http://verraes.net The project was of to a bad start: an inherited legacy codebase, a waterfall contract, and a projected loss. The promise of Kaizen or Continuous Improvement seemed very appealing. But when we tried to incorporate this into our process, it didn’t catch on. Biweekly retrospectives didn’t seem to expose any problems we could improve upon. The ceremonies we tried, like Deming’s Plan-Do-Check-Act cycles, added too much overhead. We were doing something wrong. Continuous Improvement implies that you know exactly where to focus your efforts. Like scientists, we started to experiment, without deciding upfront what we expected the outcome to be. The rules? Make every experiment as small as possible. No meetings, no consensus, no cumbersome evaluation process. We let the results speak for themselves. This talk explores the successes and failures of a team that went from survival mode to learning mode over the course of a year.

1. small
controlled
experiments
@mathiasverraes

2. small
uncontrolled
experiments
@mathiasverraes

3. Mathias Verraes
Independent Consultant
Value Object Comm.V
Student of Systems
Meddler of Models
Labourer of Legacy
verraes.net

4. Fitness landscape

6. Continuous
Improvement

7. "When changing teams or organizations, the
trick is not to try and push them out of their
current behavior. (...) A better idea is to
change parameters in the environment so
that their current situation becomes
unstable and disappears all by itself."
4 Jurgen Appelo6
6 Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders

9. Heavyweight

10. Retrospectives are too slow

11. Unproductive pressure to
improve

13. Daily
Two minutes, after standup

14. Brainstorm rules
"Yes, and... "
Divergence
Convergence7
7 "Thinking in New Boxes", Alan Iny & Luc de Brabandere

15. Avoid upfront consensus
"A meeting is where ideas go to die"
Experiments over opinions

16. "If we have data, let's look at
data. If all we have are
opinions, let's go with mine."
4 Jim Barksdale

17. Avoid upfront expectations
Expectations determine outcomes

18. Low impact
Small, cheap, reversible, low-risk

19. No backlog
Backlogs kill motivation

20. Timeline
Stickies

21. Guarantee veto
Everybody must be heard

22. Measure
selectively & intentionally
Avoid optimising for the metrics

23. Accept uncertainty
Non-scientific
Exposes invisible problems

24. Accept gut feeling
Emotional response is fine

25. Accept failed experiments
Welcome failures as new data points

26. Kaizen Mind
The urgency to improve

27. Climate of Doubt
Assume everything is broken and fixable

28. "If an idea is obviously bad,
find a quick way to test it,
because if it's not bad,
then it's really interesting."
4 Kent Beck

29. Experiment
Deliver
one story a day

30. Experiment
Atomically scoped
stories

31. Experiment
Start every story
in pair

32. Experiment
Testers deploy
independently

33. Experiment
Core Protocols

34. Experiment
Syncing physical
boards

35. If it's not
on a wall or a board,
it's not visual.

36. Experiment
Measure by hand

37. Experiment
Hide the estimate
from the board

38. Experiment
No more
sprint deadlines

39. Experiment
No interrupts after
lunch

40. Experiment
Vizualize cost of
interrupts

41. Experiment
Wall of
Technical Debt8
8 http://verraes.net/2013/07/managed-technical-debt/

43. Use experiments to
detect problems

45. @mathiasverraes
http://verraes.net/2014/03/small-controlled-experiments/
http://verraes.net/workshops