What can IT learn from F1?

So i'm a great F1 fan - I love lots of parts about the sport and to be honest I can't quite rationalise some of these things; on the face of it, the industry makes a lot of noise and spends huge amounts of money making bits of metal and rubber go faster and faster round in circles. It makes millionaires, advertises banking, burns many gallons of fossil fuel and ultimately what do you achieve? Not a great deal .. i'm not even sure they can lay claim to non-stick frying pans or velcro like the space programme can.

Horses and Stable Doors

Wikipedia shut down recently in protest against the proposed SOPA bill. And it got me thinking about online piracy itself - why is it there? Why is it such a problem?

If you stop to consider the origins and ethos of the internet it starts to make some sense. Look at why we build friendships, why we congregate in groups, why we created local area networks, and why we then joined them together with such enthusiasm. Our desire is simply to share.

Sharing is a good thing, right? We share ideas, we gossip, goodness knows I love Apple's Bonjour protocol because it finds printers, Macs and devices I didn't know I had. And then it lets me communicate with them. I move documents around, I use DLNA to share music, watch films, I use the internet to share ideas, to find out how to repair my car, to laugh at other peoples' misfortune (and marvel at their friends who somehow manage to video it).

At its core, the value of The Internet is only sharing. But we didn't tell it what to share. We didn't differentiate between the pattern of bits making up a copyright-protected audio file, and the pattern of bits making up my Word document. Primarily because we weren't interested - we were just evolving our natural instinct to the world of technology.

So when your business depends on sharing and you charge people for the privilege, you need to be careful. My advice - steer clear. Why would a recruiter publish the client details for all his vacancies? A trader share their deals? A journalist share their sources? And why would a business built upon the premise that sharing 'costs' find a use for the internet?

But wait, here comes the music industry, already making a tidy profit using technology to package up recordings and distribute them - deciding to leverage the internet as a sales channel. Of course, it gives them an opportunity to slash their production costs, revert to their core 'digital' product, drop any 'value add' around gatefold sleeves, picture discs, exclusive special edition booklets - dare I say it - analogue warmth versus digital convenience and massively open up a much wider audience. Now we can start to see their mistake - times have changed, sharing is easier now - we don't need a distribution chain, shops on every street corner, physical media and home-based playback systems - all we need is an mp3 player and the internet. In the blink of an eye, their core business model has disappeared. Remind me - what am I paying £13 for again?

I'm sorry, guys, but this is a bed you made for yourself. No surprise then that much of this noise around SOPA makes no sense. Why would we stop sharing? Why would we censor? Why would we have a problem with people communicating freely?

Not so fast and not so furious

Most of the talk nowadays is around fast networks - gigabit LANs, fast broadband, 3G data. And it's fair to say that he quicker we can get the data to our front door, the more functionality is available to us, and the more possibilities it opens up. Anyone fancy live TV over he Internet? Well, it's here! Anyone fancy software downloads via the net, or cloud syncing of large mounts of data? All here, today, ready for you to take advantage of.

But what about the low bandwidth connections we are often left with? Think they are a thing of the past? Think that it's only people in remote areas of the country, or those with older phones? Nope even those of us with posh iPhones and androids suffer from slow networks. I'm typing this on the train and my network connection is terrible. I was trying to get a connection from the office in the centre of London the other day too and it was awful. Why? Well, I was in the middle of the building with about 2ft if concrete between my phone and the outside world!

So what does his mean? I think it means that there are plenty of us on slow network connections even in this day and age. And our experience is often not considered. Take, for example trying to load the Apple 'App Store' app on a slow network connection. You are presented with a blank screen, shortly followed by a spinning icon which simply says 'loading'. You try again - same story. Try another app - a slightly different experience, but still unrewarding and often disjointed compared with the WLAN-based experience.

The message? Don't assume bandwidth - it's not always there!

Agile: Getting it

Talking to one of my scrum team members the other day, I learned that one of their techniques was to split longer stories into pieces so that they would fit into a sprint. Not particularly a problem I thought - until I discovered that they literally split it into two. And decided that 'done' for the part of the story in sprint 1 was simply defined as 50% through the work, and 'done' in sprint 2 was when it had all been tested and was ready.

I also learned about a PM who, determined to deliver his project in the new 'agile' way, had shared his project plan with a wider audience:

sprint 1 - requirements gathering
sprint 2 - design
sprint 3 - build
sprint 4 - test

I wonder what sprint 5 would have looked like?

I also discovered a project manager claiming to be both PM, scrum-master and product owner. I'm quite surprised that he wasn't also planning to do some of the testing.

The problem is clear - when we say we're agile, how do we know? And when we say we're using scrum, are we really?

Some simple 'is this a scrum' tests:

Is the team between 4 and 9 in size?
I've seen one-man scrums claimed before, and teams > 10 trying to be a scrum. Clearly 7 +/- 2 is ideal, but i'd settle for between 3 and 10.

Who distributes the work?
If the answer is anything other than 'nobody' then you have a small group of people under the leadership of someone who is likely to be using scrum to avoid taking responsibility. And you need to fire your so-called scrum-master who doesn't have a clue.

Does everyone attend the stand-up?
The answer is clear, but a large offshore supplier quite recently suggested to me that their scrum team would consist of a core team in which some members would 'represent' other members who wouldn't attend the stand-up. I guess these guys would appear to have superhuman delivery characteristics - huge achievements, disproportionate impediments and planned activity far in excess of other 'puny' team members.

What tidy-up activity would be required if we fired you all after this sprint?
Again, if the answer is anything other than 'nothing' then there is something wrong - the basic premise of scrum is that you keep asking the question: what next? And you do it after every sprint, and you must be prepared to completely change direction. Everyone must understand that it is more valuable to have fully delivered 0.5% of a featureset than have partially delivered 80%.

Why are you doing this?
I expect each scrum team member to have an excellent grasp of the work they are doing, not only from a technical perspective, but also from a value perspective. They need to have bought in to the work they are doing, so that they can look for better ways of doing it, so that they question appropriately, and so that they become more than just a pair of hands building something for someone. This is the point of the product owner and the close engagement with the customer. Without it, you have an inefficient team.

I've missed the obvious stuff like - daily stand ups, show & tells, fixed time-boxed iterations, retrospectives, etc. only because these things are perhaps easier to achieve. They are important, though, and should be happening also.

I'll let you know when all my teams pass the tests ..