Spikes And Stories

Scrum tips and agile insights from a Silicon Valley agile coach

A Simple Model for Better Decision Making

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I think every agile team should be viewed as a small startup.  When you do so, you can begin viewing senior leadership largely as venture capitalists (VC).  They’ll occasionally visit your office, they’ll provide valuable expertise and insights that will help your small company succeed, they’ll paint a vision of your competitive landscape so you can make better choices, and most importantly, they’ll infuse your small startup with cash.  This metaphor can only be extended so far, and we could talk endlessly about the complexities of decision making within this model, but we won’t.  Instead, I’ll borrow a quote from Martin Fisher:

Knowledge is the process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.

So how do we simplify this? How can we paint a simple view to understand which decisions are for our VCs to decide, which is for the start up’s leadership, and which is for those in the trenches turning ideas into working product?  Here’s how I answer those questions:

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Impact Over Velocity

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Impact over velocity.  In other words, don’t just do things.  Do the right things.  It seems obvious, but how many of us are guilty of deciding the success of a sprint by how many stories or story points we completed?  But don’t worry.  You’re not alone.  Velocity is an easy number to get at, but easy isn’t always best.  Or right.

Before we dive into understanding impact, let’s flip the concept.  What does velocity over impact look like?  If any of these apply to you, it could be a sign of trouble:

  • Your team has disjointed or vague sprint goals.  Your goals may have little to do with your team’s mission.  Or they may be so varied or vague that they provide the team no focus, vision, or enthusiasm.
  • The team has too many goals.  James Carville once gave Bill Clinton this advice:  “If you say three things, you say nothing.”  Too many goals are noise; they’re overwhelming.  Find out what’s most important, attack it with conviction and discipline, then move on to the next target.  Don’t attempt to do everything all at once, or you’ll end up doing nothing.
  • A disproportionate amount of sprint work has nothing to do with your goals.  Maybe your goals rock.  However, when you look closely, do these goals align with everything contained in your sprint backlog?  If half your backlog has nothing to do with your goals, this may be a problem.
  • Your velocity metric is overemphasized.  In the absence of other measures of success, stakeholders associate a high number of completed story points with a high amount of impact.  By extension, the team adopts a similar mindset.  Remember that people don’t do what you expect; they do what you inspect.
  • There’s little or nothing to demo at the sprint review.  The entire team has been busy.  Days have flown by because there was so much to do and never a dull moment.  Yet, when it’s time to demo another increment of your product, there’s little to show your stake holders.

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Spikes: Purpose And Usage

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Spikes. It’s part of my blog’s name: Spikes and Stories, and it’s a bit of word play, which I’ll explain at the conclusion.  Because of this, it seems only appropriate that I pay homage to spikes and explain how I’ve used them with teams.

They have their origins in Extreme Programming (XP), and I define a spike as:

Work within a sprint that will not deliver any value itself.  Instead, it will create knowledge that may be instrumental in doing or estimating future work.

Why call them spikes?

I don’t know.  I’ve seen several conflicting stories on the origin of the term so I’ll not make it worse by picking a side or by making up another origin story.  Nonetheless, I think most of us will agree that it’s not a very intuitive or descriptive name.  Whatever their origin, their usage is a more interesting story.

Should teams estimate spikes as they do stories?
Some say they should be estimated, and they say so for a few reasons:

  • How do we do velocity-driven planning if we don’t estimate spikes?
  • So the team gets credit for the spike in their velocity.
  • They shouldn’t be penalized just because they don’t know everything.
  • If velocity is a measure of how much work a team can accomplish, credit should be given.

However, I disagree. I say no.  Spikes should not be estimated, and as with so many other things in agile, it comes back to our manifesto which states:

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Qualities of Great Agile Coaches

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Great scrum masters and great agile coaches are a rare and special breed.  They often do their best work behind the scenes, and they seldom want credit for a job well done.  Instead, they’re most satisfied when they see their teams grow and succeed.  In many ways, it’s like watching our kids grow up.  They started as a collection of individuals and mature to a self-organized, effective, and efficient team.  So what qualities set apart the good agile coaches and scrum masters from the great ones?  I thought I’d try to answer that question today by way of several biases.

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