Sublinear: all you need in a burndown tool, no more.

Burndown charts: managers love them, many smart Agile gurus hate them. Ron Jefferies has disowned even the concept of story points. A recent video from Bob Hartman and Peter Saddington labels burndown charts as more BS than Agile.

Part of me agrees with the haters. Tools like Jira, Zenhub, and Linear leave me cold. They are complex and include features that encourage bad practices, including letting you assign

• stories to future iterations, when we know that such predictions are fictions
• priority labels to stories, when we know that leads to all stories being top priority
• team members to stories, when we know that leads to bottlenecks, and you should pull stories from the top

But on the other hand, burndown charts have been critical in my agile development courses at Northwestern. They are how clients learn to be realistic about what will get done, put high value stories first, and seriously de-scope early in a project. 

Here's my alternative. My vision of what a project tracking tool should look like, in a Google Sheet.

Here's the sample sheet. Feel free to copy and play with it.

To me, the most important aspect of this tool is that it puts the stories front and center. Not graphs, not velocity. The focus is on what stories might get done, and what stories probably won't get done. As always, less is more.

But if you also want a chart, here's a version that does that too.

Agile is Hopeless

(click to enlarge)

Supersonic / Steroids / Appgyver heads up

I've been using Supersonic, also known as Steroids and Appgyver, in my agile software development class. It's almost perfect for my purposes:

• It installs relatively easily on both MacOS and Windows. Good Windows support is rare.
• Students work in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, specifically Angular, which I prefer over Objective-C, Swift, or Java.
• The Supersonic QR-code deployment tool makes deployment and redeployment for testing about as fast and easy as updating a web page.
• One codebase can run on Android and iOS.

But there's a couple of flies in the ointment to be aware of.

First, at Northwestern, students can get a free educational iOS developer license. It lasts for an academic year. It puts them in a Northwestern team. The intent is that students develop apps using a single wildcard provisioning profile. This works great except with Supersonic. Their cloud building tool does not support team wildcard provisioning.

That means that we need to create specific app profiles for every student app that needs an ad hoc debug deploy. As you can imagine, that set can become a bit unwieldy, and needs to be groomed periodically.

Second, test automation has been a challenge. I had hoped to use Appium to communicate with the apps via the Selenium Web Driver API. A few students got something to work using Java to drive the tests, but so far no luck using tests written in JavaScript. The pieces are there but things just don't connect.

The 4-Panel Storyboard Revised and Applied

I'm pushing clients really hard on using the 4-panel storyboard for initial project envisioning in my agile software development class this quarter. I'm having them use named persona and explicit pain points. I.e., instead of this

I want

I believe the 4-panel storyboard

• forces clients to get real in panel 3 about what their value proposition actually looks like
• properly discourages clients from developing the usual slew of data-entry wire-frames
• provides the clients with an early user-testable object — "Has this happened to you?" "Does this look like something you could and would use?"
• provides developers with a one-page, easy to read, contextualization of problem, target user, and intended benefit
• defines the first clear deliverable,  i.e., a working version of panel 3

So far, coaching clients on developing the storyboards has been much easier than my previous attempts to coach clients on developing an MVP via a product box. (I still encourage product boxes, and some other elements of the Inception Deck.) Over ten quite different projects and clients, convergence has come pretty quickly:

• They send me an initial draft, close but too busy
• I send a revision cobbled together from pieces of their draft
• They send a pretty decent final revision

This has been true for clients with and without software project experience.

I'll be watching now to see whether the storyboards appear to be improving initial client-developer communication, and if so, do they also improve the value of the initial deliverables.

The 4-Panel Storyboard

In preparing materials on storyboarding for this year's NUvention Web+Media course, Daniel Eiden, one of the TA's, included the following from Ryan Daugherty's blog.

I LOVE THIS STORYBOARD.

Simple? ✔ Visual? ✔ Personas clear? ✔ Problem clear? ✔ Payoff clear? ✔ Solution explicit, focal and distinct from payoff? ✔

Pretty impressive and lightweight. Panel 3 is what I meant by the Scene. What the user sees. No "a miracle occurs" allowed.

Could even be reduced to 3 panels if personas and problem can be conveyed in Panel 1.

I'm planning on making all my teams do these early and often.

[Update: in doing so, I have made one small tweak.]

The Scene

Obviously, from posts like this and this, I'm a great proponent of scenarios, as in persona, problem, and payoff. I probably point people to Goodwin's Storytelling by Design more often than any other slideset, even if her title gets it backwards.

