhile. Even if you can't use any of it however, you and your team probably gained valuable experience that will help in the future as well. Think of it as an expensive team exercise.
Don't put your heart and soul into someone else's project?
I do a lot of work for different people and while some projects are more interesting than others they're not my projects so I wouldn't be too broken up if they got canned. I've got my own stuff I'm working on. No one can terminate those projects but me.
Grieve. Such a loss will produce a grief reaction. Not one as strong as though you had lost a loved one, but it's a grief reaction nonetheless, complete with all those stages of grief.
Failure is the best (and sometimes only) way to learn new things, even if the failure is not your fault. There are many different angles by which you can salvage useful information from this:
Code that is reusable
New technologies or skills garnered from the project
Lessons about project management based on how the failure was handled (maybe the project should have been canceled much sooner, before the team bought into it)
Non-technical ideas that you can reuse in other projects for the company or even in your own endeavors.
I highly recommend doing a postmortem, but don't dwell. Most projects get canned at some point in their cycle and if you let it affect your morale, it becomes a downward spiral from which it's hard to recover. You may become oversensitive to even slight requirements changes.
Attack every project as though it were your own. By this I don't mean invest all of your emotions (as stated here already by Spencer Ruport). But write all your code and organize all your code in a manner that you can easily pull out tools that you might need in the future. You never know if you will need it...but odds are you will. If you write an account manager app...do it in a modular reuseable fashion. If you write an image uploader...write it in a way that it can be ported to any other project you have. Write helper functions around all of your major features to make it more user friendly down the road.
This of course requires some planning prior to losing the gig! No worries. It rarely is because of you that you (the whole team) loses the gig. Some financial decision or business decision is usually at play. In this case most likely the economy is what killed you. In the case that you don't have any physical benefits to the failed project...look at it as a learning experience. Inevitably...no matter how good you are...you probably had something that you did that you don't or no longer agree with. Learn from that. You most likely also did something very cool that you loved. BLOG ABOUT IT! This serves two purposes..you just created something tangible from the project...and you put it somewhere that you won't forget about it.
Sucks all the way around. But at least there is a great market out there right now! Contact me directly if you want my headhunter list (80 technical recruiters in CA and the US).
Two things:
Your Investment in the Project & Code: The fact your team had such strong feelings for the project & were so frustrated on it being canned is a good sign - it means you are a true developer/programmer and are not just doing a half-job for full-pay. So to deal with the project being canned: know you & your team are committed to your work & while that project may not have panned out, you guys sound like a real credit to that project & any other you may work on. It sounds like you just need to find a project/opportunity that has the legs.
My Experience: Projects get canned for all sorts of reasons - budget, lack of confidence from stakeholders, too late to market, changed scope etc. I would enquiry/investigate why your project was canned. If it is budget or lack of stakeholder confidence then it is really good news. It means an opportunity has just presented itself to you & your team. Consider pursuing it!
Either way your team will have grown from the experience: both technically & from a business perspective.
cash the paycheck - that always helps ;-)
ask if you can have the rights to the canned project, since they don't want it, then open-source or commercialize it yourself if you think it's worthy
it's good to care about your work; it's not so good to obsess over it.
there will be other projects even better than that one in the future; they might also get canned, for any number of reasons both rational and irrational
Good example: I once worked with a lady who spent 2 years on a document-imaging project that was canned a few days before it was supposed to go live; it was canned because the new manager did not like the old manager, and the project was his "pet". This lady's reaction: "I'm looking forward to learning something new!"
This can be used to bring your team closer together, if you have the right sort of people. There is nothing quite like working hard on something you believe in and then having it canned. It can depress, but it can also motivate people to want to prove next time that they can do the job, that they had the right idea.
It helps to galvanize the team; we were there, we worked hard, and it was taken from us.
Of course, it's better not to be in that situation to start with, but when you find yourself there use it to build the team.
Sunk cost cannot be used as a reason for the continuance of a project. If the leaders have made a business decision then I'm sure that it is well motivated, however upsetting.
I'd console yourself in that big swings should be celebrated in business, big companies do not win every bid and complete every project they start. So console yourself in having lost once, maybe you might be able to change the way things were done, or focus more on the project stakeholders as well to make sure they understand why your project is worth completing compared to the other projects and business initiatives at the company.
I'll finish with my favourite saying:
"Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement."
Learn from it!
Watch a Rocky movie (the last one was good) and have a few beers. There's no way not to put yourself into a project, there's no way to not feel bad about a project being terminated or failing, there's no way not to feel negative about the company. What makes a good programmer better is taking all the emotions, anger, etc. and being able to release it and move on with the same focus and dedication that was there with the first project. All part of life and all part of working in IT.
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What steps can one take to mitigate the risk of a one-person team working on a project, especially when that one person is a rather junior programmer?
I ask because I am that junior programmer, and there is no one available/willing to do things like code reviews. Part of the problem, I suppose, is that I am working on web applications in an embedded software company, so most employees' expertise is in a different area.
Recognising this as a problem is more than most "junior programmers" would be able to do :)
Unfortunately most employers don't see the benefits (only the downsides) in multiple people on the same task.
With lack of understanding from your employer on this point, just stick to all the usual rules, such automated testing, documentation, and source control. I know too well that when working alone on a project, it is all too easy to become complacent.
The truth is that the documentation is not just to help others know what your code does. It helps you too. Source control is not just to enable multiple people to work on a project and merge changes, it helps productivity (in the sense that you can easily revert changes), enforces backups, and gives you good tracking of where your time and effort has been spent.
Source control and automated tests are two things that will help in any environment. Those two things alone will mitigate some of the major disasters (lost work, buggy code resulting from constant changes and refactoring).
Beyond that, stick to the basics: K.I.S.S. Keep your code design as simple as possible, keep your classes simple, follow the Single Responsibility Principle and above all, avoid duplication (which will greatly guide your designs). Make use of every resource you have: message boards, other programmers at other companies, friends from school, whatever you have available to you. Even having a mentor you can send e-mail to is helpful.
Best practices aren't much different than for a larger group. Source control, unit testing, follow a style guide for your language, script everything instead of using manual processes, and try to have at least some high level documentation and comments in the tricky parts of code. For specific decisions that are important and hard to change, like how your code interacts with the database, try to find out what approach a well-designed project uses, if necessary by checking on this site.
Unit tests especially are a great way for other people to quickly figure out how your code is supposed to behave, and to check whether their changes have broken anything.
StackOverflow is full of available and willing people to help solve problems and give advice.
Other than that, be prepared to make mistakes and learn from them.
Oh yeah, and get a copy of Code Complete!
As #MattJ mentioned, the fact that you care enough to try to mitigate that risk implies much more seniority than your current job title purports.
I would say that you should do all of the normal things you do to mitigate risk and, where it's not possible to get another resource, just either do it yourself, or skip that step.
It's the best you can do.