Antony Marcano's Blog - Latest Comments

Re: Mission Critical Agility at NASA

Olu — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 17:47:10 -0000

Well said.

Re: Monsters, Names, Pot-Roast & The Waterfall Model

Jerrel — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 22:33:25 -0000

waterfall brought me here.. nice post

Re: Scenario-Oriented vs. Rules-Oriented Acceptance Criteria

Antony Marcano — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 15:30:22 -0000

I can relate to what you describe here (as in the looser way of working). That's quite consistent with teams I would be a team-member of... But then I wouldn't even be using terms like "acceptance criteria" in those situations. It would be little more than a card, the conversation and lots of collaboration - with whatever notes are necessary to aid our collective memory.

For those teams that do place a high emphasis on capturing up-front acceptance-criteria and can relate to the problems I outlined, then moving in the direction of scenario-oriented acceptance criteria might prove a useful step towards not needing them at all.

Thanks for your comments Liz.

Re: Scenario-Oriented vs. Rules-Oriented Acceptance Criteria

Elizabeth Keogh — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 05:31:24 -0000

I'm a massive fan of BDD, yes. I like to talk about the behaviour we're expecting, then look particularly for *unusual* scenarios - edge-cases which aren't obvious.

In the cases where the scenarios are obvious from the behaviour we've discussed, I'm happy to leave it at that, unless someone wants to automate it. An example might be:

"Replaced or refunded items should be added back into to stock unless faulty."

The four scenarios you could associate with this are obvious.

However, when I ask, "Can you think of an example in which items aren't returned to stock even though they're not faulty?" someone might say, "Oh, do you remember that time when that mother came in to get a refund because the buggy was too small, but it had been recalled anyway? Yes, we need to check for recalls." And now we have another scenario. *That* one, I'd want to write down - it's not obvious, and it's easy to forget. But I'll write down that specific scenario, with a title of "Check for recalls". And then someone says, "Oh, we can't even refund earrings for hygiene reasons, unless they're faulty!" And now we have another. So I'd write these down, but I wouldn't bother writing down the obvious ones.

That's why I can say that I'm into BDD, but not necessarily driven by specification by example - there *are* other ways to specify, and they're OK! I find the word "specification" stops people questioning quite so freely as well, so I don't tend to use it.

I'm very happy for people to have the conversations around as many scenarios as they want, and pretty much insist on it if it's something new or unusually complex, but I think people are starting to put *too much* emphasis on capturing every single scenario, when some of them are really obvious. In those situations, I'm happy with rules being captured (as above) instead as proxies for the scenarios they generate. The scenarios will appear when and if we automate. In the meantime, the focus can fall on some of the unusual scenarios instead (which are frequently around new, differentiating and therefore highly valuable functionality). So we don't "replace" the rules, because often we don't even bother writing them down!

The big difference for me is that where a scenario *needs* to be captured, I'll use specific, realistic, actual scenarios with realistic names and data, rather than capturing scenario-oriented acceptance criteria. I find it pings people's imagination more, and lets us come up with the other five scenarios that we *also* forgot about.

I have done the kind of thing you're talking about before, capturing all the scenarios to use as acceptance criteria. I found it useful in low-discipline environments, where the developers sometimes forget to check what's working and what isn't. I've got away from that recently by teaching Feature Injection instead, so that everyone has a clear idea of the value of what they're doing and the risks associated with it, and is motivated to understand their work better.

I've also done it when the scenarios have been discussed during planning meetings, and needed to be captured because the people doing the work weren't always the same as the ones doing the capturing, or enough time passed for them to forget. Persuading people to step away from fine-grained estimates (also using Feature Injection) and accept some discovery in the process of software development means we no longer have to do that either, and can talk through scenarios as and when it's needed, thereby keeping the knowledge fresh.

As a result I suspect that I have a slightly looser process - and I don't think either of our approaches is necessarily wrong. We may just work in different contexts.

Have a chat with Dan North about his "Ginger Cake" pattern some time, and please invite me for the conversation if I'm around :)

Re: Scenario-Oriented vs. Rules-Oriented Acceptance Criteria

Antony Marcano — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 03:21:21 -0000

Hi Liz,

Some of the things you've said don't make sense to me so either I've not understood you, you've not understood me, or a little bit of both.

Hopefully we can do something about that... What I think I'm saying, in relation to what you're saying is:

* Your "acceptance criteria" are what I call "rules-oriented acceptance criteria".
* I find that you can also take a "scenario-oriented" approach to acceptance criteria and I favour that over "rules-oriented acceptance criteria".
* Your "scenario titles" are also my "scenario titles" but they can be the same as my "scenario-oriented acceptance criteria" but they can't be the same as the rules-oriented acceptance criteria.
* Your "scenarios" are also what I call "scenarios" and I am in general agreement as to what goes into them (although our writing styles may be a little different).

