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From Agile 101 book: The Ant and the Cicada

jueves, 21 julio 2016 20:00
antoniomartel
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One summer a cicada was resting in a field, when she noticed a small ant running around here and there.

– “What are you doing?” asked the Cicada.
– “The Queen has asked me to build a new anthill!” replied the Ant.
– “But they already have one there, just a few meters away” offered the Cicada, puzzled.
– “Yes, but it’s getting a bit small, and in winter, with the rain, the things we have collected get wet”

The Cicada, ready to learn from her hard-working friends, decided that it would be a good idea to prepare for the winter. The leaves and sticks she used to build her shelter the previous year were getting dry, and it wouldn’t hurt to have a new home to spend the winter in comfort.

She quickly started to plan the wonderful shelter she would build. Now that she had time she would build it with every possible comfort. She would be the envy of the whole meadow. The stories about her new home would be heard far away, further even than the cypress hedge. It would have spacious windows so the light would flood in, and she would design a clever pulley system that would save her many trips to and from the barn to store what she had collected.
The Ant, however, had a plan. In August she would build the first room, which would be the barn. That way, if the rains started early this season, she and the other ants would have at least some extra space to store their grain. Then she planned the rest of the work according to its importance. If she didn’t have enough time to finish it all by the deadline, she would have built at least the most important parts.

In September she would dig a hole that would later become the hall were the first larvae of the year would live. In October she would build an additional room to increase barn capacity. Lastly, in November she would finish the work by digging a hall where she could grow fungi.

In the meantime, the Cicada was worried about having a dining hall that was big enough, and a structure as solid as necessary to hold everything she had imagined. She would run back and forth looking for the materials she would need to build all the things that she had planned in her head.

In October the first rains came, but the Cicada didn’t even have a basic shelter to take cover in. Also, water ruined some of her first constructions that were halfway built, and she had to start again. Then November came and the weather became really ugly. She had to hurry up and started working from sunrise to sunset.

Those first October rains made the Ant think that something could go wrong, and she decided to test whether the work that was already done would be useful. She started to fill her new barn with grain and soon she noticed that the access hole was too small for big leaves, and that it should be a bit higher if they wanted to avoid water or mud coming through. In order to fix this, they had to stop doing other things.

Winter came early that year, and the Ant realized that she wouldn’t have enough time to build the last room, so in the main anthill they decided that they should open an extra entrance, in case the main one got blocked by a stone or an enemy.

The Cicada, however, was surprised by the bad weather. She didn’t really know what was finished and what wasn’t. Also, what she had considered finished had not been tried out, and now there was no time to improve it. Winter was here and no more work could be done.

In her new shelter, under the leaking roof, the Cicada promised herself that this would never happen again: “Next year I’ll start work even before the Ant,” she said to herself.

You can find texts like this and many other about how to manage agile projects in my book Agile 101: Practical Project Management (available on Amazon).

Translation by Begoña Martínez. You can also find her on her LinkedIn profile. Proofreading by David Nesbitt.

How we used Scrum in our software projects

martes, 19 julio 2016 19:00
antoniomartel
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These days I have been preparing and updating a Prezi presentation about how we used Scrum (or Agile development) in our software development projects.

You won’t find there a Scrum theory implementation but the process and methods we used to try to become more Agile (whatever that means) and to deliver software regularly and frequently (working software).

Reach the presentation at Prezi: Practical Scrum – How we used it.
or have a look at it here:

Functional tests with Selenium WebDriver

domingo, 17 julio 2016 21:00
antoniomartel
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(Sorry, this is a technical post about software testing, but don’t worry, you can find here some of my non-technical blog posts)

A few years ago we used Selenium IDE in a web application project just to check the functionalities developed at that sprint were working as expected but there were some problems with that. I try to sum up them here:

  • Selenium IDE works only with Mozilla Firefox web browser. That was a problem when you did need to test another browser or your web app worked only in MS Internet Explorer.
  • Tests and tests suites used to become red frequently. Firefox updates (on security mainly) made script commands deprecated easily so it was needed to search for a replacement, when available, or to find a workaround (after a few hours in Stackoverflow). To keep them working in order was costly (and time consuming).
  • There was some kind of a mess with script commands: type or typeKeys, click or clickAt, mouseAt or mouseDown. You never knew.
There were also some advantages, of course, like the way the user actions could be recorded by the IDE. You just had to click somewhere, move the mouse or type something that your movements were recorded by the IDE as script commands. It was needed to adapt or fix them after recording it but it used to made things easier. 
These days I have been playing around with Selenium WebDriver. It doesn’t need to inject javascrit code into the web browser and you can use your favourite programming language to write the tests.
I have written a couple of tests to check one of my web applications just to show you some of its main features and how Selenium WebDriver can work on Chrome. At the end of this post you can find a video showing how these tests work.

This first test is a kind of smoke test just to check that the application is working properly and shows the main page when it is requested:

Below you can find how to get the driver variable for Chrome. Using it you can have access to all WebDriver commands. It is written inside the jUnit @Before annotation so it is going to be executed before any other test run. At the @After method there will be a driver.quit(); sentence.

