Rapid Prototyping with Aza Raskin from Dan Braghis on Vimeo.

Aza Raskin, creative lead at Firefox, shares some tips and tricks about rapid prototyping at the Mozilla Drumbeat festival

One of his points: “Aim to finish a usable artifact in a day. This helps you focus and scope.”

He shows this block of wood as example:

This block of wood has rather a history, because it is also a Palm Pilot. I regarded it started at Palm. Actually,

which he carried along with him for months. And he pretended to use it. Asking: What kind of things would i write on it now.And he tried this, and this is how he got a number of economical use-cases for it.

Again, this is a really complex piece of software – but all could be prototyped in one day.

So if you think about the things you are going to prototype, its going to seem big and complicated, but the most important and fundamental aspects of it can be prototyped in one day.

I am an avid fan of prototyping and have used it a lot in my work during the last 3-4 years.
Prototyping is highly addictive and also a necessity for getting feedback fast.

Related articles:

• Capgemini website article: Prototyping and Ruby on Rails (apr 2008)
• Prototyping Talk in Danish IT Usability Network (may 2006)
• Ruby on Rails as rapid prototyping tool (apr 2006)
• UX Magazine article: How To Prototype And Influence People with Aza Raskin (November 2nd)

RUP is pretty prescriptive – it has over 30 roles, over 20 activities, and over 70 artifacts. You aren’t supposed to use all of that though, you are supposed to select a suitable subset for your project. This seems to be hard in practice.

“Hmmmm… will we need Configuration audit findings artifacts? Will we need a Change control manager role? Not sure, so better keep these in just for in case.” This may be one of the reasons why RUP implementations typically end up quite heavy-weight compared to Agile methods such as Scrum and XP.

XP (eXtreme programming) is pretty prescriptive compared to Scrum. It includes most of Scrum + a bunch of fairly specific engineering practices such as test-driven development and pair programming.

Scrum is less prescriptive than XP, since it doesn’t prescribe any specific engineering practices. Scrum is more prescriptive than Kanban though, since it prescribes things such as iterations and cross- functional teams.

The main difference between Scrum and RUP is that in RUP you get too much, and you are supposed to remove the stuff you don’t need. In Scrum you get too little, and you are supposed to add the stuff that is missing.

The quote and illustration are from Henrik Kniberg’s “Kanban vs. Scrum” which is a 40 page PDF file. As you may recall from his “Scrum and XP from the trenches“, Henrik has flair for writing as well as illustrating his points.

Video clip is taken from “The Downfall” and texted as if we were attending a daily scrum meeting during world war II.

You’re not ready for agile if you:

• are inflexible. You’ve got a policy for everything. If it’s not in the book, it doesn’t exist. This is the way we’ve always done it.
• treat developers as a commodity; a uniform, fungible resource. They are all alike. You can’t trust them to think for themselves, you’ve got to make the important decisions for them.

Go to Andy’s site to read the full 5 point list.

Related articles:

• /\ndy: Stage 0: Not Ready For Agile
• Justaddwater.dk: Video: Agile and Scrum Tuning by Jeff Sutherland (March 2008)
• Justaddwater.dk: Great Quotes For The Agile Project Wall (February 2008)

The question is if there is anything else that can bring an organization to the same level of performance as Scrum.

Right now I’m working with a CMM level 5 organisation. It took them seven years to get to level 5. Everybody is using the same process. All processes are monitored. They got so much data that I can ask them any question, and the will give me 3 answers from 3 different datasets.

The thing about CMMI maternity levels is it’s designed to reduce rework. CMMI level 1 companies have about 50% of rework. That’s bugs and stuff that has to be redone because it’s not right.

By the time you get to CMMI level 5 you have only 10% or less rework. You added about 10% of overhead for process management. You haven’t increased the productivity of the real work.

So, they spent 7 years to eliminate — to bring their rework from 50% to 10%. It improved their productivity by about 25%.

They then introduced Scrum. They immediately cut their defect rate by 40% (they were already very low). They cut their planning overhead by 80%. They doubled their productivity.

And now they are bidding contracts out to the Defence Dept. in the US, for example. If they want waterfall it cost them 10 million, if they want Scrum it cost them 5 million.

And they have only been doing it 6 months. I think they can go all the way like Toyota and get it twice as much. So what I can say is I have real data that shows that Scrum can take the most mature company in the world and fix it. And I haven’t seen anybody else that has that kind of data.

I think that Scrum is like Toyota. Toyota has this team that go all over the world helping companies be better.

They did this experiment couple of years ago. They said let’s find the most agile company in the United States. And they found this industrial process control company that won all kinds of agile awards.
They sent the Toyota team in there. In six months, they doubled everything.

Just like the Scrum example. They did everything I just described in the CMMI 5 example.

So my point is that there is no company that Toyota can’t fix. I don’t care how good it is. And fixing it means they will double every metric in a positive way.

And I think Scrum can do the same thing. It is based on the same concepts as lean manufacturing is.

Bonus quote from a video presentation by Craig Larman

[The managers of a big defense industry company] explained to me that they were proud to be a CMM level 5 company. Wow. And they spend a couple of hours explaining to me how it all worked. There were at least 40 managers there explaining how it all worked. An also in the room were a bunch of developers. And when the managers left, first thing they said was

“Don’t believe a word they say. There is absolutely no way we can run a successful CMM5 software project if we follow these crazy CMM practices. We fake it and then fill in the paperwork afterwards and then try not to let the managers know”

This is of course another echo the “nail” story in 5-year economy

In stead of focus on results and innovation and there is a focus on conformance and process.

(from Valtech http://www.valtech-tv.com/permalink/2284/scaling-lean-thinking-and-agile-methods-to-offshore-development-part-i.aspx — note: Free but requires registration!)

