If you want to create a good iteration and release plan, you should make sure that you work on the high value stories. But how do you know which stories have high value? It’s simple: your Onsite Customer will tell you. You do have an Onsite Customer, don’t you?

But how does the Onsite Customer decide? How does your company prioritize stories, epics and projects?

Playing with Business Value

In the XP Game you get story cards with the Business Value number already filled in. That makes it easy to prioritize: just look at Business Value/Cost.

The Business Value Game looks at the problem from the Onsite Customer’s point of view. Vera and I developed this game as a complement to the XP Game, to explain the difficulties facing the Onsite Customer.

We simulate a situation where a group of salespeople sell projects to customers (like Jonathan on the right) and need to decide what the development team will implement. The goal of the game is to make money by releasing features and by keeping customers happy (by releasing features).

Over 6 iterations, we introduce Customer Requests like the one below. Each request generates some income for the company when all the stories in the request have been implemented and released. Delivering a release makes the Customer happy. The players need to define the Business Value of each Request taking into account many factors: potential income, potential customer happiness, constraints, deadlines… Using the estimated Business Value and the estimated Cost (already on the Story cards), the team must decide which stories go into each iteration. Of course, the developers can implement no more than their velocity.

We introduce more and more difficulties and parameters in each iteration: developer output fluctuates, there are dependencies between projects, some Requests are inconsistent, you can invest in process improvement and many more that we can’t reveal now.

Tried out

Tryouts are an essential part of game development. I hosted a tryout at Agile 2008. Last Wednesday Vera and I hosted a tryout at the Belgian XP Users/Agile Belgium group meeting in the offices of Cap Gemini. We received a lot of feedback from the participants at both tryouts. Thank you.

We have so many tips and ideas that we’re thinking of creating two versions of the game: a basic version with 6 iterations in 90 minutes and an extended version with 9 iterations in 120 minutes. As we add more difficulties in each iteration, the 9 iteration game might become very challenging!

Try this at home!

The Business Value Game is licensed as Creative Commons and available online like the XP Game, the Bottleneck Game, the Real Options Space Game and Mirror Mirror on the Wall.

DOWNLOAD IT!

The Business Value Game by Vera Peeters and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Belgium License.

The last slot of the conference was filled with re-runs of the most popular sessions. Portia and I were interested in two sessions, but neither presenter turned up at their re-run. While we were waiting for presenters who never showed up, we played the “Mirror, Mirror” game with a few Crispies. A lot of people at the conference were interested in the games Vera, Portia and I designed. Watch out for more games on the Belgian XP users site, the Agile Coach site and the Agile Fairytales site.

Then we realized that “The Agile Playground – Learning Games for the Agile Practitioner” was also re-run. We really wanted to go to this session to learn more about learning game building, but it was scheduled at the same time as Mirror Mirror. We ran to the session, where Don McGreal and Michael McCullough graciously allowed us to join the session midway. We took part in one game and learned some lessons about game development. Don and Michael have a whole set of games at the Tasty Cupcakes site. We exchanged games with the presenters and participants. Like Vera, Portia and I, Don and Michael provide their games free of charge as a way to give something back to the community.

And then Agile 2008 was over.

We talked to a few of the other participants before they left and then went for a walk to the harbourfront to get some sun and fresh air. The evening ended with a fun experiment in simultaneous blogging: Portia and I brainstormed the highlights of our Agile 2008 visit; then we had one minute to write one sentence about each topic in turn. You can see the results here and here.

Goodbye Toronto

Saturday started with a long run along the lakeshore, followed by a walk to Kensington Market, Little Italy and Chinatown with Laurent Bossavit. The beautiful weather was replaced by rain. When we wanted to go on to the harbourfront, a heavy thunderstorm stopped us in our tracks. When the weather let up a bit, we went back to the hotel to leave for the airport. On the way, we joined the stream of people coming out of the Rogers stadium after the Blue Jays‘ defeat at the hands of the Cleveland Indians.