This last test actually checks that 10 questions are asked at each attempt (no more, no less), chooses randomly one of the multiple choice options and ensures that there is a results page at the end.

This is the Selenium/JUnit tests video recording:

You can find texts like this and many other about how to manage agile projects in my book Agile 101: Practical Project Management (available on Amazon).

References:

Agile 101: Scrum’s sprint 0 and the initial design

sábado, 16 julio 2016 19:00
antoniomartel
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Sometimes we’re in projects in which we need to prepare a large number of things before starting out. Can we start building without stopping to plan or analyse what we’re about to do?
When we read about Scrum, we get the impression that all texts start directly with development, but…what about environment, team or office preparation tasks? What about design? Shouldn’t we stop to think about the whole design and architecture of what we’re about to build before we start programming?

About preparation or “before” programming. Some people call it “sprint #0”, the sprint where you prepare your tools, install the stuff you need, train the team, etc.. It can be a longer sprint (3, 4 weeks or so). Some detractors criticise this sprint because it is not agile, and because it hides some work that is taken care of in the same way as the rest.

It is true that it can be very comfortable, because we tell the client that we’ll be back in 3 weeks to have the preparation meeting for the first sprint, and by then we have organized it all. I have also used those zero sprints in my first projects, but now I prefer to solve those issues also in an Agile manner.

I try to make every one of those tasks (installing the development server, installing the demo server, creating a project and tasks in Trac or Redmine, installing the Integrated Development Environment or IDE, etc.) part of the first sprint and, if possible, have a set deliverable at the end of each demo.

In that demo, we could show, for example, the project-management tool already installed in the final URL and the task list with the tasks ready to be assigned, or we could launch the IDE in that demo meeting, and check whether the environment has been created correctly and whether Jetty executes a “Hello World” application correctly.

Another important step is the initial architecture design. If we make a huge design with all the application architecture (known as a big up-front design) before we start programming, we will be returning to a waterfall design. Firstly, we analyse everything, three months later we do all the design work during a couple of months, and then we program everything in one go until we finish it six months later. If we finish all work and show it to the clients and they say: “that is not what we discussed a year ago…” then we have a problem.

It is better to design one of the modules of the application, or one of the new features, then draft the specifications, and finally send them to development. While part of the team implements them, analysts can gather requirements for another module or another feature, and go on doing so sprint after sprint.

There will be sprints in which we won’t have new stuff to analyse and others in which the development goes a bit faster than the specifications, but normally there is always some task ready to be carried out while Product Owners sign off the latest requirements, or until those requirements are completely defined.

If we work like that, new modules or features could be regularly deployed to production or preproduction, so users will be able to take advantage of them without waiting until the very last feature of the application has been designed.

You can find texts like this and many other about how to manage agile projects in my book Agile 101: Practical Project Management (available on Amazon).

Translation by Begoña Martínez. You can also find her on her LinkedIn profile. Proofreading by David Nesbitt.

Agile 101: Scrum for fixed-price projects

jueves, 14 julio 2016 19:00
antoniomartel
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One of the most common questions we ask when we’re wondering whether we should adopt a methodology like Scrum is how to face the fixed-price contracts that are so common in public procurement and many other sectors. One of the Agile principles says: “we welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.” This means that using Scrum we will be flexible with features we must develop, and we will admit new ones that were not in the original contract listing. This sounds very good but… the final price of the project is not going to change!


I work in the public-procurement department in a software-development company. That means that in at least 90% of the projects I work on I have a public institution as a client. Contracts are normally defined by a document with specific administrative specifications and another one with technical features. These contain all the services that are being hired, the characteristics of the product to be developed and the maximum price of the tender. They include even the technical features of the software and the profile of the projects’ participants. It is all very narrowly defined. It is the price that the public administration must pay to avoid arbitrariness.

If our company has been lucky enough to win the tender, then both of us, provider and client, have to face the harsh day-to-day reality of projects. Circumstances change. New legislation comes up that affects the project. Things that were deemed correct a few months ago are no longer valid, because needs have changed. What should we do? If we adapt the project to every change that the client needs, then we providers have to bear the brunt of additional cost. If we refuse to change anything for the client, always waving the contract and its specifications in their face, we risk delivering something that might be perfect for last year’s decree, but—for that very reason (or for any other reason)—is no longer of any use.

The way to avoid this, or at least the way that has worked best for me so far, arises from the way of working in Scrum projects. At the beginning of the project I make a list with the features to be developed, and give them a score that the client knows right from the beginning.

I normally give the example of a large jar full of ping-pong balls. Each ball is a feature that must be developed. The jar is full. If the Product Owner wants to include two new features, I ask that person to tell me which other features—or ping-pong balls of a similar size—should we take out of the jar. Normally this vision solves the predicament and the Product Owner does not resist giving up other features, now recognizing that they aren’t important. If it all gets recorded in the meeting’s minutes and, most important of all, if the Product Owner understands what is being given up and what will be gained instead, it is normally a comfortable solution for both sides.

You can find texts like this and many other about how to manage agile projects in my book Agile 101: Practical Project Management (available on Amazon).

Translation by Begoña Martínez. You can also find her on her LinkedIn profile. Proofreading by David Nesbitt.