💡 Agile manifesto, divergence & convergence, career frameworks

Monday Ideas — Edition #91

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1) 🏆 The Four Values of Agile Manifesto

Last week I had Kent Beck on the podcast. Kent is one of the signers of the original Agile manifesto and we talked a lot about Agile, Waterfall, TDD, and engineering practices.

This is a good opportunity to look back at the 12 principles from the manifesto itself 👇  with my own annotations.

The original agile manifesto, with my annotations

I believe we can extract 4 major themes from it — still very relevant today:

(1) Work closely with stakeholders 👥

Good communication with stakeholders is a primary factor in any project's success. Agile has long preached about keeping customers in the loop and welcoming requirements' changes, over clunky long term plans.

(2) Work in small batches & deliver incremental value 🚚

Splitting work in small deliverables is key to the health of your development process. Small batches lead to frequent releases, which in turn make the feedback loop faster and reduce risk.

This virtuous cycle means that, counterintuitively, there is no trade-off between speed and stability in software. Higher speed brings higher stability, because it also brings faster recovery from failures.

(3) Give teams agency 🏅

The best results I have witnessed in software have always been delivered by diverse, cross-functional teams who had the skills and trust to independently iterate over a product.

(4) Promote simplicity and good design 🎨

Good design means minimizing the work to be done, both right now and in the future, and this mostly comes from good communication.

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2) 💠 Divergence & Convergence

Following up on the principles above, breaking down work and getting frequent feedback isn’t enough to guarantee that you will ship the right thing in time.

For any sizeable initiative, there is additional work that spawns over the course of the project. Most of it comes from the feedback you receive: other features you may need, tweaks, bugs, etc.

This is healthy, to the point that you should get suspicious when this doesn’t happen — chances are you are not getting enough feedback.

However, additional work can also easily derail deadlines and create friction with stakeholders on prioritization. My preferred way for handling this and set the right expectations is to break down the project timeline into timeboxed stages that look more or less like this:

1. 50% → Core features

2. 30% → Learnings + secondary features

3. 20% → More testing + bug fixing + final tweaks

Let’s make an example. Say you have a 6-months project for which you are working on the scope and requirements. You may identify a sub-scope of core features, on which to spend the first three months. After these three months, let’s look at the project status. Are you on track? Are you late? How much new stuff has emerged?

You may have now a backlog with:

• Leftovers — a few core items still to complete.

• Secondaries — all the minor features.

• Learnings — tweaks and additional features that came from the learning and feedback over these first months.

Together with stakeholders, you may re-prioritize these and figure out what to fit in the next two months. Finally, in the last month, you focus on convergence — you do the final tweaks, more QA, and bug fixing.

Some FAQs:

• 🌊 Isn’t this waterfall-ish? — Nope, you are still demoing features every week, testing, getting feedback, etc. It’s just that you do the most important items first, and timebox the various stages.

• ⚖️ What if my core features take more than 50%? — you can go for it, but you should understand what you are leaving on the table. In my experience you can’t really avoid the final convergence on tweaks and bugs, so, if you want to stay in time, you are likely penalizing tasks that come from learning. This is usually not a good deal.

I wrote a full guide on planning and executing software projects last month, and it is literally the most popular Refactoring article of all times! 👇

How to Plan and Execute Software Projects 🚢

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3) 🪜 Career frameworks stages

In 2022 I wrote a two-part series about creating a good career framework for your team. These days I am doing a ton of research and talking with many people, as I want to create a completely revamped edition about this.

Two of the biggest challenges with career frameworks are 1) when you should introduce it, and 2) how complex you should make it.

My TL;DR advice is that the level of sophistication should match that of the problems you want to solve, and not more. So you can think in stages:

• 🌱 In a team of 5 people — expectations are probably the same for everybody, and alignment means just writing down a few engineering principles.

• 🌿 In a team of 10-15 — you may get away with creating 2-3 simple levels, with descriptions of a couple of paragraphs each.

• 🪴 As soon as you have managers — or leadership roles, you may identify a few core skills and write down the different expectations for the various jobs.

• 🌲 In a large organization — you may try a more granular assessment of your people’s skills to help with internal mobility and the deeper career tracks.

You can learn more in the previous pieces 👇

Career Frameworks — Part 1 🪜

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I wish you a great week! ☀️

Luca