Remote Developers And The Feature-of-the-week

In all the discussions I’ve had regarding agile and from all the presentations I’ve seen, articles I’ve read, etc, the most valuable thing I’ve heard so far has been what I’ve been calling the feature-of-the-week.

The feature-of-the-week was something I picked up at the very first APLN (Agile Project Leadership Network) group meeting I attended here in Calgary. The presentation was given by a fellow named Jonathan Rasmusson who is a Calgary-based agile coach and software developer (he’s got a blog here). Jonathan was giving an introductory level presentation to the group and talked quite a bit about how to get started. The best advice he had (which is also the best I’ve heard so far) was “don’t get caught up in trying to define agile for a team as part of some big master plan or organizational overhaul… just tell someone you’re going to deliver something that works in a week, then do it. That’s agile”.

I’m not sure if Jonathan actually said feature-of-the-week that day or if I imagined it afterward. If he did say it, I don’t know if he’s the one that actually coined the term, but it doesn’t matter. I credit him for the simplest yet most useful thing I’ve heard so far regarding agile methods in hardware development.

That was an important day for me because I do most of my work with clients remotely, which means I work as part of a development team but instead of being on the other side of the cube wall, I’m on the other side of a phone call. Remote development is not an ideal arrangement but it can work quite well. The communication barriers are obviously higher and I’ve seen that make things difficult. I’ve come to wonder, though, whether its the distance between remote developers that makes things difficult or the way we work and how we measure progress that presents the real difficulties. It was my first time attempting the feature-of-the-week that got me wondering.

In case I haven’t made it obvious, the feature-of-the-week entails writing, testing and releasing code for some feature in a week or less. Not just writing or testing some chunk of code, writing and testing a feature then releasing it to the rest of the team, all in a week or less! A week was a fast turnaround for me since I was used to writing a few weeks worth of code, then coming back to see if it worked.

The first time I tried this with a client, it was obvious that I was committing to a focused and intense approach to development. I was onsite for a week getting acquainted with the project and while onsite, I committed to a delivery from home the following friday. Granted, it was a pretty small delivery but I didn’t realize how hard it would be until I sat down monday and glanced at the calendar. Friday was only 5 days away and I had a lot of work to do.

I’ll spare you all the details, but in a nutshell what started as a series of daunting delivery milestones ended up being the best thing I’ve done as a verification engineer. With the ability to demonstrate my work every 5-10 days (yes… the feature-of-the-week ended up being the feature-of-the-week-or-2) I could show that either:

a) I knew exactly what I was doing; or

b) I was out in left field and in need of help.

Demonstrating – as opposed to telling – is key and the purpose of that wasn’t to prove I was actually working on the other end of the VPN, it was to close a tight feedback loop with the designer. I could ask a question about a feature, code the answer immediately, run it and ask for confirmation soon after (i.e. “take a look at this sim… is that what you meant Tuesday when you said <blah blah blah>?”).

That tight feedback loop kept me on track. I’ll admit to having a few misses, but I was able to recover quickly every time. To understand how the quick recovery was possible, try debugging 5 days worth of code and then 2 months worth of code. Which is easier?

From that experience, these are the lessons I learned:

  • Describing “lines/classes/modules/tests written in a status report” will never be as reliable as “code done and demonstrated”
  • Short tasks are easier to estimate and complete on time than long tasks
  • 1 week screw-ups are easier to fix than 2 month screw-ups
  • As a remote developer, regularly releasing code to the rest of the team is the only way to show them you know what you’re doing.

The last lesson was most important. I’m now convinced that perceived productivity limitations of remote developers aren’t in fact caused by distance alone. They are a product of the way people work together and how they measure progress. Simply put, the feature-of-the-week with it’s weekly deliveries, tight feedback loop and increased transparency made me more productive as a remote contributor (if you want more details, you can tune into an open discussion on our AgileSoC Linkedin group).

A valuable lesson from a very simple idea: telling someone you’re going to deliver something in a week… and then actually doing it!

neil

Q. How long do you write code before you test and release it?

Q. How do you communicate progress as a remote developer? Status reports or passing tests?

One thought on “Remote Developers And The Feature-of-the-week

  1. I am a Verification Engineer myself and am in a regular habit of doing not 2 months but maybe 2 weeks of verification code and then sitting down to testing it. I am of long trying to break free of this habit. This habit I must say is result of doing the entire testing of a feature and not dividing it into simpler sub features.

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