In more detail...

Hi Antony, this makes sense. I think the only difference is that I'm calling the examples at the bottom, where you actually have specific albums and people, "scenarios", where as I'd call the short-hand form for the scenarios you identified "acceptance criteria phrased in scenario form". It isn't until we get "visible to me, not to others" that the scenarios start to emerge, and probably if we were talking through them we'd find more (eg: what happens if Jane visits a page where Fred used to have a public album?)

I can see why you might think that calling the "given-when-then" parts scenarios is different to what I was saying since I've re-read the post and it's not clear that I too also call those scenarios... Although I also acknowledged that some people also refer to them acceptance tests, so that's not different to what I was trying to say.

How is calling the "scenario-oriented acceptance criteria" (the phrase I used) different to the phrase you've used: "acceptance criteria phrased in scenario form"?

A better way of getting my point across might be that I call these "scenario-oriented acceptance criteria":

* Can create new private album (visible to me, not to others)
* Can make public album private (visible to me, not to others)
* Can make private album public (visible to me, & others)

And I call things like this scenarios:


Scenario: Can Create new private album 
When I create a new private album called "Weekend in Brighton" 
Then I should be able to see the album And others should not be able to see it

And, by using scenario oriented acceptance criteria, we can use the criteria as the scenario titles and the scenarios become an elaboration of the criteria, rather than mis-aligned derivatives of the 'rules-oriented acceptance criteria".

I like to retain the acceptance criteria in some form, but often only as the title for a scenario or a short description of what we're trying to achieve in the scenario blurb. I've found this useful in the past because we often miss scenarios (despite all the conversation, we don't know what we don't know).

If a team found it valuable to retain the 'rules' as notes or additional reference material, I'm ok with that... but I'd not want them to be regarded as acceptance criteria.

In order to demonstrate that the rules-oriented acceptance criteria in my "private albums" illustration have been met you'd need all three scenarios anyway... All the rules in my illustration apply in each scenario (i.e. the rules are cross-cutting) and are demonstrated by all three scenarios passing... so I'm not sure what value keeping the rules-oriented acceptance criteria would add.
Can you demonstrate how the acceptance criteria (as you describe them) or "rules-oriented acceptance criteria" as I describe them, can be used as scenario titles?

I'm not completely drawn in by Specification by Example as a result...

I am confused as to how you can not be drawn in by "Specification by Example" since you're such a strong advocate of Behaviour Driven Development...

Unless you have a completely different idea of either "Specification by Example" or "Behaviour Driven Development" to me...

What I understand from "Specification by Example" is that it's a general term to describe approaches that use examples, rather than rules, as the basis of a specification. Examples can be any form of stimuli with an associated outcome. I also understand it to imply that we infer the implementation both incrementally and iteratively from the examples and test our understanding by being able to execute the examples against the implementation.

Test-Driven Development and Behaviour Driven Development are forms of "Specification by Example" since we specify things by means of input-output examples (or stimuli-outcome examples). An input-output example may be very specific or more abstract, depending on what aspects of the input or stimuli is relevant to the scenario. From each example we infer the next evolution of the implemented algorithms to support these examples.

...though I do very much like talking about behaviour and having examples of it. Using the desired behaviour (or "acceptance criteria") as a title is a really lightweight way of getting the traceability, etc., that you mention.

I think what I'm trying to say is that by reframing our rules-oriented acceptance criteria as scenario-oriented we negate the traceability concern. I wouldn't call it lightweight... maybe zero-weight because we demote the rules to no longer exist or into nothing more than notes - so there's not need for traceability.

My post was mostly aimed at the opposite problem - when people were specifying scenarios too early and in too much detail, resulting in glazed eyes and boredom.

That's not the opposite problem. It's a related problem solved in a different way. My solution to that problem is expressed in the blog post as it's ok to discuss the criteria in terms of rules but (and this next part is where our approaches differ) replace those "rules-oriented acceptance criteria" with "scenario-oriented acceptance criteria" at the earliest opportunity. The key-word there being "replace". In the context of this problem, I'm only talking about going as far as writing the "scenario-oriented acceptance criteria" not the full scenario.

As for the examples you gave... the scenarios are exactly the same but for some word-smithing. The final elaborated example you give is a good one... and similar to where I might end up if that was what we wanted to happen. In my example, we had decided in the conversation that the person would get a 404 when attempting to view someone else' private album and that the scenario was adequate as it was.

I hope that clarifies what I was trying to communicate a little more.

Re: Scenario-Oriented vs. Rules-Oriented Acceptance Criteria

Elizabeth Keogh — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 04:06:59 -0000

Hi Antony, this makes sense. I think the only difference is that I'm calling the examples at the bottom, where you actually have specific albums and people, "scenarios", where as I'd call the short-hand form for the scenarios you identified "acceptance criteria phrased in scenario form". It isn't until we get "visible to me, not to others" that the scenarios start to emerge, and probably if we were talking through them we'd find more (eg: what happens if Jane visits a page where Fred used to have a public album?)

