Impact!

October 2012

Monthly newsletter prepared by Gojko Adzic and colleagues from Neuri Consulting

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Hello and welcome to the second edition of the Impact newsletter. In the October edition, you’ll find:

My new book, Impact Mapping: Making a big impact with software products and projects is now available. This handbook is a practical guide to impact mapping, a simple yet incredibly effective method for collaborative strategic planning that helps organisations make an impact with software. Impact mapping helps to create better plans and roadmaps that ensure alignment of business and delivery, and are easily adaptable to change. It fits nicely into several current trends in software product management and release planning, including goal-oriented requirements engineering, frequent iterative delivery, agile and lean software methods, lean startup product development cycles, and design thinking. Click here for more information


Specification by Example won the Jolt Award for the best book of 2012. Jolt is, as far as I'm concerned, the most important book award in our field and I'm both surprised and amazed that my book did so well. Thanks again to everyone who helped promote the book and the ideas of Specification by Example over the last few years!

If you were influenced by Specification by Example, please consider writing a few words about it and nominating me for the Agile Testing Days award. By voting, you also get a chance to win a free ticket for the conference.

Community discount offers

To celebrate the Jolt Award, the publisher of Spec by Example is offering a 37% discount on both print and e-book versions of Specification by Example. Use promo code 12sbe37 to get the discount on the Manning web site.

If you're interested in more advanced specification by example topics, or want to try things out in practice, come to a public Spec by Example workshop with me in London in early December - book before November 1st and use promo code impact to save 200 GBP. The workshop is a two-day hands on exploration of the most important topics, and participants learn how to facilitate specification workshops, how to define good specs with examples, how to start changing the process in their company, and as an added bonus, I'll teach you how to do impact mapping as well. Click here for more information and to sign up.

Yves Hanoulle and friends have finished work on the Volume 1 of their Who is Agile? series. Through short interviews, they give readers the inside story on many people who've influenced and shaped the agile development community over the last 10 years. And they're offering the book at 1/3 of the price. Use the promo code GojkoAdzic when buying the book from LeanPub to use this offer.

Agile Testing Days in Potsdam, Germany, is one of my favourite insiders' conference in the agile community, focused on testing. I'm one of the keynote speakers this year, along with Lisa Crispin, Janet Gregory, Scott Ambler, Lasse Koskela, Jurgen Appelo, Markus Gärtner, and a great line-up of speakers. Conference evening events are famous, last year Lisa Crispin was in full knight dress on a horse. The conference runs from 19 to 22 November, and you can attend with 15% off by using the promo code GojkoA015 when booking on agiletestingdays.com.

Agile Testing, Specifications and BDD Exchange in London is running again on November 23rd. I’m doing a talk on Making impacts, not software. Other confirmed speakers are Paul Gerrard, David Evans, Chris Matts, Andrew Burfoot, Walter Badillo and Cirilo Wortel. Use promo code LDN-BDDX-DISCOUNT to get a 20% discount. For more information and to sign up, see the event page.

The seventh edition of JDD, a Java developer conference, will happen on 25-26 of October at the Hotel Galaxy in Krakow, Poland. I won't speak this year but you can listen to Adam Bien, Martin Gunnarsson, Jessica Kerr, Pär Siko, Thomas Sundberg, Michael Hüttermann, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock and Joseph W. Yoder and many more. You can save 10% on registration costs by using the discount code 2012-gojko at www.jdd.org.pl.

Important dates

We're running specification by example workshops all over Europe this autumn. The workshops are a perfect chance to try out specification by example in practice, investigate more advanced topics and learn how to adopt it effectively. As an added bonus, you'll get a chance to practice Impact Mapping as well.

Let's meet - I'm speaking at these conferences in the near future:

Here are some things that you should definitely read and watch...

Pre-emptive commit comments

Arialdo Martini presents an ingenious idea of focusing development by writing a commit comment before starting to work on a piece of functionality, to achieve a similar effect to BDD-style scenarios. He shows how this practice creates micro-goals for development, reduces cognitive load for tasks, focuses development work and balances out the granularity of commited changes.

