Challenge Vs. Skill diagram from Wikipedia via Merlin’s footnotes.
I was going to write a post about Merlin’s post on Just Enough To Start but I’ll just let him do the talking. As usual he hits it right on the head. His talk at MaxFunCon (linked to in his post) was one of the things that got me off my ass and trying to make a regular schedule for posting to this blog again. I don’t know if he would want to be called inspirational but he is, in just the right way.
No is for wimps. No is for pussies. No is to live small and embittered, cherishing the opportunities you missed because they might have sent the wrong message.
There is a point in one’s life when one cares about selling out and not selling out. One worries whether or not wearing a certain shirt means that they are behind the curve or ahead of it, or that having certain music in one’s collection means that they are impressive, or unimpressive.
Email interview with Dave Eggers
I have no memory of how I found this interview, really just an email to the author Dave Eggers and his replies from 2000, but it stuck in my mind and has probably ended up being one of the most personally important things I’ve ever read online. It’s religious to me in the way that Frank Llyod Wright’s buildings are religious to me; they inspire me and awe me and make me want to be better to live up to their standard.
I was recently in San Francisco and finally made it to 826 Valencia, a free tutoring center fronted by a pirate supply store, and I knew it wouldn’t happen but I was really hoping Mr. Eggers might be there so I can thank him for this interview. I’ve read his work and bought every issue of The Believer for a few years, but this is what I would thank him for. The message of saying Yes to things, to not give a shit what people think or how this or that might affect your rep really resonated with me.
What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips’s new album is ravishing and I’ve listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210. What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it.
It’s long and some of the specific references are a little dated but the overall message, the way Eggers smacks down this pseudo-intellectual hipster prick whose asking him “what steps are you taking to keep shit real” with an honest and open soliloquy on saying yes to new things and no to fashion and what others will think, is something I re-read regularly and would memorize if I could. I really encourage you to read it as well, there’s something for everyone to take from it.
I try to live up to this, even though it’s hard for me. I’m incredibly shy and have a problem with new things sometimes but I try to remember “No is for pussies” and press on. When I feel like I’ve let myself down by giving in to my introverted nature I read the end of this interview and am renewed.
Originally published on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com – This started out as a comparison between Scrumworks and VersionOne and turned into a bit of a rant and slam on Scrumworks. I was pleased to hear from various users of Scrumworks that they’ve fixed some of the specific issues I mention.
This installment of My First Agile Project is going to be a little different than the previous ones (Table of Contents for the series available at the end of the post). Today I’m going to tackle the topic of tools. During the first year or so of our project we used ScrumWorks by Danube. It was brought to us by our vendor along with the Scrum methodology. After our license ran out we didn’t like ScrumWorks enough to get our own license or even go with the free version, which I’ll go into more detail about below.
For our last couple of sprints, we’ve been making due with a whiteboard and evaluating other tools. The one I like the best and we’ll probably be going with is VersionOne, which I’ll be talking about in more detail next week. Honestly VersionOne makes ScrumWorks look old-fashioned and barely functional. I had a list of things I didn’t like about ScrumWorks and one of the first things I noticed during my initial demo was that VersionOne didn’t do any of those things, obviously a big selling point. This week’s post is that list of pros and cons about ScrumWorks.
Choosing a tool can be very important in a lot of software development and choosing where to put your backlog and tasks is extra important to Scrum. Since the whiteboard/corkboard + stickies/index card approach is basically free, you want to choose a tool that gives you some extra benefit. Read on for my team’s pros and cons about ScrumWorks and hopefully it’ll provide some insight on this important decision.
What we liked about ScrumWorks
The first thing I should say is that we started using ScrumWorks over a year and a half ago and I only recall doing one update so my experience might be out-of-date. I didn’t bother looking at ScrumWorks again when looking for a new Scrum tool. Also, these are my and my team’s opinions only and I’m not affiliated with either Danube or VersionOne beyond using them.
1) Gave Us Structure
As I said, our vendor brought ScrumWorks with them along with the Scrum methodology when they came to work with us on our project. Since this was our first exposure to Scrum, bringing a tool they were familiar with was a good idea. If we hadn’t had the guidance on the process that ScrumWorks brought just by having a set workflow and screens that asked for the important information for backlog items and tasks, it would have been a lot more work getting going. If we’d had to figure out what needed to go on cards, which cards went where, how to make a burndown chart, etc., it would have taken a lot of time.
2) Did the Basics
We also liked being able to see our tasks and make changes online, run reports, make graphs, etc. Being essentially lazy, having a program automatically make the burndown chart alone is worth a lot to me.