I like to retain the acceptance criteria in some form, but often only as the title for a scenario or a short description of what we're trying to achieve in the scenario blurb. I've found this useful in the past because we often miss scenarios (despite all the conversation, we don't know what we don't know). I'm not completely drawn in by Specification by Example as a result, though I do very much like talking about behaviour and having examples of it. Using the desired behaviour (or "acceptance criteria") as a title is a really lightweight way of getting the traceability, etc., that you mention.

My post was mostly aimed at the opposite problem - when people were specifying scenarios too early and in too much detail, resulting in glazed eyes and boredom. I reckon it's probably OK in that context to capture the acceptance criteria and just talk through scenarios until they're automated, while also capturing any unusual edge-cases that come up. So in that situation I'd have:

Make a private album public,
Make a new private album,
Make a public album private - Given Fred has a public album, when Fred makes the album private and Jane goes to look at it, then Jane should see "This album has been made private".

I think we both agree that whatever helps people talk, in their context, is fantastic. It's been a while since I've worked on a project where the testers haven't *wanted* to be more involved, so thank you for reminding me that this happens.

Re: Old Favourite – Developer Race-Tech: Continuous Testing

Antony Marcano — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 13:14:27 -0000

Hi Jean-Paul.

Firstly, it's a sad truth that many developers don't do much in the way of testing their code... and that's a shame because that means they are not taking responsibility for what they do.

Secondly, developers who aren't bothered about writing automated unit tests or are not running unit-tests frequently are not the target audience for this blog post... This really is targeted at developers who are employing TDD (or an approach that results in frequently writing and executing unit tests).

Beyond that, I think the direction you've taken the metaphor causes it to break down (as all metaphors do eventually)...

Think of running the unit-tests (something the developer does) as being analogous to selecting a gear (something the driver does).

Think of saving your files then telling your IDE or command-line to run the tests (something the developer does) as being analogous to de-clutching, moving a gear lever and re-engaging the clutch (something the 'typical' driver does).

Think of each save to a file (something developers do) automatically causing relevant unit tests to be run in the background as being analogous to tapping the up-shift paddle (something a race driver does) automatically causing the de-clutching, shifting of cogs and re-engaging of the clutch in the background. In this part of the analogy, I'm only relating actions of the developer to the actions of the driver... not the internals of the machines they happen to be operating.

JUnitMax and Infinitest are two plugins that behave just like this. They make the execution of your unit tests as unobtrusive as background compilation... they even run the tests that are most relevant first based on the class you've just changed.

I hope that clarifies my point a little...

Personally, I write and execute unit tests frequently and the less I have to think about explicitly pressing the keyboard shortcut to run my tests the better... I'd rather it just happen in the background.

Best,

Antony

Re: Old Favourite – Developer Race-Tech: Continuous Testing

Antony Marcano — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 13:13:30 -0000

Re: Sushi, Hibachi and Other Ways of Serving Software Delicacies

Antony Marcano — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 03:26:43 -0000

That might be a solution in some situations... Although, reducing the menu
options just makes the cooking more efficient. It may reduce the costs in
the kitchen but doesn't get the meals to the customer any more easily or
quickly unless those funds are used to boost the parts of the system
suffering from under investment.

The problem is rarely budget but perceptions of how much we feel we 'should'
have to spend on certain types of things compared to others. Rather than
looking at the evidence and diverting funds to balance out the throughput of
the whole system, people _feel_ that certain things _should_ cost less than
other parts of the system that are 'sexier' or are perceived as the main
value-add of the process.

The trick is to get people to care more about overall throughput of
delivered value above just cutting code or the 'cooler' practices of a given
methodology. This is what the Lean movement is really about... making
sustainable throughput of customer-value sexier than coding or branded
management methodologies or anything else... And to do this, the movement
fights fire with fire by becoming a branded methodology (or collection of
branded methodologies). But that is a whole different blog post..

Ultimately, people will always do what they _feel_ is right even if all the
evidence points to that being less effective than an alternative... And that
is the rather subtle subtext of this story :-)

Re: Sushi, Hibachi and Other Ways of Serving Software Delicacies

Roland Stens — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 12:41:41 -0000

What if we simply shrank the menu choices?

Re: To hack, or not to hack

Salim Virani — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 15:00:01 -0000

Hi Antony, would be interesting to know how you see the forked Kanban approach fitting here. http://agilefocus.com/2010/04/...

Re: Old Favourite – Developer Race-Tech: Continuous Testing

Jean-Paul V — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 17:07:04 -0000

Unlike the race driver who's gearbox was designed, built and tested by somebody else the developer has to, at least most of the times, design, built and test the test cases himself if he/she is to (re-)use a continuous testing tool. I think herein lies the crux of the problem. A lot of developers do not seem to want to put in that kind of effort for something they either do not do anyway or are content with the test cases they have added to the code.

