How to measure productivity? That’s a question that many in the business, from CEOs to coders to engineers to managers, have in their minds all the time, and Adolfo Cruz, Scio’s very own Project Management Office director discusses metrics, measures, and meanings of productivity.
At the end of the 90s, a methodology called “Personal Software Process”, or PSP, was designed to help developers measure their productivity. You had to take a course, there was a lot of documentation to follow through, and you had to use a timer to measure your progress, stopping it every time you needed a cup of coffee or to go to the bathroom.
The idea was to see how much you accomplished in a day, but in fact, this methodology was entangled too closely with the number of lines you wrote, meaning that you were more productive the more you coded, which is not necessarily true.
But if this is not productivity, what is it?
I define “productivity” as finishing a task in a reasonable time. The word “finishing” here is key because productivity is not starting a lot of things, but seeing a project to completion, right until you get a product. However, how do you define exactly when something is “finished” in software development? What criteria do you have to fulfill to say something is done? If we were building something physical, let’s say a boat, first, you need to build a hull, and this phase ends when it fulfills certain requirements.
And although not all boats are the same (building a freighter or a yacht would look very different), in essence, you have the same process, blueprints, and requirements to do it. Software development doesn’t work that way.
Developing software involves a lot of things. You may see it conceptualized as a “factory”, or a development team working like a well-oiled machine, where you input requirements and get a product at the other end. But in truth, there’s an artisanal quality to developing software; everyone has their approach and style, and progress changes according to the team you are with.
This results in a lively debate where no one agrees on the best way to measure productivity. If you ask a room full of developers how many lines of code they write to see if they are productive, you can get a very heated discussion, because how are you measuring that?
The best code is concise and everyone checking it can understand it, so I don’t know how you can see someone writing 10,000 lines of code and conclude he is more productive than someone achieving the same in 500. Maybe it made more sense at a time with no frameworks to build things faster, when everything was a bit more rudimentary and you coded every single piece of the product, but today you have to write very few things from scratch, with a whole range of tools that let you produce, let’s say, the shell of a website in a minute without coding anything directly.
So imagine if a company starts giving productivity bonuses based on lines of code produced per project. They would end up with developers gaming the system to get the bonus or at least trying to not look worse than their peers by writing less, resulting in bloated, inefficient products because the incentive wasn’t centered on creating something useful.
You have to be very careful when linking rewards to metrics, or else you’ll generate a perverse environment where everybody is just racing to inflate numbers.
The Scio way
I’ve been with Scio for 14 years, and since then, perspectives have changed. With the arrival of Agile Methodologies, we moved on from counting lines of code to seeing how that code comes together, achieving working software whose process of development is not focused on numbers, but on how the product is going to be used.
To give you an idea of this evolution, not long ago the requirements of a project were written from the point of view of the system, so every requirement started with the phrase “The system shall…”: the system shall do X thing, the system shall do Y thing, the system shall do Z thing, etc.
So you ended up with a massive document repeating “The system shall…” for every little thing. Then the Agile Movement centered on the user, with requirements stating “The Administrator can…” or “The Manager can…” because we understood that software is not about a system that “shall” do things, but what people in different roles “can” achieve with the product, resulting in productivity built around how much value we give to the final user, not how much code our devs write.
Coming back to Scio, we see it from the perspective of the stakeholders and clients we are building a product for, and our productivity is measured on the information we get from them, knowing how our teams are doing, how much value they are adding to a project, and what their perception of the whole process is. It’s a more people-oriented approach, far from the days of counting lines of code, and more interested in understanding how a developer is contributing to the goals of our clients.
To that end, we developed some internal tools, like the Team Self-Assessment, based on our prior experiences, consisting of questionnaires about the things we consider important for a team to focus on. For example, there’s an entire section about quality, how they are preventing issues during development, if they are doing Pair Testing practices, or if they are doing code reviews to make sure the code is maintainable and scalable…
Are they giving issues the proper attention? Are they documenting them? The team members have to ask themselves if they are focusing on the right issues, and if they aren’t, it’s something we have to improve. That’s how we try to motivate our teams to share their experiences, practices, and insights into our client’s projects.
It is said that only 35% of software development projects succeed, and I think it has to do with the planning stage of a product. Let’s say I want to complete the A, B, and C steps of a project in six months, based on previous experiences in similar projects. But it ended up taking 8 months instead of 6 because something needed to change, does that 2-month delay mean the project is going wrong?
It happens a lot with start-ups trying to create something completely new. In the course of development, it’s common to see something, a feature or function of the product that changes the client’s perspective, that taps into some potential we haven’t seen before, so the plan has to get reworked to harness that and bring its full potential. In six months, priorities can change.
But if we measure the productivity of the process very rigidly, and then that very same process brings out the value in unexpected places that, nonetheless, force you to rework entire parts of the project, it’s easy to see it as a failure.
The Project Management Institute uses these rigid measures a lot, asking for a specific basis, beginning, and end of every phase of a project, and if you don’t deliver them exactly as planned, then you get a mark against you. In an actual software development environment, that doesn’t happen, because the dynamics of a development cycle can change fast.
Software development works by evolution
The measures you have to use are subjective more often than not. Some industries require strictness, especially when manufacturing something, but in the world of software, and start-ups in specific, I don’t think it’s necessary to be like this to create a successful product.
This is why we back away a little from the technical aspects of a project and focus instead on the business side of things, having conversations with stakeholders and product owners to get them involved, reconciling all these points of view about what the business needs, and how development is.
We take a look at the features planned, check how many people ask for them, how critical they are for the business model to work, and decide how to proceed from there, adding real value by focusing on building those pieces first. Technical aspects are solved later, as you first see what the business needs, and then the technical team starts sketching solutions for the challenge.
Productivity is a question with no definitive answer yet.
