Agile Focus

A team in which everyone works at top capacity has got to be the most productive, right? This article explains why it ain’t necessarily so.

(Note: I didn’t invent the exercise described here. I first saw something like it presented at the Agile2006 conference by Ashley Johnson and Rich Phillips of Valtech Technologies, Inc.)

The assembly line analogy

I recently conducted an exercise with the folks at North Bay Agile in which two teams formed assembly lines for folding paper airplanes. Each assembly line consisted of a number of distinct operations, as follows:

• Operation 1 - Get raw material (a sheet of paper) from stock.
• Operation 2 - Fold inward lengthwise, then unfold.
• Operation 3 - Fold top corners inward.
• Operation 4 - Fold sides inward, fold in half, fold wings down.

In the first shift, every member of each team worked at top capacity. The result: Each team produced about a dozen airplanes in 5 minutes.

But then I had each team fill out a “profit and loss” statement. They got credit for “selling” all planes produced, but they were also debited for the labor and material costs of uncompleted airplanes (which stacked up in front of Operation 4, the bottleneck). The financial news: Both teams incurred a loss.

In the second shift, the teams were instructed to slow down to match the rate of the slowest operation. This was accomplished by creating a “buffer zone” before each operation and following a rule which said, “you can’t pass your work on to the next operation until that operation’s buffer zone is empty.” The result: Each team still produced around a dozen airplanes in 5 minutes.

When the profit and loss statements were filled out a second time, each team showed a profit. This was directly due to the fact that no work-in-process inventory built up, thus reducing the amount spent on materials and labor.

The most obvious difference in the overall activity of the assembly lines from shift to shift was that, in the second shift, the upstream operations were sometimes idle. By slowing the upstream operations to match the rate of the slowest operation, both assembly lines increased their productivity.

Increasing productivity stepwise

After the first shift in the exercise, the inclination of several participants was to try to find ways to improve the performance of the slowest operation. As the second shift demonstrates, however, a simpler first step is to just slow down all of the upstream operations to match the rate of the slowest operation.

The business novel The Goal outlines a process for increasing the productivity of a manufacturing system:

• Step 1 - Identify the system’s bottlenecks.
• Step 2 - Decide how to exploit the bottlenecks (e.g. don’t let a bottleneck be idle).
• Step 3 - Subordinate everything else to the above decision (e.g. throttle back the upstream operations).
• Step 4 - Elevate the system’s bottlenecks (e.g. speed up a slow operation).
• Step 5 - If, in a previous step, a bottleneck has been broken (i.e. a bottleneck is no longer a bottleneck) go back to Step 1.

 As you can see, the recommendation is to slow down all non-bottleneck operations before trying to speed the bottlenecks up.

How does the assembly line exercise relate to software development?

Although software development is not the same as manufacturing, there are situations in development that exhibit the characteristics of an assembly line. Suppose, for example, that you are a developer building components for use by other developers. If you (the upstream operation) produce components at a rate faster than the other developers (the downstream operations) can understand and use them, you can create a bottleneck, causing excess “inventory” to build up.

Software development is about creating and sharing knowledge

Here are some simple things to remember when considering whether it is more profitable to work at top capacity or to be idle part of the time:

• Knowledge is the inventory of software development
• People consume knowledge at their own rate
• Creating knowledge faster than it can be consumed causes excess inventory
• Excess inventory reduces profits

In other words, working at your own top capacity may not be the positive thing you think it is. If you’re producing software components at a rate greater than the rate at which they can be put to use, you could be hurting the bottom line.

As Agile methods become more popular, they risk turning into a pointless fad. Here are my tips for avoiding that trap on your own projects.

Agile is the new black

A friend of mine is a founder at a startup that’s very Agile: weekly iterations, releasing 2-10 times a month, heavy test coverage, and lots of pair programming. He met for coffee with a friend of a friend, an executive in charge of building his company’s first significant piece of software. Part of the conversation went like this:

My friend: So, how are you developing your software?

Executive: We’re doing Agile!

My friend: That’s great! We started out two years ago with a typical Extreme Programming set of practices, but since then we’ve made a number of significant changes, including [list of new and modified practices]. And we’re still continuously improving. How about you?

Executive: We’re doing Agile!

My friend: [Sighs, shakes his head sadly.] Nice weather we’re having, isn’t it?

In my experience, this is becoming more and more common: somebody hears that Agile is what all the cool kids are doing, so they take a very shallow understanding of what that means and run with it. This rarely works out well, and always puts me in mind of somebody who goes to a buffet restaurant and makes a meal out of the desserts. It’s theoretically appealing, but the long-term costs are fearsome.

Fad-proofing your Agile adoption

Agile methods have become popular because there’s real value to them. However, just jumping on the bandwagon won’t do you any good. Take the time to think through what you’re trying to achieve. Do an Agile adoption poorly and people may become cynical enough that you won’t have another chance. Here are 10 things you can do to help:

1. Focus on what works - Your team isn’t there to create process or make software. You’re there to deliver sustainable long-term value via software. Use that as your primary ruler to measure success.
2. Don’t expect miracles - There are no silver bullets! Agile methods don’t fix your problems for you; they mainly make the problems obvious quickly, so you can solve them yourselves.
3. Give yourself room - Thinking that “doing Agile” must be quick and easy, many teams don’t allow enough time to learn how to make the practices work well for them. Allow for an initial productivity hit, one that will get paid back richly down the road.
4. Don’t get suckered - Now that “Agile” is a big buzzword, there’s an equally big incentive for consultants and authors to sell you Agile lite, the software process equivalent of cotton candy. Don’t fall for it!
5. Don’t just “do Agile” - I’ll tell you a secret: there is no “Agile” that you can do. There is a collection of Agile methods; you can do any one of them. There are a whole host of practices to adopt. But unless you know enough to tell them apart, you don’t know enough to do any of them well.
6. Get help from people who have done it - As a coach, I’m probably a little biased, but I think everybody who tries an Agile approach should involve somebody who’s done it before. Whether that’s a key player, a manager, or a coach doesn’t matter much. But it’s hard to learn Agile methods from books, let alone a couple of articles on the web.
7. Track and pay down your debt - Part of an Agile adoption is raised standards. That leaves most people with a lot of cleanup to do. Make a list of all your code debt and testing debt, and have a plan for paying it off.
8. Push power down - Agile methods do best in a context where teams are given broad latitude to solve problems on their own. Focus on supporting rather than directing your Agile teams.
9. Improve continuously - An Agile method isn’t something like a turbocharger that you bolt on once and then use forever. If you aren’t having regular retrospectives and continually improving your process, you’re not Agile.
10. Use your ignorance for good - One of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking that even though they’ve never used an Agile approach, they know enough to make big changes to it from day 1. Instead, accept that you’re trying something truly new to you, and act like it.

Feedback wanted

Have any war stories about the dangers of being fashionably Agile? How about tips on doing it right? I’d love your comments, and other readers would, too.

P.S. Hat tip to my old pal Christopher DeJong for the phrase “Agile is the new black”.