But scenarios are hard to get right. It takes many iterations before students get the hang of them. Yesterday I reviewed the following example from a student team in Northwestern's NUvention Web course:

Ann, an 80 year old grandmother, wants to live independently. However, her family are worried about her safety and don't feel comfortable with her living on her own. Ann is able to share her vital signs with her family. They are all recorded and kept for her automatically in her Vital Patch web page. There is also a fall monitoring detection, which automatically sends an alert to her family and/or 911 when a fall is detected.

What's wrong? There's a persona here, a problem, a payoff.

Or is there? What's the payoff? Ann can post data? The family can see that data? So what? This is just potential payoff. There's something missing here. In my critique, I suggested finishing the scenario with this:

Ann's daughter Susan, who lives 300 miles away, sees that her mom’s blood pressure has been increasing over the past 3 months. Susan calls her mom and works out a plan to have a friend near Ann drive her to a doctor's visit.

Now there's a real payoff. Something good just happened.

Then I realized that what I had now was The Scene. The Scene is a visualization of an event that motivates the creation of your product. Novelists and  movie directors often talk about how some work of theirs began with just one powerful one image. They often weren't sure what it meant but they needed to find the story to make the scene happen.

The Scene needs no prologue with persona and problem. I see Susan at home, at her terminal, studying the screen. She frowns. She picks up the phone and dials a number. "Mom? Hi, um, I was just looking at your VitalPatch, and I noticed ...."A conversation starts that may prove crucial to her mom's health. As I think about what would make The Scene work dramatically, I get a clearer picture of who Susan and Ann are, what she sees on that web site, and other core scenario components.

Find The Scene. It's the real starting point of your journey to a Minimum Viable Product. In the words of Winston Churchill, The Scene is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning.

An AI Manifesto

While researcher and journalists have certainly written much nonsense about AI, none of it competes in my mind with the recent silliness from Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk.

To that end, I offer an Artificial Intelligence Manifesto, modeled of course on the Agile Manifesto.

We are developing computational models of cognition. Through this work we have come to value intelligence that

• bases its decisions on benefits and costs, rather than politics and religious dogma
• exposes the depths of its uncertainties, rather than saving face and scoring points over opponents
• continually learns from failure, rather cherry-picking the facts that fit its opinion
• takes its goals from the needs of modern society, rather than the distant needs of biological survival and domination

Why competency-based learning is not enough

Critique-based learning and my virtual talk on education in 2025 say much that is also said by proponents of competency-based learning, including the emphasis on proficiency over seat-time, multiple pathways through a curriculum, formative over summative assessments, and teachers as mentors not graders.  When Success Is the Only Option by Sturgis and Patrick as an excellent overview of the ideas of CBL.

So is all I'm saying really CBL? Is CBL sufficient to define what education needs to be? Let's look at two large examples of CBL: the Florida Virtual School curriculum and the 2014 Western Governors University course catalog (course listings start on page 40).  What you see there looks identical to the courses you see offered in any traditional curriculum: Chemistry I, College Geometry, US Government and Constitution, etc. Compare those courses with the role and story driven offerings suggested by slide 21 of my virtual talk or actually offered at XTOL.

CBL is built on the same broken discipline-defined foundations-first content structure of traditional curriculum. Competency rather than seat-time is the right idea -- but competent in what matters just as much.

Education: So much to critique, so little time

I don't mind giving talks but I suck at sending things to conferences.

So I created a standalone virtual talk on what's wrong with education -- it's a long list --  and what it could be like instead. You can see it at Roger Schank's Engines for Education site.

Scrum Grumps

In my software development course at Northwestern, I emphasize early delivery of value and team development. I start with the second and move to the first over the 10 weeks of the course. I constantly refer students to those whose ideas have fed into my understanding of lean agile, including DeMarco and Lister, Brooks, Weinberg, Beck, Cunningham, Jeffries, Cohn, Rothman, Rasmusson, Ries and many more.

The one big thing I don't do is claim to teach Scrum. I teach most of the parts, such as user stories, backlogs, velocity, and daily standups (not "scrums"), but there are a couple of terms I avoid and actively un-teach when students come across them.

Sprint

Sprint says run like crazy, but not for very long. I know that's not what "Scrum Sprint" means but that's what "sprint" means. Words matter. I want my students to see development as steady loping, not repeated mad dashes. There's just one sprint in my course: a hackathon at project start to get the very first testable slice to the client. This first mad dash has benefits for the product, developers, and client-developer relationship. The one bad side is technical debt but the code base is still small and you have plenty of time to pay off technical debt. I use iteration.

The length of sprints, from two to four weeks, is also problematic. For anyone new to agile, I prefer one week. Move to two weeks when things are humming along -- or move to continuous delivery and drop iterations all together.