An aside about Burndown charts
One unrelated note on these automatically generated burndown charts: make sure your upper management doesn’t fall too in love with them. We had problems early on with our management not understanding the process and using whether or not the line on the chart was going up or down as their only view into how the project was going. Managers love graphs and will (ab)use them if you let them. You learn things and change estimates and the line goes up. This is fine.
What we didn’t like about ScrumWorks
This is the bigger of the 2 lists, unfortunately. ScrumWorks gave us the basic functionality required for a backlog/task manager. How it did that is where the annoyances came from. Now, these things might not annoy you and I’m sure they made some of these choices on purpose but they didn’t suit our team. Tools are very individual and I think ScrumWorks is pretty popular so other people must love the heck out of it. That was not our experience.
3) Too Many Required Fields
The first annoyance we ran into was that ScrumWorks makes too many things required. To enter a backlog item you have to do your difficulty estimate, and enter a value for business benefit before you can save the item. This gets in the way of just entering things into the product backlog so you don’t forget about it later. Estimating difficulty should be the team’s job (or at least the team member responsible for the item), not the job of whoever enters the item. And being forced to enter a benefit in just so ScrumWorks can do its priority calculation (it gives you a ratio of difficulty to benefit) was extra annoying because we never used the calculation it gave. Since our project was to replace an existing system, everything we entered at first was functionality we had to replace so how were we to determine the benefit? We tried at first but it just wasted time in planning meetings. At the end we were just entering 5 for everything it required us to fill in just to get past the screen.
4) Too Much Required Workflow
In the same vein, you also have to estimate tasks as they’re created and you’re not allowed to assign a task to somebody before you put the item into a sprint. It’s one thing to suggest people follow the proper procedure, it’s another when your tool forces you to do things a different way than you want to for no reason. I can’t tell you how many times we were forced to stop our planning flow to do things the way ScrumWorks wanted us to.
5) Can’t Split Items Between Sprints
Another big irritation was the inability to split up items between Sprints. If you don’t finish a task during a sprint, you’re forced to move the whole backlog item to another sprint, losing the history of when you first did what. The first chunk of our planning meetings was spent going through unfinished items, checking if they were actually incomplete or if we just forgot to close them out, and moving the item to the current sprint. I was beyond pleased to find that VersionOne gives you an easy way to split things up between sprints.
6) Forces You To Use 2 Different Tools
ScrumWorks is actually 2 tools, a web-based taskboard and a regular desktop application for sprint and backlog maintenance. I can only guess that either they, unlike VersionOne, didn’t think the web could handle the maintenance interface or they added the taskboard web interface later. In either case, it’s jarring to have to go from the taskboard to a different URL to launch the desktop app for certain things. But the web interface is the one you use most of the time so that’s not a huge concern.
7) Can’t See Only Your Tasks
First is that you can’t just see your own tasks and items. All the items are shown in a long list and you just have to scroll or search for yours. They’re highlighted with a color but you can’t just show yours. This led to a lot of problems with people not knowing they had been assigned something or forgetting to update a task because they skipped over it. Just because you can’t sort or filter a whiteboard with index cards doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be able to filter a web list of tasks. That’s a head scratcher of a decision to me, it makes no sense.
8) Web Interface Became Unusably Slow
The more sprints we went through, the slower the web interface became. I won’t guess at how they designed the thing to say why that might happen but it was almost unusably slow after 9 or 10 sprints.
9) No Way To Find Each Team Members’ Hours
There’s no way to find how many hours of work you have assigned to you. It’s not in the web interface and if it’s in the desktop app we never found it. What we always had to do was export the sprint to Excel and use the Filter feature to show each person’s tasks, then add up the hours. Obviously not ideal.
Conclusion
I hope that gives you a feel for what we liked and didn’t like in ScrumWorks. It does what its supposed to, giving you control over items and tasks and whatnot, but the way it does those things ranges from no-frills to annoying to infuriating. It was never really a question on our team if we wanted to continue using it or not, we even considered just writing our own basic version. As I said, our experience is a year old now and they might have revolutionized the product for all I know. But for now, we’re all glad to be off ScrumWorks, even if it means being without a good tool for the time being.
I meant this entry to be a review of both ScrumWorks and VersionOne but in the interest of not putting any more of my readers to sleep than I already have, I split this up and will give each tool the space they deserve. If you’re dying for a VersionOne review before next week, I give it a big thumbs up and encourage you to talk to them about doing a demo. They let you use it for 30 days and I found that a big help. They also have a ton of videos and tutorials that give you a feel for using the tool. More on our experience next week! Thanks for reading.
If you have experiences with ScrumWorks you’d like to share, please do in the comments below.
