Dave and Bob have great comments on my post, Might Three Backlogs Be Better Than One?. Dave is describing situations where management is making reasonable decisions, not incurring management debt, and by extension, technical debt. Bob and I have experience with significant management debt. (Take a look at Musings About Management Debt for more information about what I mean by management debt.)
Let me provide a little more perspective on these situations. The clients range from large systems of up to a million lines of code (but still software-in-the-small) to software-in-the-large systems of 14, 15, 16 million lines of code. These systems have been in existence for more than 5 or 6 years. They are the flagship, and sometimes only, product that creates revenue. In each case, management is fairly new. The product owner players are new. Many of the technical people are new.
No one knows enough to make good decisions. Yes, they should have one backlog, and they don’t know how to prune the defect list. When you’re talking about more than a few thousand defects, the number is just too big. When your builds take longer than one day, when you have no automated tests, when you’re using a configuration management system from the ’70s (ok, not quite that bad, but close), and you don’t know how to break down the work into small chunks, it’s all overwhelming. Oh, and don’t forget the customers breathing down your neck for not just the defects you need to fix yesterday, but the features the sales people promised tomorrow.
One VP told me he could not make the decisions. He was concerned about who he needed (”do I need all of Engineering??”) and the time to rank into one backlog (”We’ll be here all day and we won’t be able to trade off against features and defects”).
He’s inherited a situation not of his making. He knows that if he can get people to start working in an agile way, they could make progress and finish some work. That would make their decision-making easier. But he has no roadmaps for feature sets for the product to see into the short-term or long-term future. He doesn’t know how many of the 1000’s of defects are still valid. (He thinks more than he wants.) Everybody is nervous. No one feels as if he or she can make a decision alone. The notion of a product owner as a “single, wringable neck” (do I credit Mike Dwyer or someone else with that phrase?) is not something they are ready for. They wanted a committee. I did manage to talk them into a committee of 2: one technical person and one marketing person. That technical person is the erstwhile project manager and the marketing person is talking himself into being a product owner.
I don’t claim these folks are agile. I don’t think they would either. They are working in timeboxed iterations. They are trying to finish valuable chunks of work in those timeboxes. They are struggling with how to make their decisions.
One thing I know about decisions is that the smaller the decision, the easier it is to make it. When you have to make tons of decisions that last forever, it’s really difficult, especially if you think you don’t know enough. At first, they all thought their technical debt was too huge to make inroads. But when I explained how to break down their technical debt into user stories, and that they didn’t have to tackle everything at once, that if they could just get the build to take less than a day they would already be ahead of the game. They didn’t need to stop developing features or fixing problems to address their technical debt.
As we see more people who have used a phased approach to development for years, and have not had tremendous success move to agile approaches, we will see people who may not be ready for real agile, but are ready (desperate?) to try something else that will provide value. We need to help them move from their previous insufficient decision-making to decision-making that will work. I do like baby steps. (See Small Steps Are Good; Be Careful What You Call Those Steps).
I do worry about the issue of three backlogs. In the face of no decisions, I still think it’s better to make some decisions even if the outcome of those decisions is not one backog. Maybe other people have had better results nudging decision-free organizations to decisions faster than I have. I do think that the visibility of the different kinds of work can help people out of their defeatist attitude of “We have so much to do, we can never finish it.” One of these clients is actually pruning their defect list this week. The reason they can do that is because they took one story off the technical debt list, finished it, made so much more progress in just two weeks that the person-who-might-be-called-the-product-owner-but-is-resisting-the-role asked if they could finish a few defects in the next iteration, and how many did they really have anyway? They have bought themselves room to breathe.
Agile–real agile–is about making decisions based on business value, and delivering valuable chunks of work in a small timebox. If you have an organization that can’t decide on business value, you are in trouble. If you have better ideas, I’d love to hear them.