Scrum Master

[Edited January 30, 2017]: Master? Words matter. Master sets up a power relationship with developers I am not at all comfortable with. Even worse,  here is how Scrum Master is defined in the Scrum Guide:

The Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring Scrum is understood and enacted. Scrum Masters do this by ensuring that the Scrum Team adheres to Scrum theory, practices, and rules.

No wiggle room here. A Scrum Master is an enforcer. The Scrum Master tells you when you are and are not doing Scrum properly. This is about as far removed from a role I would want someone to play as can be.

What do I teach is the needed? Agile coaches.  The role of an agile coach is to help you identify ways in which team and business needs could be better served. An agile coach is good at

• detecting when things are going off the rails before the team does
• identifying counter-productive processes and attitudes
• suggesting simple and effective things to try to improve the development of both the product and the team
• making these ideas real with stories from personal experience and case studies

Increment

My minor grump is the definition. The Scrum Guide defines an increment as "the sum of all the Product Backlog items completed during a Sprint and the value of the increments of all previous Sprints." This is an odd use of increment. In normal English, an increment is an increase or addition, not the accumulated total.

But my real grump is with the commentary under the definition of Done: "Each Increment is additive to all prior Increments." I am not the first to note that an additive view of implementation fits very poorly with the realities of product development. I use version with no commitment to steady growth. Build-measure-learn.

Courage in Profiles

(For those under 100, the source of this title.)

At least half of the student teams I coach in agile software product development have creating a user profile interface as their first or second user story. They're so used to seeing them in Facebook and elsewhere, that they assume they must have them.

Profiles are friction, pure and simple. There is no user payoff in creating a profile. How silly would an app be if all you could do with it was create a profile? Well-known sites can get away with profiles because users already know they want the services those sites provide and are willing to put up with some friction. Your fledgling app is unknown and probably not all that good yet. Users have no incentive to put up with any friction with your app.

Nor is there any value gained in early testing of a profile creating interface. No risk is reduced, because such pages are not hard to build, and no business value proposition is validated.

"Maybe so," the teams reply, "but our app has to have user profiles."

I've yet to see that actually be the case with any team.

The first argument for user profiles is usually "we need to know who the user is so that we can attach data to them." For example, if someone joins a scavenger hunt game, we have to know who they are so we can keep track of what items they have found.

This argument confuses identity with a user profile. To give someone an identity, all you need to do is give them a unique URL that they can bookmark and/or save on their home screen. Writeboard (recently retired) from Basecamp worked this way. When doing early product development, it's a way to get test users started with no friction or commitment on their part, and total control over the identity on your part.

The second argument for user profiles is so that users can specify preferences, e.g., what name they want to appear under, how and how often they want to be sent messages from the app, and so on.

This argument assumes that the only way to collect preferences is to interrupt the user's experience. How many apps have you used, from Google, Facebook, and elsewhere, where you wanted to change one thing, e.g., whether to get email reminders, and you had to go a preferences page with dozens of options to search through? Now consider the alternative: you get a reminder you don't want. It includes a link that says "don't send reminders in the future." One click. Done. Or your favorite restaurant searcher shows the places too far away, so you click adjust the radius of search and say yes when it asks if you want this radius to become the new default. Two clicks. Done.

Not only do these alternatives have way less friction, the friction is connected to immediate payoff, not some potential future benefit.

So does this mean you should never implement a user profile and preferences page? Not at all. Such pages are a great way for users to review and adjust their current settings. But such pages are just nice to have's. They aren't and should never be critical to your app or your early development process.

Have courage! Put user profiles where they belong, on the backburner, off the main line of development.

My Rubric Rant

I'm a calm guy, really. Normal blood pressure, definitely not Type A.

Unless someone gets me started on rubrics for courses. In that case, get a fresh drink, reserve at least an hour, and don't expect to get a word in edgewise.

To save my voice and your time, here's my rant on rubrics in easy to digest PDF form.

EBD: the right way to sell Agile

For quite some time, I've been summarizing agile development as "early and frequent delivery of value." But it has struck me that skeptics have a good reason to be unswayed by such a claim. Of course "early and frequent delivery of value" would be nice. Ditto "easy," "seamless," "fun to use," and all those other claims every product and methodology has promised since the beginning of marketing. It's quite right to treat such promises as so much hot air. What matters is what you deliver.

So instead, let's ask a few easy questions.

What's better for making decision, more evidence or less? 

Can I assume we all agree here? Next question.

What kinds of evidence are better:

• user surveys or user observations
• historical data or last week's results
• expert opinion or actual measurements

Still with me?