And then we’re on our way home.

Agile 2008 is over.

Alan Cooper, author of “About Face” and Visual Basic, asks what programming is and isn’t. It isn’t art, science or engineering. It is craft. Programmers are smart, hard-working and eager to please.

The most important part of software are the interstices, the interfaces. Using existing libraries and API’s is alluring, like taking a highway through a swamp. But the library or tool may not be really suited to the task.

We regularly throw away our tools and jump onto new toys. Agile is the new toy. But there’s is no silver bullet. And we have to consider the context to define ‘good’. Agile is unique because it’s the first time developers create a revolution based on people and process, not technique and tools.

The problem with waterfall isn’t only the handoffs. Even worse is the abdication of responsibility and accountability. All roles must remain involved and responsible throughout the four stages of software development:

• Big ideas
• Design
• Engineering
• Construction

Alan posits that mixing the four stages is the most common source of failure. Agile intends to fix the broken process. Programmers feel surrounded by incompetence. Programmers like Agile as a defence against that incompetence. Agile is a coping tool. Coping with unreasonable clients, incompetent designers, documentation and process excess, foolish managers (who are mostly well-intentioned but use obsolete, industrial-age tools based on command-and-control). Managers have come to expect failure. Success seems random.

Interaction designers and agile programmers are allies. Both of them are craftsmen, work hard and build tangible, testable deliverables. Interaction designers can help programmers to understand business goals and users.

Cooper’s thesis: we can know what users need. Interaction designers are the ones who can discover this.

As expected the slides are gorgeous. They are available at Alan’s Journal.

I’m left wondering a few things:

• Are Interaction designers the only people who understand customers? Are sessions like the ‘Nine Boxes‘, which help everybody to understand customers, useless?
• Do developers and interaction designers have to be allies against incompetent managers, or can we work together with competent managers?
• Will Alan’s 4 step process (Big Ideas, Design, Engineering, Construction) be misunderstood as a sequential lifecycle? Talking about this keynote, I heard some people say that they got the impression that Alan advocated going back to a waterfall-like sequential process?
• Can we really talk about ‘construction’ in the software domain? If the job is predictable and repeatable we will automate it.
• There is more to time than being first on the market. Money now is worth more than money later; we can invest our early income in more projects.

‘SimBlogging‘ offers a his and hers viewpoint where Pascal and Portia timebox-blog as a pair on the same topics simultaneously

Rough Guide to Toronto

We visit Darwin, one of my heroes, at the Royal Ontario Museum. The Casa Loma fairytale castle on the hill with its stunning library and conservatory put us in the right mood for some agile fairytales. Fred the friendly busdriver took us to the quaint, quiet rivertown of Niagara Falls so that we could buy bells in the Santa shop, where it’s christmas 364 days a year as they’re closed on christmas. The ‘Maid of the Mist’ is a natural thrill-ride: up close and personal with the power of the Niagara Falls you get extremely wet.

Agile 2008

Coming across ‘Bimbo Slides’ is really confusing: the slides look great, like a super-model, but the accompanying text doesn’t fit. Playing with the Leadership Legos, we experienced a few ‘Lego moments’, where you realize that someone else has lived some experience that we can never experience in the same way.

Chilling Out and Staying Cool

After Gino offered us an excellent improvised lunch, Portia thinks that all Belgian boys know how to cook, but she’s only seen 2 out of 5 million, so her conclusions may be premature. Our other Torontonian friend, Allison, told us 400 years of Canadian history in the time it takes to eat a Japanese lunch. We can share our passion for Agile by extending it in ways that were never envisioned (or intended) by the originators of Agile: test-first, paired, iterative and incremental, timeboxed clothes shopping. Consequently, we look sharp as we go out to dinner with Ben, Allison and Gino to discuss scary ideas in English with a funny French accent.

