Thanks to Near Infinity's generous training budget, I had the opportunity last week to spend 3 days with several members of the Object Mentors group. These guys have an enormous amount of experience, especially "Uncle" Bob Martin. So I thought I would share a few of the pearls of wisdom they dropped along the way:

I love tracking user stories in SharePoint. It's free (assuming you have access to a Windows Server 2003 or 2008 machine with WSS turned on) and is extremely flexible. Adding new custom columns is easy. Adding custom views is easy. Bulk editing is amazingly simple and powerful (assuming you're willing to use IE). And building a custom home page "portal" with all the states of your team's workflow (e.g. unassigned, stories I'm working on, my resolved stories, to peer test, etc) is easy and is intuitive to use.

This 13 minute screencast shows you how to create a user stories list in SharePoint and build burn up and burn down charts off of the data using Microsoft Excel. It includes the custom fields you'll need in SharePoint, the formula's you'll have to create in Excel, and shows tips along the way like how to simplify refreshing your reports when data changes.

Once you've watched the screencast if you want to implement this yourself here is the information you'll need:

Custom SharePoint Columns

• Iteration (Choice column e.g. Iteration00, Iteration01, zBacklog)
• Released (Date - the date the iteration was closed out)
• Points (Number)
• Created Date (for demo only, you should be able to use "Created" on your project)

Calculated Columns in Excel

• Total Points to Date
  • The total points on a specific date including backlog, current iteration and all completed stories
  • =SUMIF([Created Date],CONCATENATE("<=",Table_owssvr_1[[#This Row],[Released]]),[Points])
• Completed To Date
  • Total points for stories released prior to current story's release date
  • =SUMIF([Released],CONCATENATE("<=",Table_owssvr_1[[#This Row],[Released]]),[Points])
• Backlog
  • What remains to be completed at a point in time (e.g. don't include user stories added to the backlog in iteration 4 if this is for a task in iteration 03)
  • =Table_owssvr_1[[#This Row],[Total Points to Date]]-Table_owssvr_1[[#This Row],[Completed to Date]]

Burndown Pivot Table Values

• Row: Released
• Filter: Released After [Some Date]
• Values: Max(Backlog)

Burnup Pivot Table Values

• Row: Released
• Filter: Released After
• Values
  • Max(Total Points to Date)
  • Max(Completed To Date)

Summary

I hope you found the presentation useful and if you are currently using SharePoint for tracking user stories please comment on your experiences.

As a software developer I never thought I'd be saying this (I suppose eight years of working for the company that invented this technique might bias me), but you can not underestimate the value of business process modeling when starting a new project. This is especially true if it's a small project and you don't have the benefit of a dedicated requirements analyst.

As a consultant (or as a person who is learning someone else's business) your job is to understand your customers existing business better than they do themselves. And you need to be on the same page with others regarding how you are going to change their day to day functions. And that's what business process modeling is for.

You may ignore this document after the first week on the project, in fact I would encourage you to. But even if you throw it away immediately after creating it, the process of developing the document will still:

• Flush out important questions
• Show your customer you understand their world
• Help document the project to other developers
• Facilitate communication (especially with the people who pay the bills)
• Generate user stories (requirements)
• Identify the entities that can feed into an Entity Relationship Diagram (or database I suppose)
• Aid making good choices for the decisions it be hard to undo later (like whether to manually code workflows or use Windows Workflow Foundation)
• More clearly identify pain points and areas where your software can help end users; and
• Identify metrics that can help determine project success from an ROI and product owner's perspective

Convinced this is a tool you need in your toolbelt yet? As long as the answer isn't "I only write code leave me alone" then check out this quick how-to:

Start with the AS-IS diagram

As soon as possible on a new project you should plan to interview your future end users. This shouldn't be an unstructured Q&A session. You should start with a rough draft of what you think their business process is and ask questions that identify the places where you were wrong.

In order to start the diagram you need to identify both the end users and existing systems and put those in "swimlanes" down the left side of a diagram. Swimlanes are important because they help you be explicit about who is performing what activities. Then flush out activities in the happy path in appropriate swimlanes like so:

As soon as you talk to end users (like the clerk in the example above) you will discover unhappy paths. What if the warehouse is out of a product? What if the payment was declined? What happens if a customer needs to return something?

Obviously you document these using standard activity diagram notation:

Identifying Pain Points/Opportunities

The interesting part about unhappy paths is how often they occur, how they affect the customers of your customer, and ultimately how they affect your customer's bottom line. For instance, how often is payment declined in the example above? Fairly frequently? Can you get an actual percentage? If it turns out it's because the original application failed to validate credit cards, then a small amount of programming effort can provide a large benefit to length of time until order fulfillment. Sometimes you can make the process more efficient without writing a line of code.

And at the end of your project if you can show that you've decreased the average length of time it takes to go through the process, ideally by showing less time was spent in unhappy paths, you will likely have made yourself one happy customer. This can be especially effective if your new system can show statistics (like percent of orders that are declined) and compare those to the old process.

Developing the TO-BE diagram

AS-IS process diagrams are completely useless unless you can effectively describe what the process will look like after you implement your new system. The process of developing these documents is pretty similar to the AS-IS diagram except of course you're trying to fix the pain points.