Re: Old Favourite: QA / Testing – what’s the difference?

Antony Marcano — Mon, 30 May 2011 05:08:54 -0000

There's been a subtle evolution to how I express my thinking on this subject since I wrote these articles in 2008. ..

Although "Testing" is more analogous to "Quality Control" it isn't "Quality Control".

Quality Controllers have the ability to reject or accept a product based on a set of pre-set criteria (and perhaps a certain amount of their own judgement).

In software teams, in my experience, this is rarely a decision made by the person(s) testing it... and rightly so.

It is a decision made by the 'product owner' or 'product manager', or others with more visibility of the business concerns.

We are 'developing' a product - not manufacturing one. Something being wrong with our product is analogous to something being wrong with the design or entire production line of a manufactured product - i.e. all instances of that product will be affected, not just one at the end of the production line.

All affected stakeholders should have some influence on the decision and it should be decided based on a risk vs. reward basis (relevant to that the business or domain). Testers can tell the business folks what the deficiencies of the product are but the people with their finger on the pulse of the business and its market are best placed to decide whether going live is a risk worth taking.

So, the only variation I would add to the above is to emphasise the word "more" in the statement "Testing is more analogous to Quality Control." And I'd say "but Testing is not Quality Control".

Re: Monsters, Names, Pot-Roast & The Waterfall Model

Large Planter Pot — Thu, 26 May 2011 11:22:21 -0000

I'm so love this blog, already bookmarked it! Thanks.

Re: Software Teams can Jump

Paul Dyson — Mon, 23 May 2011 08:39:27 -0000

Sorry ... couldn't resist ... an hour after I posted this link popped into my twitter stream:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2011...

From the first entry written by someone described as an Agile Coach:

"Do you work hard to make them agile since this is what they're paying you to do even though they really don't want to change?"

"Make them agile", "what they're paying you to do", "they really don't want to change". Not much self-organisation and emergent behaviour going on here!

Re: Software Teams can Jump

Paul Dyson — Mon, 23 May 2011 07:01:17 -0000

Hi Antony,

a comprehensive and insightful response which I'd love to respond to in detail. But I'm going to resist ... partly because I don't have time to write a long letter, let alone a short one right now but mostly because I think detailed point-and-counter-point discussions are best done face-to-face. Maybe we'll meet one day and can have that discussion.

Instead I'm going to step back and try and explain the context in which I make my comments so you can see where I'm coming from. I've read your article four or five times now and it really is about having 'a coach' (specifically you in most cases). A labelled individual with an identified role:

"If you have a professional software team without *a coach*, consider ..."

"Competitive sports teams always have *a coach*. Temporary coaching in a professional sports team is almost unheard of"

"On many teams, once *I* move on, there is a coaching void."

"I always say to my clients to keep at least one day in their budget for *me* to go away and come back some time later"

You're absolutely right when you say you are asking questions rather than offering conclusions, albeit with a bias based on your experience that having 'a coach' is a good thing, and what I'm doing is positing a different set of questions with a bias based on my experience.

Why?

Two things make me feel uneasy about the growing 'cult of coaching'. The first is that I've seen many teams thrive without 'a coach'. Yes, Kent had coach down as a role in his first edition - I don't blame him, he's American, they see the whole of life as a sports metaphor - but none of us who started out in the early days took that too seriously. We couldn't really because there were no coaches to call on; we all had to make our own discoveries and mistakes. Different teams talked to each other and learned from each other but I can't remember a single one appointing a coach from inside or outside. And those teams all did great things partly, I believe, because their behaviour and learning emerged as a result of self-organisation and experimentation.

[As an aside: some of the best-known coaches emerged from those teams and I wonder whether they are so well-known and talented because they have just been around for longer or because they got so much from learning it all for themselves?]

As soon as you appoint 'a coach', no matter how experienced and talented, how well-meaning and adaptable, some of that self-organisation and emergent behaviour goes out the window. Its human nature: even in a team of experienced peers, identify someone as 'the coach' and the team look to them for guidance. Remove that person and they feel they have lost that guidance (a "coaching void"). In other words you can take a team that would tend towards self-emergent behaviour, and be very strong for it and, by providing guidance, deny them that opportunity.

And this is assuming the coach is a benign and benevolent presence (and something I want to say is none of this is an attack on you or any individual ... I'm sure you're a great person who adds a lot of value to any team you work with). If the coach is a bit naive, doesn't understand the business domain well enough, hasn't got the right techniques for this team, is having a bad week, whatever, then their guidance may take the team to a place it really doesn't want to be. Either way, a question the team or the manager or the business owner should ask themselves, alongside the ones you pose, is "can my team self organise and can behaviour emerge or do they need a guide?" if the answer is they need a guide a further questions need to be asked: "are they the right team; is the coach the right coach?".