Related post:
Internal Capgemini Scrum Presentation

Technorati Tags: agile, scrum, cmm, cmmi, project management, video, presentation, toyota

Thanks Jakob!

The entire 38 minutes presentation is in Danish

As a side note, we had quite some traffic from the Danish blog “Version 2″ where Rasmus Knippel (an ex capgemini colleague) wrote about the video. Rasmus found it quite unique that a larger company in Denmark would “broadcast” an internal presentation in this way. He also thinks that companies that allow this will put a certain confidence in the employees.

I totally agree on that, and look forward to more lunchbag meetings around interesting issues like this.

Technorati Tags: scrum, agile, capgemini, presentation, video

Mads, a colleague of mine did a fast prototype of a new application that we probably want to use as a tool in our agile projects. We’ll do a fast, digital version of a Scrum board (see image below)

For the digital version, we’d like to project the scrum board on the wall, and be able to drag/drop tasks from one column to another. Here is a screenshot a preliminary version that hooks up to Trac and shows tickets for the sprint/milestone + a constantly updated burndown chart.

A touch screen would be perfect here, but a quick google search only shows “small” touch screens. For a wall projection Scrum board, we would need at least 40-50 inches display.

I realize that this request may be more or less trivial in 10 years or so… But until then, any ideas on what to do now or within reasonable time? Are there any large touch screens commercially available at all?

PS. We were actually talking about using a regular projector and a Nintendo Wee or similar for moving post-it notes, but it turned out there is a limitation in screen resolution. A bare minimum is around 1200 px wide.

UPDATE: This is the kind of interaction i am looking for (video via ReadWriteWeb)

Does anybody know if it’s possible outside a lab?

Technorati Tags: touch, screen, request, lazyweb, scrum, scrum board, screenshot

Capgemini Denmark lunchbag session explaining “What is Scrum”, “how to Scrum”, “Why Scrum”, recorded Friday March 7th.

Presenter is my colleague Jakob Schmidt Sørensen, Capgemini Denmark. He asked me to help him out keep track of time and draw the burndown chart during the presentation.
Note that the entire presentation is done on a scrumboard with a burndown chart being constantly updated during the 40 minute presentation. Actually, this was the rerun of a similar presentation one week earlier: The first one was quite popular and several people encouraged Jakob to redo the presentation.

The entire 38 minutes presentation is in Danish

Google video: Scrum in a lunchbag session (Danish)

Update 2008-03-27: Jakob made an edited version 37 minutes long slightly edited to focus on the most important parts.

Technorati Tags: scrum, agile, capgemini, presentation, video

Scrum Tuning: Lessons learned from Scrum implementation at Google

(example starts around 42 minutes into the presentation)

• Outsource $2million development
• Outsourcing costs $1.6M
  (industry data show 20% cost savings on average)
• Alternative: Introduce Scrum locally
  (240% improvement)
• Local Scrum costs $0.83M
  (which yields a 59% cost reduction)

Every company I introduced Scrum in (even one with 600 developers) more than doubled productivity. In fact, I don’t even view that as very good.

That’s kind of a mediocre effect. A good implementation get’s a Toyota effect — at least four times. [company name] get it ten times. 240% was what I got at my last company which had about 600 developers. That means I can take my 2 million Dollars and do it locally for 0.8. If I send it to an Indian team that is doing waterfall and pay 1.6 — how dumb is that?

Why would anybody do that?

You would always wanna introduce good agility locally first, and then go and insist that the Indian teams be agile — and that’s what [xx] is doing — they are converting all their Indian operation — which is growing bigger than their US operation — to Scrum.

… although this seems pretty biased, the story continues and Jeff gives an example with even better productivity: Distributed scrum for a company in Utah, US/St. Petersburg, Russia.

More notes: Agile and Scrum Tuning by Jeff Sutherland

Technorati Tags: agile, scrum, video, presentation, jeff sutherland

Scrum Tuning: Lessons learned from Scrum implementation at Google

Working software is really the only measure of progress.

It used to be only about 40% of requirements change in the average project in the industry. But in the 2003 report from Stanford that number moved up to between 60 and 65% of requirements change during a project. Google knows this, but some people are still trying to make a plan and then they create a change control group, which is the kiss of death for successful projects these days.

When Rosing started at Google in 2001, “we had management in engineering. And the structure was tending to tell people, No, You can’t do that”. So Google got rid of the managers. Now most engineers work in teams of three, with project leadership rotating among team members. If something isn’t right, even if it’s in a product that has already gone public, teams fix it without asking anyone. (agile principle #5)

“For a while,” Rosing says, “I had 160 direct reports. No managers. It worked because the teams knew what they had to do. That set a cultural bit in people’s heads: You are the boss. Don’t wait to take the hill. Don’t wait to be managed”

And if you fail, fine. On to the next idea. “There’s faith here in the ability of smart, well-motivated people to do the right thing,” Rosing says. “Anything that gets in the way of that is evil”.

(fast company, April 2003)

Other companies don’t have any body in charge — it’s just organic. Maybe it’s where Google and yahoo started… what they found was that didn’t scale.

So yahoo went out and hired some consultants who gave them a big heavy weight process and 300 page specifications.

And when i got there a year or two ago and they said they really hate this. And when they learned about agile and particularly scrum, they said:

“SCRUM will allow us to go back to our organic roots and work in small teams in the same way.

But give us the kind structure that Toyota has where people are empowered but there is a structure there that allows scalability.”

What we see is that scrum is really infinitely scalable. [...] It’s actually linearly scalable. IE if you double the number of people you actually double the output of software. It’s the only process that has actually documented this with good data.

Technorati Tags: agile, scrum, video, presentation, jeff sutherland