Considering all this, forming an exact image of productivity is a question with no definitive answer yet. Every individual has to decide what works, but only in the specific context in which that person is acting, so no one has come up with a universal method to measure productivity in software development, as even the perspective from which you measure can change; seeing it from a client’s perspective is a world apart from a developer’s.
As you discover better routes during development that weren’t foreseen during the planning stage, or maybe because the technical aspect ended up being unfeasible for one reason or another, or the infrastructure cost is too high for your purposes, or any other number of reasons, a lot of what you may define at the beginning of the project will change.
You adapt, which is very different from building furniture or producing food, where it is clear what you are trying to accomplish over and over. But in software, where there’s no single solution for the same problem, it’s difficult to reach a consensus on what you need to do in detail.
However, you want to measure productivity, metrics evolve, and whatever method you use to decide how productive your team or your company is, I think the Agile Methodologies got it right, where it doesn’t matter the number of lines, or the documentation you have, or how pretty your database is, what matters to the client and the final user is having software that works.
The idea of a future when AI can perform all sorts of tasks, even programming, is irresistible, but is it something feasible? Is programming a job that can be done by machines, and if not, why?
By Scio Team
One of the biggest leaps of these past two decades, and indeed the most intriguing technology development of the 21st Century, is the advancement of Artificial Intelligence that seems to occur every day. It is understandable why; science fiction technology has a sort of magnetism that attracts all kinds of engineers, entrepreneurs, and visionaries, many of them with the cash to back up the R&D necessary to bring these visions to life.
AI also has the allure of being potentially implemented anywhere, automatizing plenty of daily tasks to free up our time. It’s also attractively dangerous, as countless Terminator jokes can attest every time a new development hits the news.
However, what is actually feasible for AI to accomplish? What are its real applications, at least for now? For the last 7 years or so, there have been some talks about AI being capable of performing more intensive labor, programming, and development among them, but is the job of the programmer in danger of being done by a robot?
It’s easy to imagine, at least. Plenty of tools already use some measure of AI to function, and interesting experiments crop up daily, from intelligent chatbots to autonomous machines. But are those tasks comparable to the actual job of programming in any way? Because as an engineer or developer knows, writing code is just a small part of the whole process of creating software.
“Processing large amounts of data? Software’s great at that. Figuring out what a human wants, or what a usable UI is like, or what the real problem you need to solve is… those are hard”, says an entry in the blog Code Without Rules titled “When AI replaces programmers”, which goes directly to the big issue in a future of machine-produced code.
Although there have been some advancements on the idea of teaching an AI to write code and produce entire programs, like the experiment done by Andrej Karpathy in 2015 where he trained a neural network with GitHub’s Linux repositories to write its own code, the results are still mixed. According to the site Perforce.com:
“[The] AI generated code (including functions and function declarations) overnight. It had parameters, variables, loops, and correct indents. Brackets were opened and later closed. It even had comments. However, the AI produced code had syntactic errors. It didn’t keep track of variable names. Sometimes variables were declared but never used. Other times variables were used but not defined.”
Of course, this was way back in 2015, and the technology behind these networks has only improved since then, but the actual viability of letting a machine program by itself one day, especially for more critical areas like Defense, Finance, or Healthcare, it’s still far away and will still be at the mercy of human instruction.
The advantage of outsourcing these kinds of tasks, be it to a remote developer or an entire Nearshore company, is the ability to communicate clearly anything you may want in the software produced. Collaboration is constant, communication is key, and the skill to apply different ways to solve issues is a given in any valuable development team.
This is to say, the “creativity” involved in these kinds of efforts is still a long way off, and having this skill while programming is critical to producing code that solves actual problems and accomplishes the expectations of both clients and final users.
“There have been some experiments before, even since the 90s, with tools whose purpose was to generate applications”, explains Adolfo Cruz, Scio’s Project Management Director, and the best person to have an idea of where this technology is going. “If you wanted to generate a User Form, for example, you defined the parameters (first name, last name, age, date, etc.) and these programs delivered a simple but functional result.”
“Those very early tried, but they worked and now it’s evolving to full-on Artificial Intelligence. However, if these tools become a reality, they’ll probably lack the spark of human imagination. During development, a programmer sometimes gets ideas about cool features that could add value to a project, and these kinds of things will be difficult to achieve for a machine.”
“But beyond that, I think we’ll see software coded by machines. Maybe there will be a point when an AI can understand and interpret the user, getting a command like “create a chat program” and propose three options, which can be narrowed by the user.”
For sure, these three options would not take any time at all for a machine, but deciding which path to take from there, refining and redefining options, could be a tiring process, although, in terms of man/hours invested, it’ll need a lot less effort than having multiple people working on this same project.
“Still, there are a lot of questions unanswered”, Adolfo concluded. “How long would it take to explain exactly what you want, what frustrations would that cause, and how that impacts the adoption of this technology is a whole discussion to have. It’s not simply about technical feasibility, but acceptance among the public.”
When we hear the word “agile,” the first thing that comes into our mind is the quick ability to respond to change. This skill is crucial, especially if you want to adapt to the evolving world of technology.
This term represents how you are able to think and respond to uncertain situations you will come across.
Agile software development involves practices and frameworks based on certain values and principles in software development. It uses planning, test-driven development, sprints, and pair programming, among others.
Approaching software development in a specific method can help you understand exactly what you need to do in a particular scenario.
It is important to know your duty and responsibilities as an agile software development manager. Hence, we have come up with a list below to help you succeed in your role.
What is the Role of an Agile Software Development Manager?
A lot of companies empower their teams to self-organize with an expectation of committing and delivering their goals on time. While bigger organizations may have different agile teams, they continue to use self-organizing principles to manage the roles of the team members.
Each technique used in agile software development has a clear and defined role that varies. To be able to work effectively as a team, each member needs to know what their role is as well as those of other team members.