Which kinds of evidence can you get from:

• requirements
• high-level design
• implementation
• testing
• deployment

Final question.

How does the above flow of evidence compare to the evidence gained from weekly user tests on working code?

And this is how you explain agile to skeptics: It's EBD -- Evidence-Based Development.

The Easter Egg Hunt: An Lean Startup Coaching Story (Really)

"Hey, Bobby! Guess what? The Easter Bunny left a whole bunch of Easter eggs outside! Wanna go find them? Follow me!

"Here's your basket. Start hunting!

"Whoops! Not in the house, Bobby. You gotta get out of the building.

"WHOA! Not in the street! Back up! Here, little guy, let me point you. That's right, look in the yard.

"Honey, don't give up already. You're not finding anything, because you're just standing there, looking around. The Easter Bunny hid those eggs. You gotta move around. You gotta look behind things. You gotta pick things up.

"That's better.

"Yay! You got one!

"Whoa! Where are you going, skipper? You're not done yet. There's a lot more out there. Don't stop with just one egg. Keep looking, guy.

"Yay! Another egg! And another! You're doing great now, Bobby. Keep going!

"Um, Bobby? Bobby? Your basket is getting awful full!  Watch what you're doing. Some of the eggs you found are falling out of your basket.

"What, you gotta go to the bathroom? Oh, OK, come on in, then. But be careful! Whoa! Slow down! Don't run or you're going to tr...

"Oooooh, Bobby..."

The Scenario Canvas

After several years of trying, I surrender. I will never get my students to put goals into their user stories ("As a ... I can ... in order to ...").

So, following up on my earlier post about scenario backlogs, and triggered by Roman Pichler's Product Canvas, I'm now experimenting with having my teams plan and report progress to me with Scenario Canvases. A Scenario Canvas is nothing more than a short context scenario plus the exact set of user stories need to support that scenario. No more, no less.



Note that there are no goals in the user stories. The goals, constraints, affordances, and so on, come from the scenario. The scenario establishes a need in a situation. The user stories satisfy that need.

To develop, pick the scenario that is most critical for your business case, e.g., for testing or demoing. You identify the user stories and write them down. Then start with the user story that is the payoff point in the scenario, the point where the user need is met. Typically this is one of the later stories. Hardwire or fake the other stories if necessary. You need to see if the idea really does pay off, or if it needs more. As you go, mark the stories that are done. Some may be already done from a previous scenario.

I expect I will still have plenty to critique in what they send me, e.g.,

• Scenario bits clearly added just to demo a feature. "Sally wondered how many things she had loaned out, so she opened MyStuff and clicked Loaned count."
• User stories that align poorly with the scenario need. "Fred was  hungry and stuck downtown. Where could he get something vegan? He open FeedMe, started clicking nearby restaurants and opening their menus."

[Edit: Related is Goodwin's Designing by Scenarios (e.g., slide 55), but I'm not trying to create a design tool. I'm looking for a more focused tool than backlogs  for client/developer communication.]

The Number One Myth about Teams

Some of the simplest ideas are the hardest to teach because of interference from an equally simple wrong idea. The number one misconception about teams that afflicts managers and team members alike is this:

The purpose of teams is to split up the work.

Follow this and you get silos, low value bus factors, miscommunications, bottlenecks, etc.

Here's the alternative.

The purpose of teams is to gang up on the work.

Follow this and you get pairing, swarming, bonding, low work-in-progress, continuous improvement, etc.

Riesbeck's Rules for Flinching

Agile thinking is fine, but agile feeling is even better. If you want to do things right, it helps to react negatively and viscerally to doing them wrong. These days, I can't help flinching as soon as I hear someone say that they

• are working on anything the client / end user can't use
• are waiting for someone else to do something
• are making something complete
• are too busy to write tests
• haven't shown the client anything new this week

Wait a minute! Writing tests is writing something end users can't use. You're being inconsistent!

Only if you think the goal is to never flinch. Software development is a tightrope walk over Niagara Falls.   You have to expect to flinch a lot. The goal is to flinch less often and less hard.

Or, alternatively, turn these rules into a drinking game. Take a drink every time you hear one of the above things. The worse things get, the less you'll care.

Me and my liver will stick with flinching.

The One-Button App

Since my friend and colleague Todd Warren has made a brief reference to it, I figured I should try to explain one-button apps, and why I push [sic] them.

With a one-button app, you achieve your primary goal with just one button push. No click click click check select check click submit. Just "do it." Todd's favorite personal example is the Flashlight app for the iPhone.  Press a button and the light comes on. It's one of the few apps he liked enough to buy the premium version.