How to scale Scrum

In a video from a recent session at the BCS, Craig Larman talks about the key aspects of scaling Scrum, tying it with organisational design, component and feature teams, presenting ideas on how to organise planning and sprint reviews for multi-team Scrum. Towards the end of the talk, Larman presents several techniques for splitting requirements.

How to shorten daily scrum standups

Mike Cohn writes about a brilliant idea on how to prevent people from taking over daily scrum standups and rambling forever.

Against scrum-masters

The whole idea of scrum masters, not least because of the certification program, has long been a pet peeve of mine. Tobias Mayer argues that the role should be dropped, arguing that three out of four typical roles of scrum masters tend to be counter-productive to the team and organizational health.

Feature injection, fidelity and story mapping

Karl Scotland combines Feature Injection, User Story Mapping and his approach to slicing stories based on fidelity, or perspective. He shows how this approach can be used to plan for a walking skeleton and then enhance features. Slicing stories and backlog planning seems to be always of interest to the community, and I'm sure this post will tickle your imagination as well.

Effect mapping at Nordstrom

Olaf Lewitz presents an experience report from the Nordstrom Innovation Lab on the combination of EffectImpact Mapping and Feature Injection. Probably the most interesting thing for me was their use of post-its to create a flexible map instead of a whiteboard. Lewitz shows how impact mapping questions map to Feature Injection hierarchy levels and how Real Options fit into the technique.

Here are some books that I liked recently

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford is an inspiring and amusing argument for experimentation as a key strategic technique for the modern age. The book is full of amazing accounts of big plans that turned into epic disasters, from 19th century imperial Russian failures to organise mining to US military attempts to control Iraqi insurgencies and the recent meltdown of the banking sector. Harford compares those failures with successes such as the Spitfire airplane and Google's internet domination, suggesting the solution in the form of a checklist:

Harford calls this checklist the Palchinsky method, after an early 20th century Russian engineer Peter Palchinsky, who recognised that "real-world problems are more complex than we think", because of they have a human dimension and a local dimension, and are likely to change as circumstances change. I'm sure this will sound familiar to anyone who has ever been involved in a real-world software project. As the key aspects of this solution, Harford calls for adaptive planning and opening up lines of communication from the field to the planning office.

Harford focuses on innovation but also covers topics as diverse as the nature of mistakes, what causes latent errors that are not noticed until the very instant we can least afford them, strategic planning, effectiveness of expertise in today's fast-moving environment and isolating 'skunk-works' groups in large organisations.

This book deserves to be read by all business project and product sponsors, as well as anyone serious about delivering effective products and projects. If your boss needs convincing that lean startup ideas are good, and an explanation why It fits in nicely with the Lean Startup ideas, and explains why delivery plans should be more about options that could be explored instead of scope that is nailed down by committment. Authors strong views on climate change come through in the middle of the book where he argues about possible solutions, which I felt broke the reading flow and felt out of place in the book. However, the rest will surely be an interesting read for most people following my work. You'll be inspired by a ton of stories and great quotes. Here are some of my favourite ones:

Return on investment is simply not a useful way of thinking about new ideas and new technologies
Ideal way to discover paths through a shifting landscape ... is to combine baby steps and speculative leaps
For an organisation that needs to quickly correct its own mistakes, the org chart can be the worst possible road map

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure
Verdict:         
Author: Tim Harford
Publisher: Little Brown, Abacus
ISBN: 9780349121512
Pick it up from Amazon.com or Amazon UK.