Hence, it is important to define the responsibilities of an agile software development manager. Generally, the manager helps the team members excel in their specific roles while making sure that the process is up to standards using agile principles.
Overall, the manager ensures that the team delivers excellent results.
Here are some of the most important duties of an agile software development manager.
1. Project Planning and Management
As a manager, you need to define the scope of the project, create an efficient workflow, and a realistic delivery schedule. At the same time, you are expected to be on top of everything, including leading, organizing, and preparing the progress reports.
Part of the role of a manager is to project plans and make necessary changes if required.
Managers must ensure that the project runs on schedule and everyone is updated in the process. An agile manager should also live and breathe the agile process and principles so that you can tackle the project more effectively.
2. Team Management
One of the most important duties of an agile software development manager is to manage your team properly. By assisting the teams and holding each member accountable, you can efficiently improve the work process.
You should guide and mentor your team properly, especially as they undergo a stressful environment.
Most agile projects require a critical timeline. Therefore, you need to ensure that the project gets completed on time.
As you manage your team properly, make sure you don’t micromanage them. Avoid overstepping and respect their roles. How you treat them can have a huge impact on their work process and output.
3. Risk Management
A good agile development manager should know how to clearly identify risks and come up with an effective risk management plan. By resolving issues, it helps keep the project moving.
Part of this task is to ensure that there are no conflicts within the team members, the budget is on point, and the tasks are achievable.
As a manager, you need to anticipate potential risks in advance so that you can determine the steps of how to avoid them. By creating risk development plans, you prevent your team and company from wasting time, effort, and money.
4. Process Management
A well-defined process creates more structure to the workflow. Make sure you identify and follow the best practices in agile software development.
Divide the project into segments and distribute them among team members so that you can reach your target goals within the given timeline.
Keep the workload balanced so that no member falls behind. In an agile environment, the communication between the team and the product owner is crucial in terms of meeting deadlines.
5. Team Building
Part of managing your team is to empower each member. Make sure that everyone is engaged in the project and is contributing to the goal. You should manage their tasks at an achievable pace without sacrificing the quality of work.
An agile software development manager should act as a mentor to his team. Hence, you should follow the basic steps in management which include coaching, one-on-one meetings, and providing constructive feedback.
At the same time, you need to ensure rapport between the members so that they can work better as a team. A successful manager encourages the team members to bring ideas to the table.
Conclusion
An effective agile software development manager is crucial to any organization. However, the job requires knowledge, research, and hard work. Most organizations require software development and continuously adapt to the automated and digital world.
To be a successful manager, we highly encourage you to fully embrace various responsibilities such as project planning, team management, and risk development. In an agile environment, you need to learn how to adapt and react quickly to any situation that may arise.
If you need additional support in setting up your roadmap, we at Scio can help you find the best solution to achieve your business goals. Talk to us today!
Of course, the first question for anyone looking at this is – what is the difference? Let’s start by saying that we’re not speaking specifically about “product engineering” – although it plays a part in this discussion. We’re actually looking at software development teams broadly, how they work and what they can (and can’t) do for your development efforts.
Today’s IT environments can be complicated beasts – with unique mixes of internal and remote API’s, web services, service-based components, virtualized infrastructure, and various open source, proprietary and custom applications. Orchestrating this architecture to provide the internal and external business services for an organization is an increasingly critical operational concern. Depending on the size and complexity of the environment, it is likely to be managed by one or more skilled engineers who are focused on the security, standardization, automation, scalability, availability and reliability of IT systems.
Traditionally, software development teams have been separated from this complexity to some degree by internal standards for application architecture and operation developed by IT. But, as the maturity of IT environments has progressed and agile has become the standard of the tech industry, software development teams are gradually being integrated into combined engineering and engineering teams under DevOps implementations. At this point, there are many different levels of integration between IT engineering and software development teams and if you are considering outsourcing a project – knowing what you are asking for is an important part of your research and decision process.
So, let’s set up a scenario: You are about to embark on a custom software development project. For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume the application to be developed is strategic and tied to your business model. With so many applications and systems available on the market, if it wasn’t – you would probably just adapt an off-the-shelf application for your purpose. You have a charter and description of the business problems your custom application needs to address, a general budget and executive support. The decision has been made to outsource this project rather than do it in-house.
With that in mind, let’s insert some different conditions that could make a significant difference in your needs for an outsourced team:
New, but fully-backed venture with basic organizational structure but with no IT engineering beyond office systems automation and help desk.
Existing IT team with legacy experience but little experience with modern infrastructure or IT operation patterns. No dedicated development team or significant custom applications.
Traditional operations, IT and software development but siloed – not integrated other than by operational standards.
An enterprise-level organization with a fully-integrated IT operations and development team in a DevOps style implementation with a significant portfolio of custom applications that are under continuous development and/or maintenance.
A new venture of an existing entity that is expected to operate as a free-standing organization based to a large extent on the services provided by the new application(s) developed during the project.
There are other complexities we could imagine, but for the most part, they can be addressed as variations of these five scenarios and the basic conditions we set up for this discussion.
1. The New, Mostly Naked, Venture
As a new and growing company, there is always (or there should be) pressure to be efficient and do things right from the beginning. If you have a technical leader in your team and/or a significant part of your operation is based on leveraging software applications to provide your services, there is a natural tension – should you focus on your customers, your value proposition and lead your software development at the product level (leaving the actual development to an outsourcing partner), or should you build and control everything in-house? We’ve covered this question before and it is a significant decision – but now, we’re considering a little deeper level of thought. If you are considering an application that will actually support all or a significant part of the services you offer and your revenue – the proper operation and maintenance of that application is a strategic decision.
Your application must be:
Planned with a set of operational standards in mind.
Scalable, so it can grow along with your business without significant rewrites and basic changes in architecture.
Logically broken into maintainable and extensible modules so it can be enhanced and the value of individual services can increase as they find their place in your portfolio.