Looking into the Mirror

The “Mirror, Mirror on the wall… Why me?” session contained an agile retelling of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to help the participants find actions to improve their collaborations and to be more aware of team composition. The Snow White Kanban cards we handed out to everyone we talked to where a hit: the dwarves sparked everybody’s imagination and the cards spread across the conference.

Les Neuf Cases aka The Nine Boxes

We subtitled the French-speaking “Neuf Cases” session in English to create the first and only bilingual session of the conference, so that participants learned to interview and improved their English/French skills; now that’s value for money! The preparation for the session, writing the subtitles in pair with bemused conference participants passing by, was almost as much fun as the session itself.

Value-Driven Presenters

As the conference went on, more and more people came up to us to talk about our games and to tell us how they had extended and used our games. Unfortunately, Vera couldn’t be here to share in the talks about the XP Game and to see how well the first tryout of our new “Business Value Game” went. In between all the talks and fun, there were some sessions that presented techniques that we will apply from now on, like the Conflict Resolution Diagram presented by Christian and Christoph or the 4.5 techniques to assign Business Value and prioritize out backlog presented by Mike.

To relax and reward ourselves for all the “hard work” and to keep the pace sustainable, we built in small treats and celebrations to the hectic touristic and conference schedule.

Friday starts off with Corey Ladas’ “Starting a Kanban System for Software Engineering with Value Stream Maps and Theory of Constraints“. The talk contains practical techniques and steps to move to a more Lean, flowing software development system. Typical issues are highlighted. Many of the techniques are familiar to me and I’ve seen almost all of the techniques in use. Teams at different levels of maturity use different techniques. The important thing is to constantly strive to to better, to reduce cycle time. Corey recommends cumulative flow diagrams to quickly highlight problems.

There are some questions about the apparent conflict between reducing waste and increasing flow on the one hand with prioritizing to maximize value delivered. Not every story has the same value, unlike the production environments where flow originated. Aha! A conflict. Can we dissolve it with a Conflict Resolution Diagram?

Read more at Corey Ladas’ blog.

Jim McCarthy gives an overview of the commitments and protocols of “The Core“. The Core provides us with tools to enhance team communication and alignment. When we want to achieve collective greatness we need to aggregate the strengths of the team members. If we want to achieve mediocrity, we can just let each person’s weaknesses nullify another’s strengths. The same message is also at the core of the “Mirror Mirror” session Portia and I organized.

I’d give this presentation a 6/10

What I liked was:

• The personal anecdotes Jim told
• The relaxed presentation style
• Jokes

To make it perfect I would:

• Use less of a preaching tone, but talk about the simple, practical tools and their results in terms that engineers and managers understand
• Take the audience through the tools and gradually build up towards the synergistic effects of the tools
• Adopt a consistent stance and style during the presentation
• Always talk clearly, directly to the audience and avoid asides
• Show more, tell less

I’ve been to Bootcamp and have used The Core tools for years. They work.

I’m afraid that the material (the book, the bootcamp manual, this talk) does not do the tools justice.

I’m In.

Business Value Game

We organized a tryout of the new Business Value Game, the first public outing of the latest game Vera and I designed. A group of us grabbed two tables in the Open Space room and played the game with two teams. The game went quite smoothly and the participants gave me a lot of good feedback to improve and extend the game.

Vera and I will publish the game soon, after the next tryout. As usual, the game will have a Creative Commons license, so that you can remix and reuse the game. If you want a pre-release copy of the game, contact me.

Gino showed us some more of Toronto and offered us an impromptu but excellent lunch. We really wanted to go to the “Seeking to Perceive more than to be Perceive” by Emmanuel Gaillot and Bernard Notarianni, but we had to prepare for our session in the next slot.

Les Neuf Cases / The Nine Boxes

“Les Neuf Cases pour mieux comprendre son Client” presents the “9 boxes” interview technique from Solution Selling in the French language track. Because some English speaking participants expressed interest in the session, we decided to make this a bilingual session, “V.O. en français sous-titré en anglais”.

