Small Controlled Experiments

http://verraes.net

The project was of to a bad start: an inherited legacy codebase, a waterfall contract, and a projected loss. The promise of Kaizen or Continuous Improvement seemed very appealing. But when we tried to incorporate this into our process, it didn’t catch on. Biweekly retrospectives didn’t seem to expose any problems we could improve upon. The ceremonies we tried, like Deming’s Plan-Do-Check-Act cycles, added too much overhead. We were doing something wrong.

Continuous Improvement implies that you know exactly where to focus your efforts. Like scientists, we started to experiment, without deciding upfront what we expected the outcome to be. The rules? Make every experiment as small as possible. No meetings, no consensus, no cumbersome evaluation process. We let the results speak for themselves. This talk explores the successes and failures of a team that went from survival mode to learning mode over the course of a year.

Transcript

1. small controlled experiments @mathiasverraes
2. small uncontrolled experiments @mathiasverraes
3. Mathias Verraes Independent Consultant Value Object Comm.V Student of Systems Meddler of Models Labourer of Legacy verraes.net
4. Fitness landscape
6. Continuous Improvement
7. "When changing teams or organizations, the trick is not to try and push them out of their current behavior. (...) A better idea is to change parameters in the environment so that their current situation becomes unstable and disappears all by itself." 4 Jurgen Appelo6 6 Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders
9. Heavyweight
10. Retrospectives are too slow
11. Unproductive pressure to improve
13. Daily Two minutes, after standup
14. Brainstorm rules "Yes, and... " Divergence Convergence7 7 "Thinking in New Boxes", Alan Iny & Luc de Brabandere
15. Avoid upfront consensus "A meeting is where ideas go to die" Experiments over opinions
16. "If we have data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine." 4 Jim Barksdale
17. Avoid upfront expectations Expectations determine outcomes
18. Low impact Small, cheap, reversible, low-risk
19. No backlog Backlogs kill motivation
20. Timeline Stickies
21. Guarantee veto Everybody must be heard
22. Measure selectively & intentionally Avoid optimising for the metrics
23. Accept uncertainty Non-scientific Exposes invisible problems
24. Accept gut feeling Emotional response is fine
25. Accept failed experiments Welcome failures as new data points
26. Kaizen Mind The urgency to improve
27. Climate of Doubt Assume everything is broken and fixable
28. "If an idea is obviously bad, find a quick way to test it, because if it's not bad, then it's really interesting." 4 Kent Beck
29. Experiment Deliver one story a day
30. Experiment Atomically scoped stories
31. Experiment Start every story in pair
32. Experiment Testers deploy independently
33. Experiment Core Protocols
34. Experiment Syncing physical boards
35. If it's not on a wall or a board, it's not visual.
36. Experiment Measure by hand
37. Experiment Hide the estimate from the board
38. Experiment No more sprint deadlines
39. Experiment No interrupts after lunch
40. Experiment Vizualize cost of interrupts
41. Experiment Wall of Technical Debt8 8 http://verraes.net/2013/07/managed-technical-debt/
43. Use experiments to detect problems
45. @mathiasverraes http://verraes.net/2014/03/small-controlled-experiments/ http://verraes.net/workshops