Reliable across upgrades, changing loads, and new features through the full product lifecycle.
Economical to operate and maintain based on a solid architecture and the ability to leverage automation across all levels of development, deployment, and maintenance.
Photoshoot at Cluster 8/1/16
If you are a new venture and you want to spend your time focusing on your customer, the value of your services, and managing feature-fit, you shouldn’t expect an outsourced development team to simply take on these issues from day one. They may deliver a wonderful application that provides everything you need, except the five points above. Although your customers will be happy, you have just purchased a load of technical debt. Like any loan, it will come due at some point and the longer you wait to deal with these shortcomings – the more expensive they will be to retire.
So as an entrepreneur with enough problems on your plate, you have a choice (remember – our scenario is that you’re going to outsource this project):
Dig in and hire a really competent engineering team that has real world experience in larger operations and understands where you are going. It is going to be expensive, time-consuming and at times – frustrating. You will have more expertise sitting around than you need in the early days, but it is an investment you need to make in lieu of the cost of redoing much of your early work when all your predictions come true. You don’t want to have to operate your business while changing the undercarriage as it speeds down the road. Once you have your engineering team and they understand your business model and where you are headed, they can manage your outsourced development team – but with both sides being new to you it is likely to be a fairly inefficient match in the beginning. Expect six to nine months to hire, train, and begin your project and another period of time integrating your outsourced team (which you also have to select) and your in-house engineering to the point where the combined team can be productive.
Find an outsourcing partner that can provide the engineering skills as a part of the team they provide. If you find the right vendor, the team should be scalable with the resources you need, when you need them. The application should be designed with the five points above in mind from the start. If the vendor operates as a partner with your organization, doing that part of the development and operation successfully is part of their value proposition to you. If the outsourced team has broad experience (as they should) they will bring to the table a range of solutions you may not find otherwise. They have worked in the market and delivered solutions in many different situations. Finding the right vendor will not be as quick as it might be if you were only looking for an outsourced development team (there are many pretenders in the field), but in the end, you should be able to get your project running faster, with better efficiency, lower cost, and risk.
The choice is yours and (of course) there are other factors you may have to consider in your situation – but at a high level, if cost, time-to-market, and lowering distractions from your emerging business are concerning, an outsourced engineering and development team would seem to be a strong option.
2. Existing IT Team, No Internal Software Development Team & Little or No Current Experience with Custom Apps and Modern Infrastructure
At first, this would seem to be a simple match for an outsourced development team – and in some cases it may be. But, the lack of current experience with custom application development and modern infrastructure in this situation should be concerning. Companies in this position tend to be service-based, SMB/E organizations with established client bases, regional strength in their market and a strong, competitive need to grow. As we pointed out at the beginning, we are assuming there is a budget for this project and the company is committed to outsourcing but – they have an existing market and they can’t afford to burn their existing customers while they transition to a new or expanded level of services. Because of that limitation, even without considering the eventual operation and maintenance of the new application once it is released, an organization in this position can’t afford to overburden their existing staff with development of a mission-critical, custom application and the operational planning needed while they continue to serve and maintain their existing services. The staff must be involved in the changes but only to the extent that they need to be to be able to take a role as things move forward.
Again, we come down to some choices:
Hire one or two technical leads/product and project managers who will take the position of planning the new application, its architecture, and operational requirements while managing the outsourced development team. They will need to be much more experienced than the existing IT team so there will be some initial friction and it will (again) take time, be costly and frustrating. It will take time to get them up to speed and integrated into the team before an outsourced development team can be selected and put to work. The reason to use only one or two resources, in this case, is to hold down costs, but doing so will only make each resource more critical and (probably) more expensive.
Hire outside consultants to develop the operational architecture, requirements and train your internal team. Since the internal team is unlikely to be large or have the skills necessary, there will still be a need to hire additional internal resources, but it can be delayed to some extent. The downside of this strategy is that when experienced staff is added eventually, they may or may not agree with the direction put in place by the consultants and there may be a period of realignment and unexpected technical debt. Also, the use of external consultants to manage all or part of the work done by the outsourced development team can create an “arms length” relationship with the development team that can make it difficult to have the level of collaboration and trust you need to avoid communication problems, especially with agile development.
Find an outsourcing partner that can provide the engineering talent as a part them team they provide. If you find the right vendor, the team should be scalable with the resources you need, when you need them. If the outsourced team has broad experience (as they should) they will bring to the table a range of solutions you may not find otherwise. They have worked in the market and delivered solutions in many different situations. If you want to transition the outsourced team out at some point, you will still need to hire additional staff for operations and maintenance of your new applications, but you should be able to have them work in parallel with your outsourced team during the transition and lower the burden significantly.
Any of the three options could be successful but if you find the right outsourcing vendor, it would be a faster, less costly and less risky route to get your project going. But, of course, it depends on finding an outsourcing vendor with the option to include engineering skills in their team and to have a flexible approach to providing the team you need.
3. Siloed Operations, IT & Software Development Teams
This scenario lends itself to slightly larger and more technically-based operations than we discussed in the second scenario. This is the type of organization we expect to find in an established ISV with a strong client list in a specific vertical. Their operations are usually as they have been for a decade or more. Their IT staff is established and has a strong operational base. Their software development team is well-versed in their existing applications, the technologies they use and the customer base they work with. If they didn’t have to step out of that box to build this new application, we can easily assume they wouldn’t need to outsource and their engineering is just fine for what they are doing today.
But that is the rub. We’re examining a scenario where they need to extend themselves into new technologies and possibly change their operations significantly. And because we’re assuming their teams are informal, separate silos – we’re also assuming they know about the higher efficiencies they could achieve if they began to shift to a DevOps methodology but – again, like our second scenario, they have existing customers and products/services in the field to maintain and support. Like most companies in this situation, their backlog of feature requests for their existing software is just what they can handle at the moment. Adding another layer of work would just mean something would have to give. An outsourced development team, in this case, makes sense and this organization is likely to have customer-facing product development well-in-hand. But, what they don’t have is a scalable organization to match the importance of the project and a broad understanding of new technologies and architectures they need to consider to streamline their organization.