The session worked really well. The participants were really engrossed in interviewing each other and learned a useful technique. The discussion at the end was even more interesting, as we looked at the bigger picture:

• We have a systemic problem with sales compensation, if the bonus is only tied to selling the project and not to delivering the project. Selling fairytales is easy. Implementing them is hard. I’d rather see bonuses tied to succesful delivery. This gives us two bonus features: salespeople have an incentive to sell short projects that deliver quickly and company cash flow improves as the bonus is paid upon payment by the customer.
• The consulting model of Solution Selling is really useful in lots of situations. The 9 boxes are a technique to perceive more.
• A customer who knows what they want is extremely dangerous. If we don’t explore the problem, we will likely end up building a solution that does not solve a problem. Where’s the value in that? Solution Selling gives us the “Re-engineering the Vision” tool to bring our interviewee back from box 9 (“I know the solution”) to box 1 (“If that’s the solution, what is the problem?”).
• The Nine Boxes can be used by everyone who wants to know what we need to make, from the salesperson to the developer. The salesperson is our first analyst. The Nine Boxes provide most of the information you need to write epics and stories. Dave Nicolette explains how to write User Stories with the Nine Boxes.

We got a lot of good feedback from the participants. Doing a bilingual session was really fun.

I wonder about the “Chansons Françaises” stage for French-language sessions. Some of the sessions on this stage only had a low number of participants. This track seems a bit ‘ghetto’, apart from the rest of the conference. Bilingual sessions help to cross the language barrier. You do need bilingual session presenters, though. Portia and I are available

Buzz

There’s a bit of buzz about techniques like Kanban, Real Options, Lean and Theory of Constraints. People will exclaim things like “Oh, I see! That’s creating an option!” or talk about bottlenecks and flow. Chris Matts keeps popping up everywhere like a one-man marketing machine spreading the word. Portia and I have met many people who’ve heard about these concepts and want to know more. Watch out for more news about our “Real Options Space Game” to experience Real Options while playing an SF board game.

Reception and dinner

The evening ends with the traditional dinner, speeches and awards. One of the highlights was the “XP song” by the Japanese participants. After dinner, we have several more chats over drinks. I’m really happy that many people came up to us to talk about the XP game and the other games Vera, Portia and I designed.

I’m glad I’m at Agile 2008.

I’m sad it’s almost over

I’m In.

Christian and Christoph presented the Conflict Resolution Diagram (or “Evaporating Cloud”), a technique to (dis)solve conflicts. I’ve been using this technique for a while, but I still learned something new: stating the underlying assumptions in an extreme way is fun and very effective. These statements ask to be challenged.

More about the Thinking Tools in Bill Dettmer’s “The Logical Thinking Processes“. The book is quite expensive, but the tools are very clearly explained. To make it perfect, I would add more “stories”, show how the tools are used on cases, step by step.

Mike Cohn presents several techniques for prioritizing our backlog:

• Kano analysis: divide themes into Exciter (“Wow! Ididn’t know you could do that!”) , Linear (“The more, the better”) and Mandatory (“Must have”) features. Implement the mandatory themes; add as many Linear themes as possible; add some Exciters to keep the customers delighted.
• Theme screening: looks at how well the themes score on several chosen selection criteria, relative to one base theme. Work on the high scoring themes.
• Theme scoring: choose selection criteria and assign weights. Choose a baseline for each criterion and score each theme. Give each theme a score for each of the criteria, compared to the baseline. Work on the high scoring themes.
• Relative weighting: score each theme on how much value it adds if present and how much value it would remove if not present. Calculate the relative contribution in value for each theme. Calculate the relative contribution in cost for each time. Score by relative value/relative cost. Work on the high scoring themes.

Essentially, the process works on the theme level. Applying it to stories is too much work and is often meaningless to business users. When we work on a theme, we have to split them in stories and redo the exercise because not all stories in a high-scoring them have a lot of business value or are necessary to realize the theme’s business value. Overall an excellent presentation with good visuals, some exercises and practical advice. Slides available on Mike’s site.

