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by Anthony Boobier on 23 August 2011
When identifying impediments or issues on an agile development project, I’m struck by that Yogi-ism “It’s Déjà vu all over again”. Teams can be so focussed on resolving an issue and then rapidly moving on, that they don’t take stock as to why the problem occurred in the first place; what was the root cause? Retrospectives are a good way to deal with problems in agile projects, if we can remember the problems that occurred during an iteration and if indeed they were the real issue.
Impediments
In agile development projects, the key is to identify and resolve impediments within a local project team as quickly as possible. An impediment or issue is anything that prevents a team from performing their work as effectively as possible, something that could prevent or delay delivery of the product. In Scrum the mechanism to log and monitor these is the Impediments backlog, or Issues or Blockers list.
Each team member has a specific opportunity to identify impediments during the daily Scrum meeting. It is improtant that specific blocked tasks or features, along with more general problems that have been identified are made visible to all. When there's a problem, write it up on the board. Making problems explicit encourages us to deal with them; If it’s not visible it can’t be a problem.
The Scrum Master is charged with ensuring impediments get resolved, taking pressure off the team so that (as Don Reinersten comments) they can feel “If you’re going to worry about it I won’t!”. The role of the Scrum Master should be not just to own and remove these impediments (where practical), but also to diagnose problems, ensure the implementation of countermeasures and assess their effectiveness.
Continuous Improvement
Why wait till the retrospective to look at problem solving for any impediments raised during an iteration? Why not look to continuously Improve organisational policies and procedures. All too often Scrum teams look for local project optimatzation and then teams have to re-learn when a ne w project comes along. While it is good to remove a problem, it’s even better to prevent it from occurring again; even it’s for another team.
Problem Countermeasure board
Mary and Tom Poppendieck suggest using a Problem Countermeasure board and putting this next to the visual control board for the team. By doing this we can extend the Impediments backlog and enable a leaner approach to continuous imrovement.
The following is Problem-Countermeasure board columns are based on the work ofJason Yip.
Fig 1: Problem Countermeasure Board column headings
Whenever someone identifies a problem they should:
- write it on the board, along with containment or workaround if problem cannot be resolved immediately
- put a block symbol on the team board on the associated task or feature
- date stamp when it first occurred
- find an owner
If an Issue stays around for too long it has a nasty habit of causing problems throughout the whole system, the blocked area also becomes the bottleneck for our system and constrains the flow of work.
Each time the problem re-surfaces, update the Problem-Countermeasure board. Add a flag to indicate it has impacted the team again and by how much time. This approach:
- quantifies the impact of any impediments, along with effectiveness of their associated countermeasures
- validates actual impediments and eliminates those which do not actually exist (but that we though did !)
- prioritises the impediments which are having most impact upon the team
Fig 2: Problem Countermeasure Board content decscriptions
The key focus is to identify what is the root cause of the problem,(e.g. using 5 whys but never stopping at an individual) how can you ensure it will not occur again or manifest itself elsewhere. Don’t close a problem until you have checked the impact of any countermeasures that have been implemented.
Summary
Don’t get stuck in a time loop and solve the same problem over and over again on your agile development projects. Ensure you find the root cause of your problems and implement preventative solutions in a timely manner so “new” impediments don’t give you a feeling of déjà vu…