My First Agile Project Series
Part 1: Doing 80%
Part 2: Inception & Planning
Part 3: Viral Videos and Bad Jokes in Scrum Demos
Part 4: How to lose credibility and jeopardize your project with lack of management buy-in
Part 5: Our Top 5 Agile Mistakes
Part 6: The First End of Our Project
Part 7: Adventures in Agile Testing
I started out trying to do this but got “too busy”. I’m done being too busy. I’ve written over 10,000 words for AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com and I’ve been neglecting my regular blogging for that and work and family. I’m done working extra hours at work for awhile so I’m going to redirect that energy to this blog again and hopefully Get Better. Thanks for the inspiration Merlin.
I've been following a very interesting series of posts (starting here) from Matt Grommes detailing his experiences managing his first agile project
This is cool. This guy found my articles on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com and writes about our experiences compared to his teams. This is kind of like being recognized on the street, awesome but strange. I like that people are getting something out of my articles though.
My second post about our team’s experience with agile has gone live on agilesoftwaredevelopment.com. I’m really proud to be able to post on that site, the other writers are posting great stuff all the time. I’m still getting used to having to write a good-sized article every week so we’ll see how it goes. The problem isn’t the writing so much as the editing, trying to get the posts to not be so rambly like just about everything I write on here.
Exciting if you’re me (and possibly if you know me) anyway. :) I’ve been invited to start writing some articles over at the Agile Software Development group blog / news site! I’m going to be doing weekly posts on our project at work; what we’ve learned, how we’re doing things, etc. I’ve never written for another site before so it’s a great opportunity to get my name out there and to start communicating with other people about Agile. It’s also going to be great to have a deadline and have to keep writing regularly. I’m really looking forward to it.
The other news is that the Idea Propulsion Lab hardware hacker club I founded is going to be featured in the Weekly Alibi paper here in Albuquerque. I think the issue with the club in it is going to be out tomorrow (8/26). A photographer was here yesterday taking pictures of me pretending to solder and of some of the stuff I’ve built. I’m one of the least photogenic humans around so hopefully it’ll turn out okay.
My friends were joking around that I was going to need a PR person to handle my media before too much longer. :)
Tags: Agile, alibi, Idea Propulsion Lab, WritingKurt Vonnegut, Counterculture’s Novelist, Dies NY Times
Dammit. I’m as sad about this as I guess I can be about somebody who I never met. Like a lot of his fans, Vonnegut’s work meant a lot to me. More than most writers, even ones whose work I also love. I did feel like I knew him at least a little bit, based on how much of him was in his work. I started reading his work because I’d heard he was a science fiction writer, during the period when I was young (probably no older than 12) when I read only science fiction. Of course his work ended up being much, much more than just sf, without the nose-in-the-air refutation of the genre you get from people like Margaret Atwood. He always said he was glad when his work was finally removed from the science fiction drawer since people tend to mistake that one for a toilet. Slaughterhouse 5 was his best book, but I always loved Breakfast of Champions. BoC was a fun book, as dark as it is in some parts. The part near the end when Vonnegut, in the book as a character, remembers that the other character is supposed to be a speed reader and quickly makes him have taken a speed reading course so he can speed read the book he’s holding just blew my writer’s mind when I was younger. The sheer audacity of that impressed the hell out of me.
One of the things that makes me even more sad about his death is that he had to die during the Bush administration. Those people made him so angry and just confirmed his worst feelings about the darkness of humanity that I’m sad he never got to see their consignment to the scrapheap of history. I hope he did see things turning around though, as I think they are.
Luckily for us, we still have his heart, spread around through the characters and books he created. Even still, I’ll miss having him around.
So it goes.
EDIT: Jessica at Indexed (one of my favorite new sites) has such a great memorial to Kurt Vonnegut I have to share it. She nailed him completely.
How to write about Africa In Granta by Binyavanga Wainaina
I finished reading The Wizard Of The Crow a few weeks ago and can only now really appreciate this essay I think. Everything we in American seem to hear about Africa and Africans comes directly from what he says here. I was really blown away by the portrayal of everyday Africans in that book since I never see that. If you have any interest in Africa, I encourage you to read books by native African authors, you get a completely different sense of the place, as a setting instead of as a character itself like most non-natives seem to want to write.
‘What does Marcellus Wallace look like?’
This is a completely awesome video of a speech from the movie Pulp Fiction. They’ve made the words just as riveting as the scene in the actual movie. This is both a testament to the power of video and to the just plain coolness of the Quentin Tarrantino’s script for the movie (and actor Samuel Jackson’s forceful speaking style as Jules, the hitman who gives this speech).
It’s 100% Not Safe For Work but do yourself a favor and watch it anyway, when you won’t get fired. :)
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