The Relative Weighting technique is used in the Business Value Game, which we will tryout tomorrow morning.

After a refreshing run on the harbourfront, the conference kicks off with the French version of the Leadership Game, “Le Jeu de Direction“. I’ve played this game before with a large group. This time we can explore the leadership issues with a small group. In the game we have to build LEGO buildings in three rounds. In each round we experience a different leadership style: directive, absent and coaching.

The group quickly self-organized, divided tasks and easily picked up tasks that needed to be done. Working without a leader or a coaching leader was not very different. In larger teams, the coach would be more needed, to help the team by keeping an eye on progress, communication and the big picture. It seems that the men and women on the team played with LEGO differently.

Real Options

In the break between sessions, we have an open space chat about Real options after Chris Matts’ and Olav Maassen’s session on Real Options. Portia and I have developed a “Space Game” to experience the Real Options techniques. Some people are interested to play this game. We didn’t bring the game with us, but we’ll see if we can cobble up the game materials with some paper, bits of string and some chewing gum so that we can have a game in the Open Space room.

10 ways to screw up with Scrum and XP

Henrik Kniberg, author of “Scrum and XP from the Trenches“, presents 10 ways to screw up agile projects and agile introduction. The presentation is humorous and Henrik is an engaging speaker. It’s fun and most of the mistakes are very basic. And yet… these are the issues that I’m confronted with daily.

In coaching and consulting work I sometimes worry that we’re telling our customers obvious, basic things. Isn’t all of this Agile, Lean, Real Options and other stuff just common sense? Yes, common sense but uncommon practice. We have to get these basics right with our customers, build a solid Agile base. Then they can take it further on their own and we can move on to help another customer get the basics right.

I’ve given this book to the teams I currently coach. Most of the answers to their questions are in there.

Scrum and XP are simple.

Scrum and XP are hard.

If you want to know more, have a look at Henrik’s blog and download the slides, they are mostly self-explanatory. Or even better, go listen to Henrik at an event near you.

Kenji Hiranabe gave an introduction to mindmapping. When we were all comfortable with the tool, Kenji showed us a video of the introduction of process changes at SANYO. During the video we had to take notes using the mindmap. Our 5 root topics were: waste, process, confusion, YATAI and KAIZEN. Yatai is the practice of having multi-skilled workers complete a whole job, instead of specialized workers working at a conveyor belt. Kaizen is continuous improvement.

The process improvement approach shown was quite brutal. After visually showing how much waste was in the system, the conveyor belt was ripped out, to be replaced by Yatai workcells. The production manager was not amused: he had just been humiliated. Moreover, the new system was slower. Things get worse before they get better. The factory would not make their arranged deliveries and risked losing the trust of the customers. So, the old system was reinstated. As a concession, an experiment with one worker was allowed. An experienced worker was chosen to perform the experiment. At first, she was slower than the old system. Over the course of five days she and the engineers implemented improvements and the time to do the work came down to the level of the old system.

The advantage of the Yatai system is that multi-skilled workers see more results of their work and are less likely to become disinterested. As they are in charge of a large section of production, they can implement improvements that are less likely to be local optimizations. The Yatai system is lighter weight and more flexible than a conveyor belt-based system.

I’ve learned a new word and technique: Yatai. The (many) parallels with agile process improvement are left as an exercise for the reader.

Dwarves at work

In the afternoon Portia and I ran the “Mirror Mirror” session. There were 12 participants, which left more time for discussion and questions. We hope the participants got some value out of this session, that they got some ideas for actions to improve their personal and team effectiveness. We’ll know more once we get the retrospective and perfection game results.

Business Value: Soup to Nuts

Andy Pols and Chris Matts talked about Business Value. Many of it was familiar, but I got some new ideas for the Business Value Game and more ideas for awkward questions to ask before and during projects.

Business Value is a continuous process based on a model of value to be delivered by the project. It is a collaborative process, so start asking those difficult questions NOW.