So, in this case, an outsourcing vendor who can bring in engineering experience as a part of their team skill and experience, a flexible, scalable team makeup and willingness to work in a partner role to help their existing team rethink and realign their operations could be a real asset. It is risky to try to do both at once with the same team, but if both teams have regular work to do and can collaborate to adapt operations over time it can be an opportunity that would be nearly impossible any other way. Again, the critical step is to have the skilled resources available as an integrated part of the team who can lead the effort to plan architecture and operations before development gets underway and you find that serious adjustment is needed. There are risks in this scenario, certainly, but there is also an upside to making changes in parallel with everyone onboard the organizational development and change initiative.
4. Mature Enterprise with Integrated DevOps style IT and Software Development
Again, we’ve moved the situation up the scale a bit but we’re still committed to outsourcing and we’re still considering what type of a team we need. In this case, the internal team has an implementation of DevOps and even if it is not complete, it is moving forward with staff support and commitment. Like scenarios two and three, our existing team has a number of custom applications in production and knows what it is doing when it comes to operations and development. We can assume they are fully engaged and the time allotted to this project is short, or they would simply hire as needed and do the project internally.
Since this organization has a DevOps implementation, there is already an assumption that new development resources will have experience in both development and systems architecture for continuous development and maintenance. Bringing on a team that doesn’t have that type of cross-functional experience and mindset would be a serious problem. They simply wouldn’t be able to hold up their end. In this case, if the project is to be outsourced, the incoming team must be able to handle both engineering and agile software development if they are going to hold up their end and integrate with the larger team successfully.
5. Spin Out/Off Venture with Software-Based Service
You might think this scenario would be a lot like the first, but spin-out ventures tend to be better positioned and planned simply because they usually come from organizations with a strong market position and goals that are carefully evaluated before the venture is started. In most cases, staff members come from the “mother ship” with a background in product development and deep understanding of the market they are going into. But, because the loss of technical resources inside the home organization could seriously impact production there for a prolonged period, they rarely pull out more than a few senior IT resources. With that in mind, their team is usually fully aware of current technologies and methodologies, even when they may come from an organization that culturally has not be able to move to them as quickly as they might wish.
A spin-out gives this core team an opportunity to move in fresh directions with less organizational baggage and legacy overhead. So, in some ways, they may look like scenario two with little IT in the beginning – but the big difference is they have experience in the product development side of custom software and how supporting systems can be orchestrated. They are better positioned to evaluate partners and decide on the roles they want in-house versus outsourced. Since we said at the beginning that all scenarios would be based on a decision to outsource – the question is still, “Do we just need an outsourced software development team or do we also need an integrated engineering component?”
The decision comes down to how much of the burden the mother organization wants to continue to shoulder and how expensive the “charge-backs” would be if they did. Leaders of spin-outs usually have strong stock incentives to keep costs in line and move relatively quickly to prove their direction is worthy of the risk. If using existing services inside their home company would create complications, slow product development, and increase costs – they will think twice about that direction. Since we have specified that they have already decided to outsource this project, we can assume they are not looking to spend any time taking on problems that do not get their services and products into the market. But that said, we know the IT resources in the venture are limited and if they want to go to a modern continuous release methodology so they can incrementally improve and tune their applications, they will need to have flexible, integrated teams of engineers and developers from the beginning so that their applications are architecturally and operationally sound from the beginning.
Bottom Line
The bottom line here is that software development is shifting away from internally-focused product development,siloed enterprise teams and monolithic applications to incremental release patterns, agile organizations, and customer-focused lean product development. Not everyone is there now. There are many different ways to implement change. But, all of these organizations have chosen to take on custom application development for a strategic initiative, the opportunity now is to do it better with an eye toward the future of their organization. This is just one small part of the change they seek, but it is an important one to consider. So, yes – an outsourced team that brings a range of engineering skills and experience along with their development background can be a big advantage for any of these situations, with a vendor who will operate as a partner in the organization.
Scio provides nearshore, outsourced software development and flexible teams with a range of software development and engineering skills based on our experience in many verticals and situations. Our teams can have flexible roles and their bias is toward agile methodologies broadly. If you have a project in mind, please contact us to discuss how our unique blend of skills and experience can benefit your organization. We would be happy to take the time to listen and provide insight into how we could partner for success.
Lean Product Development (or Design), LPD, is gradually becoming a standard methodology in software development in much the same way that agile, scrum and lean have become industry standards. But, as is the case with other «standards» – many people say they have strong implementations, but if your product development team practices LPD principles, you might have trouble trying to integrate their approach. That problem can be troubling if you’ve invested in a rigorous, repeatable process for developing and releasing new software products and then find it difficult to find outsourcing services who understand your goals, your process and can work alongside your team seamlessly.
If you have software applications as a part of your services portfolio or directly to clients and use LPD methodologies, it is important to fully integrate your development team. But, if you are using an outsourcing service, what should you expect? How important is it to integrate your outsourced team?
A Little Level-Setting
In strict thinking, although the term «LPD» is used interchangeably for design and development, there are some differences in focus between the two in implementation. Both are based on Lean, the principles that started with Toyota Manufacturing and have evolved to embrace a process of finding solutions to customer problems that emphasizes iteration, reducing waste, and lowering risk. Broadly, both are informed by the Lean Startup Methodology, but because LPD has been adopted by many large organizations for the development of service and product lines, lessons from Lean Startup are brought down to the product level, rather than at a business model level as they are for startups. And, because we are specifically interested in services, software and software development, rather than manufacturing and the development of physical products, we can include the fact that all LPD implementations favor the use of agile, scrum and kanban as development methodologies.
