Silent Hour - Experiences

Week ago I blogged about our new experiment - Silent Hour.

Our team has just one room, people sitting next to each other and even if you are discussing with only one team member, others are also easily distracted. Headphones do help a little, but we decided to try something different. Between 12:00 to 13:00 we close doors of our team rooms to avoid all unnecessary disturbances both from internal and external origins.

For customer contacts we fortunately have first tier customer support which can handle easy tasks independently. Complicated tasks and problems are forwarded to developers, but during Silent Hour we encourage them to try little bit harder before doing that. Or they can take request for callback if the issue is not too urgent. But rules are not absolute; if they really needed help they can ask advice from developers anytime. Common sense rules.

On the other hand managers and salespeople tend to rush to ask questions from developers at any time. And just fiver minutes later they come back to ask follow-up question. Face to face communication is good thing -no doubt about that- but just when you are getting back to flow for programming, there is already new distraction waiting... With Silent Hour closed-door-policy should encourage people to at least think do they need the answer right away or could they wait 30 minutes.

This have been working quite well. After little over week of experiment I did questionnaire to all stakeholders including developers, customer support, managers and salespeople. Almost all answered. Results were quite encouraging. Nobody thought that Silent Hour-policy had made his own work more difficult. Even that sometimes people did not remember the policy and have to turn away when they noticed closed door, they did not feel that additional waiting time for their communication needs did do any harm.  Everybody understood the need for developers to have some time when they can just concentrate task at the hand. And naturally developers were quite thrilled for the uninterrupted time. Sometimes we got visitors even during silent period, but always with good reason. 

Conclusion was that we end this as experiment and make it as permanent policy.

Silent Hour

Agile puts great value for interactions and communications but sometimes too much communication can turn to waste. Interactions should not be part of WIP and should not have their own sticky notes on board.

The Agile principles embrace

Co-Operation

Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

Communication

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation. 

But also

Sustainable Development

Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

Simplicity

Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.

In order to put more emphasis and improve the latter two we now are in progress of testing the new practice we call Silent Hour. Between 12:00 to 13:00 we close doors of our team rooms to avoid all unnecessary disturbances. We urge everybody to think at least twice before distracting developers during Silent Hour. Average waiting time is 30 minutes anyway, so it should not be any problem. Also developers avoid any unnecessary chatter. Some developers are also going to test the Pomodoro Technique® since there is just enough time for two pomodoros.


This is just ongoing testing and rules will surely evolve, but it has received quite good acceptance with developers and also with other stakeholders.

Edit: There is also followup post with more information and experiences: http://ikettu.blogspot.com/2011/11/silent-hour-experiences.html

Performance = potential - interference (P=p-i). Tim Gallwey 

Lean principles - Deliver Fast

Deliver as fast as possible -- Customers like rapid delivery.

After deferring the commitment it is finally time to do the real work; Programming, integrating, testing, deploying and finally delivering. And this stream should be as fast as possible. When it is decided that something have to be done, it should be done quickly so that customer can provide feedback. And if you like procrastination; the faster you can deliver, the longer you can delay decisions.

Use short iterations where new, functional software is delivered to the customer in closely-spaced intervals to have limited number of requirements waiting for feedback.

Empower your team and use pull model where team and individuals pulls the tasks for themselves. Utilization keeps high as tasks are pulled as soon as there is capacity to do the task. On the other hand, team does not saturate under overwhelming workload. Saturation just leads waste in form of unnecessary task switching and partially done work. To prevent team saturation to be bottleneck, limit concurrent Works In Process (WIP). Make rule that there can only be X amount of features in development, testing etc. Kanban provides means for both pull system and WIP-limits.

Finally some practical points.

Automate anything you can.

Automate your delivery/deploy pipeline. It is more productive to use your time for programming and testing than going trough delivery checklists and manually copying files from servers. You also gain repeatability of process, delivery errors are reduced etc.

Use proper tools.

It is well worth of paying extra money for productivity tools and proper hardware. On software business we do not have to invest ocean-going cargo ships, but we have to invest on people and their creativity. On could do the mathematics and calculate:

10 builds/day * 30 seconds faster / build with new hardware
 = 300 seconds / day => 1,5hours / month

But those 30 seconds can be essential to keep coder on the flow.

   Ilpo Kettunen

See also

• 7 Lean principles

“busyness is not good business” -- Alan Shalloway

Lean principles - Defer Commitment

Decide as late as possible.

Defer commitment to have as much as possible information to back your decisions. Delaying irreversible decisions at the last reasonable moment allows time to learn more about problem in hand, which results in better decisions. Deferring commitment is positive procrastination.

But do not close your options too early. Sometimes it is worth to pay added cost that options can be held open, allowing decisions to be delayed until more information is available. Decision should be made at the moment at which failing to make a decision eliminates an important alternative.

