In the agile community we love fast. Fast feedback, fast delivery. Fast is good. Slow is bad. Why then is the most common complaint I get about agile - "All this team stuff distracts me from writing code. We can't deliver fast if I can't write code". That's a good point. We are taking our devs away from coding to some extent. In an agile team they can’t just sit down in a corner with their headphones on and just cut code solidly for a week. There's a lot of team interaction that has to go on to make the team run smoothly.

So are we, by doing agile, slowing down delivery of code? Quite possibly yes. But what about fast delivery? How can we say we are about delivering fast but slow down the people who are actually delivering the code? The thing is, we don't actually deliver code. If we just delivered code we would go out of business. What we deliver is working, tested, fit for purpose code. More fundamentally than that, what we deliver is business value, not code. Agile is all about speeding the delivery of value, not the delivery of code.

AgilityDave Martin9 June 2015optimisation, valueComment

Self Organisation

I recently coached a team that had a problem. Actually, they thought they had a lot of problems. Their builds were a mess. Their environment was unstable. Their tests were broken. They were finding it very difficult to get any work done. Their once excellent planning was starting to drift away from reality. When we started to look into these problems though, it became clear that all these problems had one single cause – their team lead.

Agility, LeadershipDave Martin19 July 2013leadership, optimisation, self organisationComment

Tortoise Projects And Hare Projects - Setting A Sustainable Pace

Hi Folks

We probably all know the old story about the tortoise and the hare. Speedy hare raced off, got tired and had to have a rest while slow tortoise kept plodding on at a steady pace and eventually won the race. Even hare's mad dash towards the finish wasn't enough to catch up. Everyone knows the moral of the story - slow and steady wins the race. When it comes to running projects though, we behave more like hare than tortoise.

AgilityDave Martin5 July 2013optimisation, sustainable paceComment

See The Whole - Avoiding Sub-Optimisation

Hi Folks

In my last post, I mentioned in passing the phenomenon of sub-optimization - where optimizing one part of a process negatively affects the throughput of the whole. This is covered by the seventh (and probably least understood) principle of Lean - See The Whole.

AgilityDave Martin7 June 2013optimisationComment

The Importance of Slack

Hi Folks

In many companies, resource utilization is considered an important measurement. The idea is that resources, whether they be machines or people should be occupied as close to 100% of the time as possible doing chargeable work. On the surface this looks pretty sensible. No point having people spending time doing things that the company doesn't make money from is there? The more time people spend working on chargeable tasks, the more money the company makes. Right?

AgilityDave Martin24 May 2013optimisation, efficiencyComment

Scrum - It's Not All About The Developers

I recently checked back in on a team I had started up a while back. Over the months since I had set them free they had made a few modifications to the process and in doing so had fallen into one of the most common traps I have seen teams fall into - they had made it all about the developers.

My first inkling that there was something amiss came when one of the testers on that team approached me for some advice on how she could be more efficient in her testing. She felt she was falling behind. When I dug a little further it turns out the team had delegated the job of unit testing to the testers to "free up the devs". This was in addition to the acceptance test automation the testers were doing as well. The devs had also resisted any attempts to assist with testing so "they could be more efficient".

AgilityDave Martin1 April 2013efficiency, optimisationComment