As you might guess from the use of the word design, Lean Product Design implementations are focused on the design of the product, the user interface (UI) in software development terms and how the user interacts with the application. A process flow for a design implementation includes a growing system of sketches of screens (or modules), wireframes and design standards that evolve and become more specific as software development progresses through iterations.
Lean Product Development implementations tend to focus on the features required to satisfy user needs and product goals. So, while both implementations will use agile user story techniques, design-based implementations will be placed more in the context of the UI and user experience. Development implementations will focus more on groups of features and user goals. In practice, the differences between the two are relatively small and depend more on the full project team and their process than anything. A development team with clients that tend to be more visual, literal and unsure of needs may find it easier to be design-focused. A team with clients working on a business process and users with strong, informed opinions may find it easier to be more development-focused. And certainly, there are many blends of the two ways of thinking.
So, What Does This Mean?
There are many software applications that embody process and principles from a software product management point of view. How will they work for you if you decide to use an outsourced software development partner to help bring your application to market? Is one or the other better for software applications or integrating with software development teams? Are there methodologies or points to emphasize with potential partners as you discuss how their product development approach and experience?
From a high level, if your potential vendor has good product development experience and understands the product development cycle fully, the software you use for product management and the implementation of agile they use within their software development process shouldn’t matter a great deal – because they should be able to be flexible and do what is necessary to integrate the teams. If they are using something out of a book or a seminar that they have actually practiced a few times with a client – and that client wasn’t themselves fully committed to formal product management – it will be a distracting challenge for both teams to work through a methodology implementation while developing your application.
5 Questions for Your Potential Partner
Let’s start with a few questions to discuss. And a word about interviews: Don’t ask yes or no questions when you are investigating how a vendor operates and works with clients. Instead, ask open-ended questions that should be answered with more than a few words (if they actually have experience and formal services around the area they are discussing). If you don’t get what you feel is a strong answer, again, ask some open-ended questions that go down a level in detail.
1. Tell me about how you use agile in projects with clients practicing Lean Product Development?
The question here is not «do you use agile?» You need to know how agile informs their work with companies practicing LPD and what value they believe their implementation brings their customers. They should also include their practices within agile, such as scrum, extreme programming (XP), or kanban. If they don’t go into this level, ask another open-ended question for more detail.
One of the many implementations that large organizations have used.
In most cases, scrum will be the task management and basic development guideline, but it may be extended by XP practices. Some teams will be familiar with kanban and some will mention that they might start with scrum and transition to kanban if the project uses a DevOps implementation aimed at continuous development. At a high-level, the choice between scrum and kanban comes down to a philosophy about work and how to manage tasks. Scrum is generally considered to be more structured, using time-boxed iterations (sprints) and depending on the team to properly estimate tasks for each sprint and with specific planning and retrospective sessions for managing task backlog and priorities. Kanban tends to limit the number of tasks a team can have in work at the same time and new tasks are pulled down into development as soon as a slot opens up in the queue. Kanban is generally more flexible for the insertion of new features and less structured, requiring more feature management to avoid creep before the base application is completed.
It is only a guideline, but most teams find scrum to be a good system in application development and might use kanban or a variation after full release when the application is in maintenance or continuous development. Again, team familiarity and experience in adjusting their «standard» implementation to your team is more important than the particular flavor of the methodology they are using. Process mockups and walkthroughs of feature and feedback flow between the teams is an excellent way to evaluate how things might work and adjust to situations.
2. How do you understand the MVP process in lean product development?
Iterative development of a minimum viable product (MVP) is critical in LPD and probably one of the least understood parts of the cycle by non-practitioners. It is also very hard to estimate effort and time for the development team because it involves an open-ended process with key stakeholders and users. The key issue is to understand what they expect and how they will help you towards viable iterations for validation.
If their understanding is more like the top example in this illustration than the second, it is going to require some real thought to ensure you arrive at validation releases that are fully-formed (loveable) but not feature-rich or too simplistic. This is an element of your work as a whole team where you can really assess the ability of your outsourced team to work fully as a partner in product development. Can they come up with creative ways to give a good representation of the core product to users with less effort and time? Can they see the evolution of ideas and pick out key elements in customer feedback? If you expect or have to micro-manage every iteration yourself, you’re not getting a fully-prepared software development team.
3. How will we capture and manage user feedback during validation and following initial release?
Now, of course – a developer could just say, «This is your problem, not mine.» To a degree, they would be right, but you are looking for partner-level answers that indicate a willingness to do whatever is needed to make the product development process work properly and to be in position for the long run if your product is likely to benefit from a continuous development/improvement, DevOps-type release. Possible answers can be all over the board from add-on services that support help desk and application feedback to in-app custom modules. At a minimum, developers should be «in the loop» during validation and early release to assure that application bugs are not being reported as feature requests or issues and a system should be available to allow users to see proposed changes and «vote up or down» features they would value.
Including the development team in the feedback loop has a cost, but it avoids a lot of thrash when a feature is not working as expected, allows the developers to be proactive with corrective actions and to understand needs directly from a user’s words, rather than summaries. Again, what you are looking for is not a specific answer but that your partner is willing and able to understand what you need from a product perspective and provide creative solutions.
4. What are our options for capturing user metrics?
This requirement is, of course, very similar to capturing user feedback, so solutions can range from custom reporting within the application to third-party services and application libraries. In this case, the richness of options is key so you can evaluate different aspects of customer acquisition, feature usage, time to complete a process, etc. These features don’t exist in «average» applications, but they can be added relatively easily during development, especially if you compare the effort required to add them at some later point. You will have to get into detail about the kinds of metrics you feel might be most useful for your application and situation, but a strong developer team should be able to give you a range of options for implementation and some sort of dashboard for generating reports.
