Here are the slides and reference links for the session Gino Marckx and I are giving at Agile 2010 in August

Triangle Model

Selecting and delivering the most important work is a critical success factor in Agile projects. But how do you know what is important? Unless you are psychic, some help would come in handy. Consider the diagram below to help make sense of the wide variety of strategies and tools.

We explain three different perspectives: Company, Customer, Team.

Team Perspective

The product backlog needs to be structured so that it informs the team of the vision and the work. Whenever the company or the customer priorities are not clear, the team will need to rely on general information and it’s common sense.

Theme Scoring & Screening - Relative or numerical weighting based on criteria (Mike Cohn)

• Video of Mike Cohn at Agile 2008 and Slides
• Agile Estimation and Planning (book)

Story Map – structure the work in a grid that reflects actual product usage (Jeff Patton)

• Jeff Patton’s blog
• Presentation

Software By Numbers – prioritize work by Net Present Value of Minimum Marketable Feature

• Software By Numbers (book)

Customer Perspective

The product backlog prioritization is done from the customer’s perspective, from the perspective of whoever is paying for the product in the first place, whether this customer is internal or external to the company doesn’t really matter. What is most valuable to the customer will be on top. Techniques focussing of this view require strong product domain knowledge, and a good understanding of the impact of specific features on the business.

Kano Analysys - Structured Questionaire to determine feature relevance: Mandatory, Linear, Exciter

• See materials of Mike Cohn from Team Perspective: Theme Scoring & Screening

Innovation Games® - 12 Games to better understand your product and what’s important (Luke Hohmann)

• For Speedboat® and Buy A Feature® + more - innovationgames.com and Book

Company Perspective

Companies need to find a balance in distributing the effort over multiple customers and/or products. But they also need to take the company and product strategies into account, deprioritizing features that might be very valuable for customers but aren’t in line with the company’s vision. As well, this takes into account stakeholders other than customers and sales – support, professional services, etc.

Company and Stakeholder Strategy

• Aligning and Balancing Your Backlog
• Blog: Why Prioritizing Your Product Backlog for ROI Doesn’t Work

Business Value Game – Simulation to illustrate how organizations can define their own business value model.

• Game instructions

Allocation Model - helpful to balance priorities with divergent or competing interests

• See example by Alisson Vale: Slides 40-49

Where to go from here?

The most common questions we have gotten after presenting these techniques are “How do I decide where to start?” and “How do these work together?”

These are complementary techniques and are used to solve related problems. Our recommendation is to start with the area that is the biggest challenge for your project. Maybe this means talking to stakeholders you normally don’t talk to. Maybe it means putting a Story Map up on the wall. It depends.

Slides

Derek Longmuir presented ThoughtWorks QTB on working with legacy systems. You can see the video and slides on InfoQ.

I like the definition given by Michael Feathers:

Legacy code is simply code without tests.

Legacy Systems have Value. They are usually business critical and feature rich. They may even be stable and reliable (YMMV). Hint: in the MindMap below, start at 3 o’clock and go clockwise.

Why change from a legacy system? There are number of good reasons: obsolete technology, can’t add features, system is fragile.

This is an important problem since most systems we have 10% of the effort to build and 90% effort to maintain. So to manage costs, we need maintainable systems.

What to do?  Traditional approaches such as Big Bang (think explosion) and wrapping/hiding legacy systems rarely achieve business objectives.

Do a system health check. Look at the code. Get complexity measures. Look at test code ratio. What state is the system in?

Before getting started, there are some tools that you will need for basic technical hygiene. The equivalent of brushing and flossing your teeth is test and build automation.

How to tackle this?

With the Strangler approach, the goal is to strangle the existing application by building a new system that runs in parallel. The idea is to put a new interface in place and begin migrating the functionality in a piecewise fashion. This approach takes a lot of effort and makes sense when there is no hope for the existing code base.

The Phased approach is about rehabilitating the system piece by piece. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Strangely, there was no mention of the bible on this topic: Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers. This book is a must-read on this topic. As is Refactoring, Refactoring to Patterns, and Clean Code.

This is a review of Luke Hohmann’s excellent blog series on Product Backlog Prioritization. As usual, I have captured what I believe to be the salient points in a visual note.  The main points are to:

1. Align with Company Strategy
2. Balance stakeholder demands
3. Drive Profit

Starting at the top left and going clockwise…

Company Strategy.  Do you know what it is?  Do you know the top 3 priorities. Do you know the product strategy? As product owners, we want to eliminate the work that does not align with these. We also want to focus on those that are most strongly aligned with strategy.

Software By Numbers is a great concept but is difficult to use in practice. Firstly, no one has then numbers and secondly business value models need to account for intangibles.

Driving PROFIT is one aspect of a healthy model. Several different approaches (customer pipeline, market research, etc) can be used to identify key business drivers. Hohmann argues that these are at the theme or epic level rather than an MMF (minimum marketable feature).

Finally, it is critical that product releases satisfy internal and external stakeholders. For me, this is perhaps the deepest insight in this blog. Product owners need to listen to and support a wide constituency for a product to reach its potential value to an organization. In my work as a coach, I sadly notice internal stakeholders such as architecture, support and services are frequently ignored. If you haven’t already used them, Innovation Games® are a great way to understand and make choices.

Ken Schwaber has a great presentation where he talks about the Innovator’s Dillemma and how companies build a (design) dead core.

A typical (success) story

• Management – we need to hit the date.
• Developers – OK, we’ll cut quality but won’t tell you.
• Success! We made the date. We’re heroes!

BUT, this is a horrible long term strategy because you get a design-dead core and can no longer ship product.

Design-dead core

Do you have  a design-dead core?  Here’s a quick checklist (see mindmap below):

1. The code is fragile: difficult to work with and things break unpredictably
2. Little or no automated test harness.
3. Few experts who really understand the technology.

Innovator’s Dilemma

The purported dilemma is that you need to choose between fast delivery and maintainability. So, if you want to get to market fast you need to take shortcuts that are going to hinder you in the long run.

This is also called the inventor’s dilemma.

Agile to the Rescue

Teams that follow Agile practices avoid this peril in two ways.

By managing features and scope, teams can find the most valuable software to deliver by a certain date.

Technical practices such as automated testing, continuous integration and refactoring keep a code base healthy and maintainable. They also helps teams go faster.

Release Burndown to illustrate the Innovator’s Dilemma

Consider the chart below. Companies start at burndown line A. If they use Agile, they will stay there. Most companies don’t. So, release by release, they accumulate technical debt and the code base decays.  After a few years, they build a design-dead core.

As a coach, I like to show teams the chart below and vote on their code base. Many companies are at line C with some area’s that are D.

Help! I have a dead core!

OK, so you’ve got a dead core. Sad news. There are ways to recover. I’d suggest you start with Michael Feather’s book Working Effectively with Legacy Code.

Watch the video

The whole video is great, but for the part explaining the Innovator’s dilemma check out:

• Start: 35:38
• Stop: 45:07