One technique I like for generating a backlog of user stories (tasks) is to put unique numbers with each step in the TO-BE process, then ensure there is at least one user story per step in the process. You may be surprised at how easily activities in your new project's swimlane map to user stories.

Summary

I'm a fan of writing code as soon as possible on a project, but if you fail to understand an end user's business process you may be writing the wrong code. Business process modeling can ensure you're writing the right code to solve the most important problems first. And that may be the difference between project success and project failure.

I have recently been taking some graduate classes in the field of Information Technology Management.  After the first few core classes, I have come to the conclusion that there are WAY too many higher education institutions that are avoiding Agile methodologies when they begin teaching software development practices.

To give some background on where I'm coming from, the program that I had started included a class on project management.  The semester had a week or two going into detail about the standard software development life cycle (SDLC).  The way they described it was exactly the way waterfall works.  All work was done in phases, requirements, design, development, test, deployment, all of which revolves around mountains of documentation and paperwork.

Seeing as I have been working on an Agile based project for over 3 years, I thought I would inject some of my thoughts for the class on how things could be better.  I couldn't believe how much negativity I got from other students and even the professor.  I was told numerous times how the Agile methodologies (in general, not specific implementations) wouldn't work for large projects and is only good for prototyping functionality.  The professor even made the comment that Agile was too restrictive when it comes to the time constraints (this I had a good laugh at).

To make matters worse, if I was to continue the program, the last 5 classes are all different steps in the waterfall process.  There is a class on Requirements, there is a class on Design, etc., all leading up to a final course that puts it all together.  I don't see a problem with teaching students different ways to gather requirements or how to go about thinking about and designing a system.  What I do have a problem with is that these higher education institutions are still forcing a specific system down the throats of students when they should be training the students on how to be most effective in their jobs and provide them with as many tools to accomplish that goal.

Agile isn't just a new fad, it has been around for quite a while now and has taken some of the best practices from years of experience and made those the focus.  Furthering oneself through education should benefit the student not waste their time.  My hope is that one day there will be a reform in the software development education programs so that new software development managers will have the necessary tools to be effective rather than being restricted out of the gate.  If there isn't some change soon, the industry is going to pass the education system by and getting a masters isn't going to do anyone any good.

Transparency: Implies openness, communication, and accountability

Agile has always espoused the importance of transparency within the development team, but it is also important to be as transparent as possible with your customer. In fact, the use of transparency can build the foundation of your customer relationship.

At Near Infinity most of our projects are consulting efforts where we build software for other people. In these situations, our customers place an enormous amount of trust in us, and it is incumbent upon us to do everything that we can to earn this trust.

Most Agile development methodologies have clear roles that serve to simplify the development process. In Scrum, the development team is responsible for delivering complete, tested, working software each iteration. The product owner is responsible for making decisions about which features should be developed at what time, and for deciding when there is enough new functionality in the software to make a release to production.

For anything not related to feature development the product owner is the decision maker on the project, but many times the software developers have more information about the state of the software than the product owners do. This puts the development team in a position of power. As we all know, with great power comes great responsibility. You have the knowledge that your product owner needs to effectively drive the project to success. You should share as much of this information as your product owner can stomach - whether it is good news or bad news. Especially when it is bad news.

Too many times in our industry, development teams will hide bad news from decision makers, hoping that they can adjust resources or shuffle the order of features that need to be developed in order to make up schedule time. We rationalize this by saying that our customers wouldn't want to know all of the "implementation details" and there is no reason to get the customer involved with something that may not even be an issue. This idea of the development team insulating their customers from development issues is flat out wrong. Nothing good can happen from this. In software development, we almost never make up schedule time and things don't magically get better because we shuffle around resources.

 So instead, share the bad news. You may think that it makes the development team look bad, but it won't. Software development is not an exact science. Pretending that it is can be a recipe for disaster. A good product owner will know this and should expect some setbacks during the course of the project. Sharing these setbacks shows your customer that you are their partner in this effort. It gives your product owners the valuable information that they need in order to make the critical decisions that will affect the overall success of your project.

As software developers, we want to prove our expertise. This is our profession; we are supposed to know what we are doing, right? (Right!) So then doesn't admitting our mistakes and pointing them out to our customer make us look incompetent? Absolutely not. The truth is that by owning our mistakes and exposing them, we look more confident in our abilities. It shows your customer that making mistakes is part of the development process and is normal. Confidently owning mistakes, learning from them, and addressing them with better solutions shows your customer that you are experienced and you know how to deal with adversity. It shows that you can be trusted to make decisions that will benefit the project and the customer, and that you are not just looking out for yourself.

It is easy to fall into the trap of always wanting to please our customers. This is a very shortsighted view of software development. If you aren't concerned with repeat business, then by all means, always tell the customer what they want to hear. The truth of the matter is that sharing information that upsets your customer is almost always the right thing to do. It may mean having an awkward meeting or a tense few days, but it allows your customers to do their jobs more effectively, to plan appropriately and it better enables them to meet their expectations in the long run.

Don't mistake honesty for transparency. Customers expect honesty. They expect truthful responses to their questions. Transparency goes one step further. It means sharing information when you don't have to. It means sharing information when things go wrong. It means partnering with your customer in order to deliver the best software possible in order to return value to the business.

Being transparent isn't always easy. Just remember, the most important time to be transparent is when it is the hardest.