What Could You Do With 10 Years Of Continuous Improvement?

Who Am I?

• I spent 13 Years working on the same development team for a software house in London
• Their product Front Office is an "IT Services Interface" went through ASP, ASP.NET webforms to MVC5
• I've been blogging about my experiences for 5 years at "Diary of a Scrummaster"
• I'm now Freelance, working with different teams and still coding every day

Where Did We Start?

• Monolithic ASP Scripts
• "Just go and build it"
• Worked alone
• Each dev was assigned features, took weeks to months
• Worked from documents
• Shallow code reviews
• Long Test Periods, QA dept at opposite end of office

Lateness, Boredom, Frustration, Shrinking team

2003-2007: The Beginning

• .NET Webforms
• Team Lead leaves - less Command and Control
• Starting to collaborate, but coding alone
• More conscious of importance of quality
• Continuous Integration
• Unit testing - well we tried

Lateness, Learning, Frustration, Shrinking team

2008-2011: Scrum

• Autonomy! Self actualisation
• limiting WIP with a 3 week sprint
• Collaboration within the team - Daily standup, increasing amounts of pairing
• Reflection - Regular retrospectives and standups
• Predictable - Delivered on time
• Refactoring - Continuously + between sprints
• Problems: testing overrun, buglog, limited creativity?

Deliver within 4 weeks, Learning, Self Actualisation, What Next?

2011- Using Kanban to Improve

• MVC alongside webforms
• Abandoned fixed length sprint
• Set Coding WIP at 10 where it has roughly stayed - frequently hit
• Measured lead time - particularly around defects
• Focus on keeping work flowing
• Dropped estimation unless asked for
• QA & Devs work more closely
• Allowed changes to backlog at any time
• More collaboration outside team

Deliver within 2 weeks, Learning, Creativity, Wider Collaboration, less Us and Them

Many Developers Just Want To Code

But...

Effectiveness Requires Collaboration

Here's What Worked For Us

Pair Programming

• Continually Questioning each others assumptions
• An extra conscience
• Reduce cognitive load leaves more space for creativity

Standups

• A time to raise frustrations
• A time to offer help/support
• A time to keep track of experiments

Retrospectives

• Identify Problems
• Generate Insight
• Devise Experiments

Some People Wanted To Move To Their Country Residence

Here's What Worked For Us

Why Leave?

• Desire to take some risks
• Work with different people - people found it hard to leave
• Even with continuous improvement there is still baggage

So What did I learn?

I Noticed Most Improvement Came From Learning Faster Through

People Instinctively Feel Ineffectiveness

They Signal It With Frustration And Dispondency

Fear Is The Improvement Killer

People Signal It With Blame And Untrue Limiting Assumptions

Anti-Matter Principle

Bob Marshall (@flowchansensei)

Present a good team with problems & they'll thrive on finding solutions. Ask them to implement your solution & they'll only find problems.

Expose your dev team to the chaos of the outside world and ask them to find opportunities in the diversity

Discussion

What constrains improvement in your enviroment?

What can you do to remove those impediments?

What activities promote improvement?

What can you do to introduce those things in your environment?

Steps to continuous improvement

• Work problems together
• Take time to reflect
• Create space to experiment
• Listen
• Question limiting assumptions

What Could You Do With 10 Years Of Continuous Improvement?