The second thing that makes me uneasy is an extension of the first. The more people - usually professional coaches - who say "you really need a coach", the more this becomes accepted wisdom. Its an age-old pattern: want to do something different, get in an external guru.

Now maybe you don't mean it quite like that. Maybe you see all 'good' coaches as experienced facilitators who don't even provide something as directed as 'guidance'. But that's irrelevant because managers and business owners will always look to external gurus when they need to make a change and large consultancies are built on the back of providing those gurus. How long do you think it will be before IBM has a team of 3000 certified coaches? How will people distinguish between the good coaches and those peddling Agile Method/1? If the government decides they need to do 100 agile projects why would they come to the likes of you and Rachel and Liz (great people all) when they can go to KPMG and take advantage of their agreed rates and loss-leading prices?

You see I think the sad thing in all this is that *the* truly great thing about XP and agile was that it started off being about teams discovering for themselves a new way of doing things that took complete advantage of the soft nature of software and the unique way in which people delivering software could organise themselves and work. I'm afraid that what I see with the establishment of Coach as a job title and Mastership certification is the erosion of that celebration of the uniqueness of software and software teams to something that is much more standardised, commoditised and off-the shelf. So my hope is more people ask themselves the question: "do we really need a coach or can we just do it for ourselves like so many others have?"

Hmm, a longer letter than I'd hoped ... as always. Will leave the final word to you.

Cheers,

Paul

Re: Software Teams can Jump

Antony Marcano — Sun, 22 May 2011 05:43:11 -0000

P.P.S. Paul, I hope my last significant comment addressed the key points of our disagreement and refined our understanding of that disagreement further... It's occurred to me that you are not really the target audience for this article. "Experts" (à la the Dreyfus Model of Skills Acquisition) generally find maxims and rules frustrating because an expert knows they don't always apply.

So, I guess the intended audience was the teams that drop any form of coaching way before they are ready because a manager somewhere wants to save money... not because the team elects to go it alone.So, the expert version would contain the sorts of things in my most recent comment to you... Essentially saying that I've found ongoing coaching valuable and I've seen value in recognising coaching as an area to develop skills in within the team... and that finding someone with those skills to come in periodically and tell you what they see from the satellite view can help you spot things that the team might not see.

Re: Software Teams can Jump

Antony Marcano — Sat, 21 May 2011 09:20:26 -0000

P.S. "I'd have written a shorter letter, only I didn't have the time" - Various
:-)

Re: Software Teams can Jump

Antony Marcano — Sat, 21 May 2011 09:13:27 -0000

Hi Paul,No problem about this discussion taking up the comments. I think this is a valuable debate and I think anyone reading the comments will be doing so because they want to... And they will only want to continue reading if they are gaining value from the discussion :-)

Ok, I accept that we have a difference of opinion. I acknowledge the validity of your opinion in the context of your experience. I hope you can acknowledge the validity of my opinion in the context of my experience.

There is some agreement between our experiences and there is some disagreement between our experiences. I.e. our experiences have some things in common and some differences.

The agreement between experiences includes the fact that teams can excel without someone labelled or named as a coach. The disagreement between our experiences appears to be that I have experienced teams excelling even more with good coaching (whether anyone happens to carry that label or not) than without and you appear to not have had that experience.

It seems that because you've not had that experience you reject the idea that it is possible... If that is the case then I will say that you and I fundamentally disagree as I have seen it happen and therefore know that it is possible.

If you accept that it is possible but reject the idea that it is likely and assert that most of the time good coaching on a team will make no difference to the pace at which most teams can grow it's excellence then, I can neither agree nor disagree... I'll only say that this is not consistent with my experience.

I'd like to highlight that the nature of the work involved in saving failing projects is more likely to bring you closer to people doing a bad job of coaching than a good job. Combine that experience with the fact that you've not experienced any positive effects of someone knowingly coaching on a team and it might be worth asking yourself whether you are prejudiced against coaching and thus biased against anything I might say in favour of the idea. And, if that is the case, it might be that you are closed minded to learning anything from anything I have to say on the subject... and if that is the case further discussion is probably of little value to you.

As someone who values shared discovery and learning, as I do, I hope you are open minded to the fact that just because you haven't experienced something - doesn't mean it isn't possible.

Because of my positive experience with people knowingly coaching, treating it as a legitimate skill-area (just like programming or testing or design), I admit that I may be biased towards the idea of good coaching adding value to a team... But because of that experience I reject the assertion that it *cannot* have a positive effect on the a teams growth and excellence and this is perhaps the basis of of our disagreement. You seem to be asserting that it makes no difference.

And I think that maybe our understanding of roles is different... When I talk of roles, I think of it more in the dynamic sense...