Active customer participation helps to defer Commitment: Involving customers throughout the process eliminates the need to make decisions up front. Keeping decisions about features and the development of those features close together leaves less room for change.

Break dependencies so your decisions are separated to each other for easier procrastination.

On the other hand, committing early can be motivating. It also changes risks and opportunities. So there could be some value making early choices.

Keep your options open. Do not block your options by delaying too long.

If you wait too long, you could end up dancing with your sister instead of second best cheerleader.

See also

• 7 Lean principles

“Making software is really hard: it is non-sequential, non-linear, unpredictable work”-- Jan Machacek

Lean principles - Amplify learning

Most things I have ever learned, I learned from failures. Not necessarily my own failures but something somebody has tried and failed so that I have not need to try it myself. Fortunately sometimes I have also learned from other people's success too. And I have to say; sometimes I have success before failing and learnt. And after all, I have gained experience while trying or following others.

( success | failure ) of (your | other people's)
-> experience
-> skills and knowledge

Sharing information regularly creates group knowledge from individual knowledge. Daily Standups are your local best friend.

Competence = skill * discipline * knowledge * social connectivity
And connectivity has more effect than knowledge
@jurgenappelo: from "The Hidden Power of Social Networks", Cross, Bob et.al

But usually I tend to give away little bit discipline by varying my methods. Doing little changes to project plan on every project. Using different test libraries on different projects etc. Some changes are rejected, but best changes remain in effect. It's kind of genetic algorithm for developement process.

Although you can learn some ungooglable little things with other ways too.


Get feedback.

Getting constant feedback from customer, and more importantly from the actual end-user, is essential way to learn about the problem we are trying to solve with the end product. By (my) definition Agile requirements management is a learning process where both the customer and the developer are working together to learn more about the problem. But even then requirements are constantly evolving and only way to make things work is have continuous feedback from actual users of the end product. So you have to commit to continuous integration, deployment and delivery so that the customer has something she can use to give the valuable feedback we need.

Use pretotyping to get feedback (actually you are trying to get prefeed...) on early stages. The main objective of pretotyping is to answer questions about the product's appeal and usage: Would people be interested in it? Will they use it as expected? Will they continue to use it? ... Failing ideas even before prototype stage is much cheaper and you have more time for new ideas to prototype.

Use prototypes to learn about technical challenges you are facing before starting large scale production. The main objective of prototyping is to answer questions related to building the product: Can we build it? Will it work as expected? How cheaply can we build it? How fast can we make it?

But sometimes you can introduce deliberately failures to learn. For example Netflix uses system they call Chaos Monkey. The Chaos Monkey’s job is to randomly kill instances and services within their architecture to learn what happens during outages.

See also

• 7 Lean principles

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." -- Thomas Edison

Lean principles - Eliminate waste

Provide market and technical leadership by creating nothing but value. By definition waste is anything that does not contribute value to the final product or customer. Also first principle of Agile Manifesto says: "Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software." Everything else is considered to be waste.

Mary and Tom Poppendieck later mapped original seven wastes from Toyota Production System to wastes we found on software development. (Poppendieck, Mary and Tom. Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash. Addison-Wesley, 2006.)

1. Partially Done Work
2. Extra Features
3. Relearning; Extra processes
4. Handoffs, Motion
5. Delays; Waiting
6. Task Switching
7. Defects

With value stream mapping we can try to identify steps on processes that add value to customer. But how we can measure direct value for example Configuration Management or Risk Management?

Root cause analysis can be used to try to find what was the original problem. There exists many methods, but I have find most effective to just ask enough why's to get the answer. Official name for this is 5 Whys. IMHO Most of time (1-5) whys should be enough.

But even then seeing the waste is hard. And is it actually always necessary?
If carrying along few extra unnecessary lines of code does not cost you anything, is it just waste of time to remove them? Is refactoring always necessary?

Manual work is eliminated by automation. But which one is waste; spending 4 hours to create one time script or doing 2 hours of manual work that accomplishes same thing?

We all are happily carrying 90% unnecessary DNA with us. I don’t want to eliminate it even that I do not know what to do with it. So my best practice for eliminating waste is; use your brain - or 10% of your brain, since nobody knows how to use the rest of it.

See also

• 7 Lean principles

"Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless." -- Thomas Edison

Introduction

Several years I have been consuming open source projects and reading published text from other people. For some time I have been thinking how to do my own contribution. So I finally decided to start my own blog and try to give something back to community.

I am CTO at FastROI which is small software company based on Joensuu, Finland. We are making our own products which we are mostly selling by SaaS model. We are learning and implementing Lean and Kanban practices. Same time our quality management system is being prepared for ISO 9001:2008 compatibility. We are trying to sell customizations as agile contracts to quite “old-school” customers.

Definitely there is a lot learn on these areas and I hope I can share as much I can during the process.