Hi guys, in this post I wrote how can we use Value Stream Mapping as a tool to help with system thinking. Many people asked me if I could explain better what Value Stream Mapping is. Therefore, in this blog, I will give a short introduction about it and I will explain how you can use it as a gathering data for your retrospective.

Although value stream mapping is often associated with manufacturing, it is also used in logistics and supply chain, service related industries, healthcare, software development, product development, and administrative and office processes. Value stream mapping is a lean manufacturing technique used to analyze and design the flow of materials and information required to bring a product or service to a consumer. At Toyota, where the technique originated, it is known as “material and information flow mapping”. It can be applied to nearly any value chain. But how can you use this in your team?

The easiest way to do this is to grab some flip-chart papers and tape them on the wall, then divide the space in equal intervals, each interval represents a day of the iteration. Draw a line on the Y axis, this line should be on the position Y=0. If they are doing any activity that will bring value to the customer, tell to each member to draw a line on top of the Y axis line. On the other hand,draw a line under the Y axis line, if they are waiting or blocked by something. They need to do this activity everyday in order to to track all different activities inside the team. Do not forget to write notes when people are blocked or in IDLE; these notes are important to be discussed in the retrospective. The possible result can be something as the picture above seen above.

I guarantee you that you will have plenty of data for your retrospective at the end of the iteration. I tried this couple of times and I was surprised how many issues we find out, how many dependencies and blockers we had and so on. Having this information available will help the team to decide how and where they can improve.

P.S. On the picture, you can see different member roles. I know the setup is not perfect but it was what we could do at that time :) So, if you want to comment on the blog, try to ignore “non- optimal team setup”, instead focus on the activity.

Hi guys, in this post I want to share with you a nice story that happened several months ago with one of my teams. At that time I had a team that was making the first steps towards Agile. They were a fantastic team, really eager to learn but still with the “old waterfall” mentality. They had a typical approach where the developers did development work and the testers – testing, not really a truly Agile team. I believe this is a common problem for teams that are switching to Agile: seeing only a small picture, they are not able to see the entire system. I believe they lacked “System Thinking”. But what is “System Thinking”?

Shortly explained, “System Thinking” is the ability to see the “big picture” and not to be focused on just a small part of your job. For a better explanation, I will use as an example my former team to demonstrate my ideas. In that particular team the work was arranged so that the developers had a set of User stories to work on. A finished User story was passed over to the testers for testing. The problem was that although for the developers these stories were quite simple to implement, they were quite challenging for testing because of several compatibility issues that required full allocation of testing resources. When developers ran out of User stories they were asking the Product Owner for more stories to work on. However, the PO acted rationally and did not give them any new stories until the team delivered everything to the iteration backlog. It was obvious that the team needed some help to visualize everything that was happening. How to help the team?

Clearly, the developers had their best intentions in mind: they ran out of work, therefore, they asked for more tasks. However, because of their lack of “System Thinking” they did not understand that more work for them would mean more pressure on the testing resources that were already fully allocated and, ultimately, an outcome of a poorer quality of the team effort. Apparently, the developers needed to understand that it was not anymore a matter of “us and them” because their job is accomplished when a customer gets the product, and the product would be ready when the team would act as a single unit. I have discussed this issue with some of my colleagues and they gave me a good idea: in next iteration to use Value Stream Mapping (VSM) for observing how the system behaved. This tool is a great instrument to identify different aspects of a system. If you want to use it you need to take some time to explain this tool to your team. From my experience not many people apply this in software development. VSM can be a fantastic tool to be used at retrospectives, but this could be explained in another post ;). Let´s see what happened at the iteration retrospective (an iteration where VSM was used).

By that time, the team was already familiar with the VSM and they were quite impressed with the amount of information we collected using it. Having looked at different VSMs (we created one for each different User story), it was not long before the team could see that bringing more User stories to the iteration would not translate into higher output because the testers were already fully loaded, therefore, producing more code would only mean that the testers would not be able to deliver everything on time. The team started appreciating more “System Thinking” and not just think anymore in terms of their separate “boxes”. After some discussions, the developers decided that in the folllowing iteration they would help the testers with all the testing activities to deliver more User stories as a team. In the following iteration the developers and the testers worked more as a team and the output of the joint effort of the team was indeed of a higher quality and volume.

Do you think this is something to consider when you work with your teams? What are your ideas on the topic?

Hi guys, this week I got inspiration for the post from a conversation that I had with one of my colleagues. I was explaining him the book that I read during my holidays - “Drive“. We went through many topics, but the one we discussed most was about Casual Friday, let me explain what it is.

In case you are not familiar with the term, you can think of it as a relaxed work day, the day when people are already in anticipation of the forthcoming weekend :). In the context of our discussion this pertained to that specific time that Google made popular with its employees: when they can use their time to do whatever they want, of course, within the company activities, but not necessarily related to their on-going projects.

The conversation continued for some time when he suddenly said that he cannot really do that, he does not have time to try this Casual Friday. He then explained that each their iteration takes two weeks, so if he starts using a day per week off the project they will have only eight days left and then they cannot deliver much for that iteration. At first, I could not understand him, so I decided to dig into it…

I asked him, “How come you cannot deliver anything in eight days? How long do you take to finish a story?” However, when he told me that each story usually takes six to seven days, I understood their problem. Of course, if they take seven days to deliver a story and if something happens, say a small delay, it would easily take them the whole iteration to deliver that one story, but they will not have any time for Casual Fridays.

In my humble opinion, they are just accepting too large stories. It would make sense for them to break these large stories into smaller units so that they could have more deliverables at the end of the iteration. Then I suggested that he tries an experiment: they could start creating smaller stories, say two-day stories, and they could see how many stories they would accomplish within the iteration. If everything goes well, they could deliver up to four stories per iteration and still have their Casual Friday.

I cannot promise that this would immediately solve their problems and allow them to have their Casual Friday, but I think they might be one step closer to it, because I truly believe that smaller stories are much better than the large ones.

This was just one example that demonstrated how large stories can have a negative impact on the development work. Here you can find more examples that explain why smaller stories are better for your development process.

What is your opinion about it?