"Roles on a mature XP team aren't fixed and rigid. The goal is to have everyone contribute the best he has to offer to the team's success." XP Explained, 2nd Edition, Beck, Andres

In this sense, people switch into and out of roles dynamically and seamlessly. This is the situation you appear to be accustomed to and, perhaps, you are at the point where labels have become meaningless to you because you are able to perform all the roles on an XP team and apparently work with others who are as experienced as you and never have anyone on any of your teams for whom the labels are useful...

"At first, fixed roles can help in learning new habits, like having technical people make technical decisions and business people make business decisions. After new, mutually respectful relationships are established among the team members, fixed roles interfere with the goal of having everyone do his best. Programmers can write a story if they are in the best position to write the story. Project managers can suggest architectural improvements if they are in the best position to suggest architectural improvements." (continuation of Beck, Andres quote above)

And it sounds like the latter part of this quote describes where you, and the teams you tend to work with, happen to be... the context you spend most of your time in.

I spend my time in a variety of contexts. I spend time in a) teams just like that and b) in teams where people need fixed roles... and c) in teams transitioning from the latter to the former. In all of those situations, I've seen good coaching, appropriate to the maturity of the team add value.
See "Adapting your Coaching Style" by Rachel Davies http://agilecoach.typepad.com/...

Also, in all cases, I've seen value in recognising and labelling the various skill areas that bring value to the team doing its best in both sustainably delivering products that matter and continuously improving how they do that.

Programming, design, testing, coaching and so on are such labels. This is where the labels are useful - not as titles but as skill-areas that each person may wish to focus their personal development to improve the team's capability.

My article was indeed about teams having someone coaching. It was not my intention to imply that you need someone who is labelled as a coach.

There is a significant flaw in one of your arguments against coaching... Your suggestion that "along came scrum with its concept of Scrum Master (a certified qualification no less) and, latterly, a whole slew of people who describe themselves primarily as coaches ... people whose role it is to 'facilitate' the process, to 'support' the team, to 'coach' the individuals. People whose goals are not aligned to the rest of the team who are working to deliver software."

It sounds like you are saying that all was right with the world while we were doing XP and then when Scrum became more popular, it ruined everything by introducing coaches... Yet, in XP Explained 1st edition, Kent Beck lists several roles: programmer, customer, tester, tracker, *coach*, consultant and big boss. So, if you want to blame any approach for the existence of coaches, perhaps it's better to blame XP than Scrum.

You also say 'But of course most coaches will say "Our goals ARE aligned. We help the
team to improve and by improving they get better at delivering software."'
Firstly, this is what you might hear from a team where there are fixed, labelled roles... and by contrast you might also hear a programmer say "Our goals are aligned. We help to implement the code that makes the customer's vision a reality".

Secondly, whether the role is labelled or not, the goals of someone doing a good job of coaching is always aligned with their fellow team members (assuming that those goals are about sustainably delivering the products their customers need/want and continuously improving the quality of that service).

Thirdly, when a team recognises a weakness and calls in someone external to help, I would use the 1st Edition XP label of "Consultant" for that service, not the label of "Coach". And I would say that I have seen teams realise that they need that help sooner with the help of someone "coaching" than when the team has no-one coaching them.

Fourth, in my experience, the satellite view reveals things that the 'troops on the ground' will often not see. The person coaching from this perspective can sometimes just be a colleague from another team... or someone on exchange or visiting from another organisation doing similar things... or from a new team-member who has joined or rotated into the team... or from a person like me who is retained explicitly as a "coach".

And, finally let's focus on teams, delivering stuff and the things that help them do that well, with ever-improving efficiency and effectiveness.I have experienced the positive effects of things that I label as "good coaching" on teams, sometimes performed by a person labelled as a coach, sometimes from people without a label. You cannot disagree with that experience because you are not me and have not had my experience. You can say that you have not had that experience or that you have had a different experience.

I have experienced the value of recognising the skills areas that add value to a team so that we can use labels for those skills areas to target the skills development of the team. Again, you cannot disagree with that experience... You can however, have had a different experience where being able to recognise and articulate with a label that you solved a problem using something, say meta-programming, is of no value to help direct your learning or the learning of your team mates. To me, coaching is just another such label.

But I accept that you might disagree with my assertion that ongoing coaching can deliver value to a team... and in that regard... I am more than willing to agree to disagree... I cannot agree with a statement that essentially says that something I've seen and directly experienced didn't happen. :-)

Best regards,

Antony
:-)

Re: Software Teams can Jump

Paul Dyson — Sat, 21 May 2011 03:48:56 -0000

You know its funny, you're the second professional coach I've had this
discussion with who has accused me of violently agreeing with them.
Either I'm not very good at putting my point across or you guys are so
attuned to conflict resolution that you find it hard to spot when
someone is genuinely disagreeing with you :)

But lets start with what we agree on: in all good teams people learn
from each other all the time. On the teams I worked in sometimes I
brought something new that helped others, sometimes it was others
helping me. If you want to call that team learning activity 'coaching'
then fine. Personally I prefer 'emergent behaviour' because it is less
directed (and given your partnership in PairWithUs I'm sure you
understand the difference between coaching someone towards an outcome
and discovering the outcome together) but lets not argue about nuances
of terminology.