Twitter is a one-button app. Type and send.

Angry Birds is a one-button app. Stretch and let fly.

There's a reason Amazon patented and fights to protect 1-click buying.

If your product isn't a one-button app, how can you expect anyone to really get it in a 5 minute pitch? If your first testable release isn't a one-button app, how can you tell what your users really feel about your core value proposition, and not other issues?

Most initial student ideas I see for smartphone apps fail to find the one-button essence of their idea. Students design apps that are too general. General is often the enemy of simple.

Take the example of reserving courts (basketball, tennis, squash, etc) on a college campus. The general solution is a classic calendar-based event scheduler, where first you have to select the type of court, to get the calendar of reserved times, then do the usual time selection rigamarole -- and you haven't even contacted the people you want to play with yet.

To get a one-button app, first pick a common use case, like arranging pickup games. Those are always the same people on the same court type. When you start the app, all you see are buttons for today's free times for that type of court. Press one of those buttons reserves the court and notifies the people you play with. They get a "can you play at ..." message with buttons to say "OK" or "Can't make it." If too few OK's are registered within the next hour, you get a message and buttons to "Cancel" or "Keep."

That's it. Just one button push to do what you normally want to do. Only on the first use, do you have to pick a court type, and, when you pick a free time, say who to notify. These choices are remembered for future use. They're easily changed, along with many other options, via a preferences panel.

But the core value of the app is in that one button push.

Scenario Backlogs

Here's a problem I've seen a lot in my conjoined MPD 405 / EECS 394 software development course: poorly motivated iteration backlogs.

  Me: Why did you tell your team to build that this week?
  Them: It was the highest priority item.
  Me: Why?
  Them: It's a must-have for our MVP.

That's really no way to run a railroad. It definitely isn't planning like there's no tomorrow, because you could easily end up with 3 top priority items for 3 different user types, and nothing to deliver for anyone. Importance by itself isn't enough to determine coherence.

What I teach now is to create scenario backlogs. A scenario backlog is the set of user stories needed to support a complete user scenario. Until you have complete scenarios working, you have no demo, and not much you can use to get validated learning. An example I used in my fall class on mobile app development was an "exercise buddy" that would let a user create sets of exercise routines. The user could then "run" a workout, and the app would call out the steps for the user to do. There are a number of user scenarios needed for the MVP:

• End user starts the app and selects a workout. App calls out the steps for each subroutine in a workout set, switching automatically, and logging the workout in a diary at the end.
• End user reviews and modifies the workout, including getting new routines from the server.
• Trainers partnered with the app developers create routines on the server for end users to download.

(Don't push me on this. The only exercise I do is hyperventilating if you count that as aerobics.)

If you look at must-haves, there are plenty, from the calling out of workout steps to the server-side entry of  expert-designed routines. If you just pick must-haves for an iteration, you don't get much guidance.

Instead, prioritize scenarios. Which scenario will determine whether this is a viable product? I think the answer is clearly the first scenario. If no one wants to use their phone to direct their workout, don't even bother with the rest.

Make a scenario backlog consisting of all the stories needed to make the first scenario work for real. We don't need to support editing workouts, or entering routines on the server. We make a canned workout routine and get all the text to speech and timing and so on working.

Work on just those stories, over one or more iterations, simplifying when possible. When done, you can start doing some real user testing and find out what else people want, like maybe responding to "pause" or "repeat" verbal commands, or music.

While validated learning is happening, work on the next most important scenario.

The nice thing about a scenario backlog is that a scenario provides coherent comprehensible contexts for writing acceptance tests and for deciding what the simplest thing is that could possibly work.

Plan like there's no tomorrow

A mistake I see a lot when I'm coaching client/managers on developing release and iteration plans is delaying some of the most valuable stories until the 2nd or 3rd iteration. This is in a course project with only 4 iterations to begin with!

I think it arises from being used to creating schedules to fill the time allotted to the project. You know you can't do everything at once, so you take the pile of valuable stuff and spread it out. With enough repetition of the MVP mantra, they get the idea that they need to think small and high value, but that just reduces the size of the pile, not the urge to spread things out.

So I tell them "plan like there's no tomorrow."  Assume the project has been cancelled. This is your last iteration. What do you put in it to get the most value you can in this final turn? If you really take seriously the idea that this is all you get to do, you start creating an iteration plan that takes thin slices of value from those later iterations. Pack in all the goodies that your developers are willing to commit to, just not as complete and fancy as you'd hoped those goodies would be.

The danger of planning for the future is trusting that the future will still be there. So plan like there isn't a future.