Ellen Gottesdiener's earlier work on collaborative requirements workshops was a great inspiration for me while developing Specification workshops, so I was quite keen on getting hands on her new book. I'm happy to report that Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis, by Gottesdiener and Mary Gorman, is likely to be as useful and influential as their previous work. Discover to Deliver is their take on many modern trends in software product management and planning. The key idea in the book is that there is a tight coupling between learning about what is needed and delivering software, each activity informing the other. This is similar to what Dan North talks about in deliberate discovery or the ideas of delivering to earn or learn which I present in Impact Mapping. In particular, a big plus for this book is the insistence on delivery scope as a set of hypotheses that have to be proven through delivery, and for demonstrating how examples can be used to clarify ambiguities and discover better requirements.

Gottesdiener and Gorman's approach to discovery a structured conversation involving three different time-line views (now, pre-view and big-picture), three value consideration perspectives (customer, technology, business) and seven product dimensions (user, interface, action, data, control, environment and quality). Through different combinations of those aspects, they present how product partners (delivery and business) can collaborate on creating a product vision, delivery roadmaps and implementation requirements. The ideas of product partnerships and structured conversations will be familiar to anyone following design thinking, in particular the co-development and divergent and convergent thinking ideas. The authors add another dimension - confirmation - to divergent/convergent thinking, which nicely completes the whole picture. Answering the key questions to describe the product from those many dimensions is intended to provide a holistic, comprehensive understanding of different customer and stakeholder needs. If this sounds too complex, don't worry. The book provides several checklists and a nice visual template similar to the one in Business Model Generation, which will come in very handy to facilitate discussions. A table of "Focus Questions" is another important checklist that many readers will want to keep close at all times.

The first section of the book presents an imaginary case study through prose and dialogue, in which the authors demonstrate three important conversation types and show artefacts that are produced during those sessions. Lots of nice examples of personas, stories and role maps will be particularly useful to people who are aware of the key agile analysis and delivery practices but have not used them yet, or not used them correctly. I would have preferred to read a real story, instead of an imaginary one, but the examples are developed enough to make the concepts more concrete.

The second, third and fourth section go into details of the most important concepts from the authors' process, including the three aspects of product partnership, seven key product dimensions and the elements of the structured conversation. With plenty of examples and checklists to spark discussion, these parts of the book present the process of discovery at a relatively high level, with references to additional tools to explore.

The fourth part of the book is a relatively short introduction into how the overall discovery process fits into Scrum, Kanban, potentially Waterfall and how it can be adjusted for different types of products, including commercial software and regulated environments.

The fifth part is a quick high level overview of additional tools and techniques that fit into the discovery process, from user stories over use cases to value stream maps and given-when-then acceptance criteria. Each tool is presented with an example related to the imaginary company from the case study, and a high-level explanation of how it would fit into the overall process and when it would be useful.

The book is reasonably short, only around 300 pages. Apart from the dialogue in the first part that, given my attention span, I had to force myself to read carefully, I found the book easy to read. I was able to gone through the entire work on a not particularly long flight. It's obvious that there was a lot of love put into the visual design of the book, with lots of useful illustrations. A journey map, similar to public bus route maps, at the top of every page helps with navigation but is also a great tool for setting the expectations.

This book will be most useful to people who already practice agile delivery and want to improve their product planning or analysis techniques. The case study dives in straight into the gist of the matter, so it might be hard to follow for those completely new to the topic. The last two sections of the book, related to process adjustment and additional tools, are at a very high level, with enough information to put things into perspective and inspire further research, but not enough information to fully adopt or use any of the techniques. I think that the trade-off is good, as there are plenty other books on basic aspects of agile product management, and we needs more of advanced level material on these topics. Discover to Deliver will be an invaluable reference for anyone with a product owner or analyst role in agile and lean projects in the near future. You'll want to keep this book close as a reference and use it to pull out questions to facilitate conversations with your product partners.

Discover to Deliver
Verdict:         
Authors: Ellen Gottesdiener and Mary Gorman
Publisher: EBG Consulting, 2012
ISBN: 9780985787905
Pick it up from DiscoverToDeliver.com.

That’s it for now. Until next time...
Gojko Adzic http://gojko.net @gojkoadzic