“The wisdom of crowds”: under the right conditions, groups of people can be (dramatically) smarter than the smartest person in the group. What are those conditions? How is this applicable to Agile software development?

Example experiment on the conference: “How many lines of code are there in Microsoft Visual Studio?”. Obvious answers are: “Too many”, “Who still counts lines of code?” or “Who cares?”. Only two individual participants got closer than the average of the sum of the entries from the collective.

Web examples: Google pagerank and “Clickworkers“. Clickworkers are volunteers who classify Mars craters for NASA. Other examples: betters on horse races or store employees who predict how many and which type of gift cards will be sold. The last one includes the factor that people on the floor have more information and a better view on the customer.

Prediction Markets use a simulated market to predict political results, product preferences, project completion dates. Why do they work? These processes surface information that classic predction processes miss. Classic processes impede the flow of information: people hoard information; people say what their superiors want to hear; people have incentives to ‘game’ the system. Prediction Markets give only one incentive: try to get it right.

Two images of crowds: volatile and extreme (lynch mob, bubbles) or mediocre. These are real effects. But why don’t all crowds work? What do we need to do to create crowds that work:

• Aggregate lots of different judgements to come up with the common judgement.
• Have diversity in the team, cognitive diversity: people who lookat problems in different ways, use different thinking tools. Homogeneous groups become dumber and dumber, ‘groupthink’ sets in because no one spots the flaws. Solution: use conflict, devil’s advocate, question decisions. But that requires a lot of trust.
• Get rid of peer pressure. Every participant must offer their input independently, individually and not influenced by the other participants. Imitation is often a good strategy. Organisations reward average, conformant behaviour. But conformity reduces the intelligence of the crowd.

We over-estimate our ability to recognize the intelligent people. Crucial problem-solving skills may be available in places you wouldn’t expect. The Lean practice of involving the workers in continuous improvement uses this.

Conclusion: good, clear talk. Now I don’t need to read the book

The idea may seem very abstract and high-level, but the ideas and the techniques to create crowd wisdom are available and practical. Some of them are in use in Agile and Lean methods, for example continuous improvement, planning poker, collective ownership…

Agile 2008 starts tomorrow and participants are trickling in. Meanwhile there’s some time left to see a bit of Toronto.

Darwin

We headed for the Royal Ontario Museum, about half an hour’s walk North from the conference and visited exhibits about European history, totems, Egypt and Shanghai. Unfortunately, there’s no time left to visit the dinosaurs. We’ve really come for the “Darwin: the Evolution Revolution” exhibition, which retells Darwin’s life and work. There’s a lot of background information on the many panels. The text can be found on the American Museum of Natural History site.

Castle on the Hill

To mentally prepare for our “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves Kanban” game, we visited Casa Loma. This 98-room castle is a folly built by entrepreneur Sir Henry Pellatt.The castle is a child’s dream come true, complete with secret passages, tunnels, turrets with crenellations and twee rooms outfitted in mock-European style. The library, conservatory and grounds are simply stunning.

One of Pellat’s ventures was the the first Canadian hydro-generating plant at Niagara Falls. Off to the waterfall, then!

And so it begins

That’s all (for now) for the touristy bits. In a few moments the conference sessions begin with a keynote by James Surowiecki author of “The Wisdom of Crowds”. This afternoon, we present Mirror Mirror.

More later.

On Monday, the Agile 2008 conference kicks off in Toronto.

This is my first visit to Toronto, so I’m using this opportunity to visit some friends and to see the city.

Highlights of the tourist program include a shopping mall, a big pointy building, mock-old buildings, evolution, dinosaurs, the harbourfront, islands and running.

And of course, no agilist can miss the opportunity to visit the big waterfall!

In between, Portia and I have some work to do to prepare for the “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall… Why Me? Snow White and the Seven Dwarves Kanban” and La technique d’interview des Neuf Cases pour mieux comprendre votre client“.

Hope to see you at one of the many sessions if you are at Agile 2008. More about the sessions later.