5. What do you do to assure that quality issues don’t get in the way?
It may seem a bit off point to discuss quality in an LPD focused question set, but the quality is far and away one of the biggest issues when it comes to unexpected project delays. You can’t expect stakeholders and users to be fully engaged in the product development process if planned releases are delayed or major features don’t appear fully formed as promised. A really good application that is unstable or has a poorly designed user interface is a big distraction from the goals of LPD project.
The best answers to this question include test-driven development, test automation, continuous integration and the tools that could eventually come into play if you choose to go into continuous development. The best case is to make this decision upfront, but things don’t always work out that way. Your primary aim should be to ensure you are in a position to move to that level when you need to without backtracking or having less than full test coverage and to leverage quality assurance tools and processes proactively from the beginning. Your team should be able to focus on feature execution and user experience as they do their acceptance and not buggy code or user interface inconsistencies.
The answers to this question should cover many of the issues of how teams will work and communicate. If they don’t, push follow-up questions in that direction specifically. If you have read anything about outsourcing, you already know that successful agile teams require strong open dialog and collaboration. Don’t let easy answers push you off this point. Understand fully how your project will deal with quality, communication, and ownership of the project goals.
There are a lot more questions you could ask, but these should get you started. The point is to have a conversation with your prospective vendor and come to an understanding of the methodologies they have utilized, the capabilities they bring to the table, and the customer experience you can expect. A conversation can clear up a lot more issues than a written response to an RFI or a proposal for work and give you a better idea if this is a group you can see your team working with. If you are actually looking for a long term partner and not just a team for a short engagement, it would be wise to have that conversation in person – in your offices or theirs. If it requires some travel, it is just part of the expense of finding a good match. It is much better to have your first face-to-face meetings in a positive, forward-looking atmosphere than when a project is underway and you’ve realized that a lot needs to be done to iron out issues.
Scio is a vendor of outsourced, nearshore software development services to our clients in North America. We provide teams with a background in Lean Product Development as a part of our service portfolio. We use agile methodologies and adapt them to the situation and needs of our clients. If you are interested in how we could partner with your organization to build a great set of new products – Contact Us. We would be glad to take the time to discuss your needs.
Rotating team members on agile software development teams is a controversial subject. Some leaders in the agile community are strongly opposed to the idea and won’t consider it at any level. Others are open to the subject, but frankly too concerned about the possible downsides to actively plan rotations or even hint to their customers it might be a good idea. And of course, there are the wild-eyed optimists who claim it is the best idea possible for every situation.
Our focus for this article is dedicated teams – teams with members selected for their skills and reliability over the long run. Typically, dedicated teams have no set sunset. They are dedicated to a product or part of a product suite and they generally stay through the active development and maintenance of a product lifecycle – which for enterprise software maybe years. But, that said, the ideas that bring up the subject of rotating members of a dedicated team could apply to any long term project, especially with smaller (3-5 member) teams.
And let’s be honest about one other thing too: the longer the project or product lifecycle, the more likely it is there will be an «unplanned» member rotation. Births, deaths, illness, vacations, career advancements and changes – all sorts of life events have to be managed as a part of maintaining a dedicated team. Even if the time a member is away is relatively short, in less than two weeks, the impact on the productivity of a small team needs to be managed to continue to meet client schedules and expectations. In some cases, the remaining team members can sustain production for a period of time by adding additional hours daily and on weekends, but eventually, that will take a toll on their personal commitment to the team. And when there is an unplanned need to bring in a replacement, there are consequences to the team regardless of the additional manpower provided. In fact, it is well understood that if for some reason two members of a small team needed to be replaced over a short period of time, it would be catastrophic for the team. Bringing the new member «up-to-speed» with mentoring and knowledge transfer takes time and effort of other team members away from their work. And, there is the well-understood impact of a team «forming, storming, norming, and performing» cycles as described by Tuckman. Changing a member of a small team always creates issues. Without some planning and forethought – it can kill the effectiveness of a team for an extended period of time.
So – why would anyone want to consider the idea of rotating team members on dedicated agile teams?
If unplanned changes in a dedicated team are going to happen anyway, why not be prepared? Why not have the process for selecting, integrating, training and mentoring a new team member planned, documented and tested before it actually happens? Why wouldn’t you want the expectation that «this can happen» and «this is how we deal with it» in place and in front of the team and the client from the beginning?
The longer a team works on a product, the more likely they are to develop «tunnel-vision.» They see the UI, but they become blind to the problems a new user might encounter trying to use it. They know there are newer technologies that might make something more efficient or resilient, but it takes time to test, advocate change, and demo the option to the client team. If what you have works, is it really worth the effort? The longer a team works together, the more «normal» the little quirks about a product become. In the long run, it can make them resistant to needed change and reluctant to suggest options.
Working with the same people, on the same product, eventually leads to a level of isolation that can begin to make it difficult to want to get started on the «same old stuff» each day. Developers are part of «geek culture» and love to see new technologies, get input from other sources and try «cool» things. When this happens, production slips and members of the team may become less committed to the success of the product they are working on. It doesn’t happen in a day; it is a slow drip that eventually eats away at the team and makes it less effective. It can also make individuals on the team consider career changes because they are afraid their resume will reflect stagnation rather than stability.
Bringing in «fresh (but experienced) blood» can bring cross-pollination from other experiences, new points of view on coding practices and processes, a new look at alternatives as you move forward and other benefits from another set of eyes on the project. If long term members of the project are not ready to accept new ideas, they can create strong resistance, but if they are positively primed for the idea by considering they could also benefit individually and as a team, it can be a shot in the arm for the team.
«Ownership» of a product, or an area of responsibility, can be a strong motivator for a team. Their understanding of its deeper value and continued success is part of their pride and keeps the team on track. But, there is also a downside. If the team is the single point of knowledge and «truth» for a product, they are also the single point of failure. If there is no base of knowledge about the product outside of the team, in the wider pool of developers around them, there is no way to replace a team member easily or help them if there is a problem that causes a loss of a member or if the team runs into a serious internal disagreement (it does happen).
