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Agile: how hard can it be?!

14 Dec, 2014
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Yesterday my colleagues and I ran an awesome workshop at the MIT conference in which we built a Rube Goldberg machine using Scrum and Extreme Engineering techniques. As agile coaches one would think that being an Agile team should come naturally to us, but I’d like to share our pitfalls and insights with you since "we learned a lot" about being an agile team and what an incredible powerful model a Rube Goldberg machine is for scaled agile product development.
If you’re not the reading type, check out the video.

Rube … what?
Goldberg. According to Wikipedia; A Rube Goldberg machine is a contraption, invention, device or apparatus that is deliberately over-engineered or overdone to perform a very simple task in a very complicated fashion, usually including a chain reaction. The expression is named after American cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg (1883–1970).
In our case we set out on a 6 by 4 meter stage divided in 5 sections. Each section had a theme like rolling, propulsion, swinging, lifting etc. In a fashion it resembled a large software product that requires to respond to some event in an (for outsiders) incredibly complex matter, by triggering a chain of sub-systems which end in some kind of end-result.

The workspace, scrum boards and build stuff

The workspace, scrum boards and build stuff

Extreme Scrum
During the day 5 teams worked in a total of 10 sprints to create the most incredible machine, experiencing everything one can find during "normal" product development. We had inexperienced team members, little to no documentation, legacy systems whom’s engineering principles were shrouded in mystery, teams that forgot to retrospective, interfaces that were ignored because the problem "lies with the other team". The huge time pressure of the relative small sprint and the complexity of what we were trying to achieve created a pressure cooker that brought these problems to the surface faster than anything else and with Scrum we were forced to face and fix these problems.

Team scrumboard

Team scrumboard

Build, fail, improve, build
“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” – Stephen R. Covey
Having 2 minutes to do your planning makes it very difficult to listen, especially when your head is buzzing with ideas, yet sometimes you have to slow down to speed up. Effective building requires us to really understand what your team mate is going to do, pairing proved a very effective way to slow down your own brain and benefit from both rubber ducking and the insight of your team mate. Once our teams reached 4 members we could pair and drastically improve the outcome.

Deadweight with pneumatic fuse

Deadweight with pneumatic fuse

Once the machine had reached a critical size integration tests started to fail. The teams responded by testing multiple times during the sprint and fix the broken build rather than adding new features. Especially in mechanical engineering that is not a simple as it sounds. Sometimes a part of the machine would be "refactored" and since we did not design for a simple end-to-end test to be applied continuously. It took a couple of sprints to get that right.

A MVP that made it to the final product

A MVP that made it to the final product

"Keep your code clean" we teach teams every day. "Don’t accept technical or functional debt, you know it will slow you down in the end". Yet it is so tempting. Despite a Scrum Master and an "Über Scrum Master" we still had a hard time keeping our workspace clean, refactor broken stuff out, optimise and simplify…
Have an awesome goal
"A true big hairy audacious goal is clear and compelling, serves as unifying focal point of effort, and acts as a clear catalyst for team spirit. It has a clear finish line, so the organization can know when it has achieved the goal; people like to shoot for finish lines." – Collins and Porras, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
Truth is: we got lucky with the venue. Building a machine like this is awesome and inspiring in itself, learning how Extreme Scrum can help teams to build machines better, faster, innovative and with a whole lot more fun is a fantastic goal in itself, but parallel to our build space was a true magnet, something that really focussed the teams and go that extra mile.

The ultimate goal of the machine

The ultimate goal of the machine

Biggest take away
Building things is hard, building under pressure is even harder. Even teams that are aware of the theory will be tempted to throw everything overboard and just start somewhere. Applying Extreme Engineering techniques can truly help you, it’s a simple set of rules but it requires an unparalleled level of discipline. Having a Scrum coach can make all the difference between a successful and failed project.


Want to learn more about using martial arts in product management? Go order the book from bol.com if you are in the Netherlands or Belgium or sign up to get the international edition.

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