Then there is having 'a coach' - something I generally object to (and
your article is about having 'a coach'). This is more than just titles,
although in a sense it *is* about the title; its about role and its
about responsibility. The wonderful thing about XP and the old-school
agile approaches was their emphasis on a 'whole team' delivering
software. In an XP team, as I'm sure you know, the whole team works
together with a common goal - deliver valuable software to the customer -
and you succeed as a team or you fail as a team. Then along came scrum
with its concept of Scrum Master (a certified qualification no less)
and, latterly, a whole slew of people who describe themselves primarily
as coaches ... people whose role it is to 'facilitate' the process, to
'support' the team, to 'coach' the individuals. People whose goals are
not aligned to the rest of the team who are working to deliver software.

But of course most coaches will say "Our goals ARE aligned. We help the
team to improve and by improving they get better at delivering
software.".

"We ... and they". All of a sudden the whole team isn't so whole.

Or they say "But I'm just part of the team". Fine, so be part of the
team. Be responsible for delivering software and contribute to the
emergent behaviour by doing so. But don't come with the title, or the
role, or the responsibility or even the attitude of being 'a coach'.

Just because the teams I work in or with don't have coaches doesn't mean
I have no experience of coached teams. I used to run a business that
specialised in rescuing failing projects, usually brought in by the CEO
or CIO equivalent when a team wasn't delivering to their business goals. In the
early days these were always waterfall style projects but from ~2005
onwards we saw plenty of failing agile projects with coaches and masters. I'm
not saying that all, or perhaps even any, of these projects failed
because of the coaches but I have seen how badly applied coaching can be
disruptive and thoroughly unhelpful.

So my view is simple: software teams should delight in the fact that,
unlike pro sports teams, they can excel without a coach. It's not about
saving money but about allowing the team to self-organise and behaviour
to emerge... something that sports teams cannot do ... which makes the
software team all the stronger. Anyone who relies on a software team for
their competitive advantage should really think hard about having
someone working with the team whose goals are not aligned. If a team
*really* feels they need some outside coaching to improve in a specific
area they can't, for some reason, cope with internally then make it a
temporary and specific engagement with very clear deliverables.

I hope where we disagree is clearer now ;)

BTW, I do seem to have somewhat hogged your blog comments, my apologies for that.

Cheers,

Paul

Re: Software Teams can Jump

Antony Marcano — Fri, 20 May 2011 17:39:01 -0000

Thanks for your comments Paul. They are really valuable...

I accept that it is possible that there would have been no value in any coaching for any of your teams... but from what you tell me, there was lots of coaching... from inside and outside of them...

With your extensive experience in XP, I suspect that you have frequently adopted the role of "coach" without even realising it. It was just something that you did without labelling it... And for you there was no need for a label. It was just what you did to help others around you learn...

For others, the labels help them to slice up the areas in which they can develop their skills (à la Ambler's "generalising specialist")... For me, coaching was one of those areas - along side programming, architecture, testing...etc.

I can see where you are coming from regarding the title of "coach"... I've worked with successful teams where there was no one with the title of "Tester". People would switch seamlessly between programmer, architect, business-analyst and tester all in the blink of a red-green-refactor cycle. I see the same happen where people seamlessly switch into the role of "coach" - even though there is no one on the team with that as a title.

My blog post wasn't really about anyone having the title of "coach" it was about the value of "coaching" in my experience.

The pro-sports team analogy was a way of showing how "normal" it is for us to see coaching as something that is invaluable. So much so that a pro-sports team wouldn't be without someone "coaching". Again, it wasn't about having someone with the title of "coach" but was about the perceived value of coaching.

So, do you still believe that coaching did not happen on your teams or was your objection only about the title?

I hope your objection was just about the title... Otherwise we have one person with extensive experience of only non-coached teams apparently saying there is no value in something he has never experienced... While another person with extensive experience of both coached *and* non-coached teams is saying he has seen value in the same and it is something he has experienced :-)

I suspect we are actually in violent agreement on the principles but just bouncing off the terminology of "roles" vs. "titles".

Best regards,

Antony
:-)

Re: Software Teams can Jump

Paul Dyson — Fri, 20 May 2011 12:06:37 -0000

Thank you for the clarification - I now understand better the message you are trying to convey :-)

Perhaps I could offer an alternative message? I've worked in and with extreme programming teams since 1997 and not one of them had someone identified as 'the coach' or 'a coach'. There was a lot of learning and improvement driven from within the team, but that's the standard emergent behaviour of self-organising teams: there is not 'a coach' just a team working and continually improving. There was also a lot of learning and improvement coming from outside the team, as the result of reading about or hearing from other teams, sharing experience and so on. But never was some individual hired or identified as 'a coach'.