Operationally, these long-term teams become silos. Outside the team, they are the go-to subject matter experts that always have the answers. Inside the team, individuals tend to become specialists, filling a niche that no one else can come close to. This not only runs against the whole concept of «agile organizations» – it becomes a growing risk within the organization.
There are more reasons too – but those concerns represent some of the more common drivers of the idea. They are all real issues and the problems the teams dealing with them have an impact on the projects they are in. But – does planned rotation actually solve the problems? Does the upside outweigh the downsides? Can rotation be planned well enough to overcome internal team dynamics? Will the supposed benefits last long enough to make rotations something you want to do? Can you actually present a case that would make client support, rather than oppose, the practice?
The answer would have to be – it all depends on implementation.
Like any change, member rotations have to be sold internally before they can be implemented.
Frank conversations about the health of teams, experiences in long term engagements have to be surfaced and alternative solutions have to be discussed.
The timing and requirements for new members have to be considered and accepted by the existing team members. Simply dumping the idea on them without preparation is sure to bring disaster.
The level of the incoming team member will make a difference in acceptance. Replacing a senior member with another senior developer may be more difficult than bringing in a mid-level or junior developer in their place. With less seniority, the new member will have lower expectations and less to live up to. They will be more accepting during knowledge transfer and mentoring and give existing team members new opportunities to grow. But if the outgoing member is considered to be a team leader, the impact may be very deep no matter who is brought in.
If the practice is fairly new within the organization, replacing a team member is likely to be more problematic regardless of planning and thought. The practice can be new institutionally or within the team, it really doesn’t matter. If team members are not experienced with the concept, issues will arise. Assuming the issue will iron themselves out eventually is not a good way to manage change.
Frequency is important. Single-member rotation will always cause thrash and lost productivity no matter how well it is planned. A team can only sustain so much change without becoming distracted and losing their center. In complex environments, it may take a considerable time for a new member to build up the necessary knowledge base. Most industry experience seems to circle around a period between six and nine months for the change of one member. More than that and the team might never gain cohesion again. Less than that and silos will begin to form. But, there is no perfect point. You can’t change a member during a critical release for a product, no matter what the calendar says. You have to work with the client team to gain acceptance and cooperation. Timing is a hard nut to crack and will be different in every situation.
This is an important and evolving area of management for outsourced agile teams. It is not widely discussed in the software development industry. Clients come to outsourcing vendors to avoid issues like team cohesion, resilience, and long-term stability. It may be difficult to bring them into a conversation about an issue that is seen as a vendor responsibility.
But, there are some ideas that are coming forward and worth considering. Larger outsourcing vendors can propose a dedicated «pool» rather than a team. The actual team in production continues to be a small number, but the vendor commits to a larger group, perhaps 7-10 including the active team, of developers that are involved and can become a team member with less overhead from change. This allows the members of the pool to become involved in project and product discussions, review code, and be the sounding board for ideas. There has to be an adjustment of the cost to allow this kind of an arrangement and a clear commitment by the vendor to avoiding the issues that are considered part of dedicated team contracts, but in certain situations, it is worth considering.
In the final analysis, it is hard to value the practice of rotating team members on dedicated teams. It can seem like a great idea if you have experienced the downsides of long-term engagements where unplanned changes and team stagnation become barriers to success. If the motivation, implementation, and outcomes are not carefully considered and monitored, it can become a serious distraction from productive development. Neither outcome is good so this is an important consideration and the decisions are likely to be different in every situation.
If you have experience with team member rotation (and not just fears or wild optimism) – I would be interested to hear your thoughts. This is still an unsettled area in agile team dynamics.
Scio is a provider of outsourced, dedicated and project teams for agile software development to our nearshore clients in North America. We have experience with many team and project configurations and would love to discuss how we could help with your next project. Please contact us with your questions.
But that is the rub. We’re examining a scenario where they need to extend themselves into new technologies and possibly change their operations significantly. And because we’re assuming their teams are informal, separate silos – we’re also assuming they know about the higher efficiencies they could achieve if they began to shift to a DevOps methodology but – again, like our second scenario, they have existing customers and products/services in the field to maintain and support. Like most companies in this situation, their backlog of feature requests for their existing software is just what they can handle at the moment. Adding another layer of work would just mean something would have to give. An outsourced development team, in this case, makes sense and this organization is likely to have customer-facing product development well-in-hand. But, what they don’t have is a scalable organization to match the importance of the project and a broad understanding of new technologies and architectures they need to consider to streamline their organization.
Now, of course – a developer could just say, «This is your problem, not mine.» To a degree, they would be right, but you are looking for partner-level answers that indicate a willingness to do whatever is needed to make the product development process work properly and to be in position for the long run if your product is likely to benefit from a continuous development/improvement, DevOps-type release. Possible answers can be all over the board from add-on services that support help desk and application feedback to in-app custom modules. At a minimum, developers should be «in the loop» during validation and early release to assure that application bugs are not being reported as feature requests or issues and a system should be available to allow users to see proposed changes and «vote up or down» features they would value.
The best answers to this question include 
There are a lot more questions you could ask, but these should get you started. The point is to have a conversation with your prospective vendor and come to an understanding of the methodologies they have utilized, the capabilities they bring to the table, and the customer experience you can expect. A conversation can clear up a lot more issues than a written response to an RFI or a proposal for work and give you a better idea if this is a group you can see your team working with. If you are actually looking for a long term partner and not just a team for a short engagement, it would be wise to have that conversation in person – in your offices or theirs. If it requires some travel, it is just part of the expense of finding a good match. It is much better to have your first face-to-face meetings in a positive, forward-looking atmosphere than when a project is underway and you’ve realized that a lot needs to be done to iron out issues.