Could those teams have benefited from doing so? I honestly don't believe so.

You see I believe there's a contradiction in your message: in the "elite teams" where "everyone does a little coaching" there *is no coach*. There is a self organising team with emerging behaviour and a focus on continual improvement. Bringing in an external coach may bring a valued fresh perspective, or may just prove disruptive and distracting. Either way, a focus on self-organisation and self-determination has, in my experience, far more influence on the efficiency, ability to learn, rate of improvement and general social wellbeing of a team than the presence or absence of a coach.

Best,

Paul

Re: Software Teams can Jump

Antony Marcano — Fri, 20 May 2011 08:44:29 -0000

Hi Paul,

Thanks for your feedback :-) Somehow my words have allowed you to misunderstand my point and read far beyond my actual words... So I'll try to address the misunderstanding...

"Have you ever heard of a self-organising professional sports team? Have you ever heard of a successful professional sports coach who doesn't impose rigorous hierarchical structures, often supported by draconian 'club rules' and fines?..."

The message I tried to convey was that successful pro sports-teams /have/ coaches... and the most successful software teams I've worked with /have/ coaches.

That's as far as the metaphor goes... I'm not saying anywhere in this post that software-teams or their coaches should behave in the same way, or use the same coaching techniques, or be organised in the same way. I hope I've addressed that misunderstanding.

"But your conclusion that a professional software team without a coach is inefficient or in some way flawed is extremely wide of the mark."

I can kind-of see how you might infer that this was the conclusion but I'm not making that assertion at all.

The key take-away from my post should not be a conclusion... but a question... "By not having a coach, are we saving money or is it a false economy?" For some it will be a saving, for others it will be a false economy... In my experience, it's more often the latter.

For the record, a professional software team without a coach is not [inherently] inefficient nor are they [inherently] flawed. However, in 16 years in the software industry and 11years of 'Agile' projects (as a team member or a coach or both), my experience has been that even the best teams without a good coach can be even better with a good coach.Sometimes that coach comes from the outside... other times they are found within... And on the most elite teams I've been on, everyone does a little coaching - depending on each person's area of expertise... and even then an outside coach visiting periodically brings a valued fresh perspective.

I hope you better understand the message I was trying to convey.

Best regards

Antony

:-)

Re: Software Teams can Jump

Paul Dyson — Fri, 20 May 2011 06:08:34 -0000

Have you ever heard of a self-organising professional sports team? Have you ever heard of a successful professional sports coach who doesn't impose rigorous hierarchical structures, often supported by draconian 'club rules' and fines?

And to ask another question: how many software coaches do you know who are the first in line to be fired if their team fails to deliver against short-term goals?

Your analogy and the conclusions you draw from it are fundamentally flawed. Professional sports teams play very simple physical games and benefit from constant drilling, simplistic instruction and very little intellectual consideration. That sound like many software teams you know?

It sounds like you've done some good work as a coach - that's great to hear. But your conclusion that a professional software team without a coach is inefficient or in some way flawed is extremely wide of the mark.

Re: Software Teams can Jump

Antony Marcano — Wed, 18 May 2011 15:12:14 -0000

Thanks for the feedback Stefano.I'm not sure that it's very complicated to "become" a coach... But like anything else, to become good at it takes learning, practice, experience, reflection and more learning. You're probably doing some coaching already... you might not realise it yet.

I fell into coaching by accident. I happened to have a lot of experience in Agile when it started to become popular and coaches were hard to find so I was asked to coach a team of beginners. At first I wasn't very good at coaching but I learned from experience and from a great mentor - Rachel Davies.Whether I'm any good now, I'll let others decide.

I've been particular to maintain my technical skills development and my appreciation of the daily challenges teams face by working as a team member on real projects for at least a quarter of the year... Not to mention background projects like JNarrate and CukeSalad. I've also developed my coaching skills through practice, reflection, feedback, reading and workshops. This combination allows me to move comfortably between more directive coaching to more non-directive coaching - see this post:http://agilecoach.typepad.com/...

Today there are great resources that weren't there when I got started. There's Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley's superb book on Agile Coaching - http://pragprog.com/titles/sdc... (Which I'm honoured to have made a small contribution to)

Rachel helps to organise the Agile Coaches Gathering where anyone who registers is welcome http://www.agilecoachesgatheri...

Rachel also has an excellent blog http://agilecoach.typepad.com/ A google search on "Agile Coaching" returns a whole host of resources, including Lyssa Adkin's book on Agile Coaching...

There's so much to read and absorb now that you can avoid having to learn many of the lessons the hard way as I did.

Best of luck on your journey.