It's never to late to learn new skills

It is now roughly a year since the last post. It was an interesting year but I won't be writing about it now, perhaps sometime in the future i will. Instead I am going to write a little about my new project in personal development.

Learning some basic coding skills

I realized I have spent the last 20 or so years learning all the basic skills for making games except for programming so it is about time I do something about that and get a decent hunch about how to do the programming part too.

I will primarily focus on learning how to program in JavaScript. This choice is based on three fundamental arguments.

1: JavaScript is sufficiently capable of teaching me what I need about Object Oriented Programming and Test Driven Development. From what little I understand about it these methods of writing code is rather transportable between different languages. It is also rich enough for making fully fledge gameplay although perhaps not the most ambitious scales of simulations such as individually thinking soldiers in big armies or fluid dynamic physics and such but those are not needed.

2: JavaScript is coming very strong in the world of game development. My prediction says that in a few years most people who build games build them with JavaScript, CSS and Html5. And several will be using various webgl libraries so create nice 3D games too.

3: JavaScript has an awesomely fast speed of iteration. Change something and get feedback in the implemented game within about 2 seconds. About the same speed for getting feedback from jsTestDriver for unit tests or FireBug/Chrome console for coding errors. This rapid Cycle Time extends to the deployment pipeline which, by having a git clone in the public area of My Dropbox all I need to do to send a test product to a tester on the internet is:

- Git pull

- Paste the link to the test subject. Or make them refresh if they already are there.

The new version is live and in use within about 10 sec on average a bit depending on how moody dropbox is, the time ranges from about 4 sec to up towards a whole minute whenever dropbox is having problems or suffering from heavy use or whatever it might be that makes it slow during american office hours.

There are a few more arguments I could raise about the choice of tech to study through such as having the internet full of people who are going through the same experience, lots of open source material, plenty of documentation with browser API's and so on. Now i got to go back to figuring out how to replace nasty if sandwiches with less horrible code.

Another good reason is that a good friend and great programmer said something like "JavaScript feels so rebellious compared to C". I like rebellious things.

Agile Failures

There has been a lot of almost mainstream media whining about how projects fail despite using an agile development methodology. Lots of blog posts about how agile cause trouble and how scrum fails in companies.

This post aims to start a journey which looks at my perspective of this trend. The journey begins with looking at the businesses which invest in projects and we’ll begin with separating these into two major factions.

Faction 1: Profitable business.

The profitable business has found a way to reproduce a profitable sale. Steve Blank uses the phrase “repeatable sales model”. My interpretation of this is that there is a potential market value which is reliably converted into money through the business activities. The repeatability causes a reliable equation to play out where you have a high chance of staying on top of positive revenue through conducting very low risk maneuvers until the equation changes when you have the option to adjust to maintain your profits.

Faction 2: Not yet profitable business

The not yet profitable business has bigger costs than earnings. This is quite simple and includes everything which is not yet profitable. In many cases you can see a profitable business include portions of this in the profitable equation, for example by making design improvements or product line extensions. The more common scenario is however attempts at creating a profitable business out of an idea.

Now that we have these two major factions we have a tool for understanding several ways to achieve failures which will make any methodology fail. Since everyone has learned that the typical waterfall project is going to fail by default it’s not that interesting to talk about, but we’ll try and stick to general failures which can be blamed on Agile.

To predict how you will fail you can start with asking yourself: where does the money that finances the project come from? If it is financed by an already profitable business you have a particular case. If it is financed by venture capital you have another and if it is financed by yourself, often as some type of hobby, you have a third. Among these three candidates you have one in particular which spells uncomfortable failure louder than the others. The least loud failure is when you are paying yourself. No one expects success from a hobby. If you are funded by venture capital you are expected to fail about 90% of the time. No one is surprised when investments fail to find a return. The loudest failure is when an already profitable business invests in unprofitable projects. These also seem to be the ones which plays the blame game and tries to blame agile methodologies for their failures.

If you look at an already profitable business from a capitalistic perspective you would think they should not invest in a new “not yet profitable business” and rather send that money to their investors. But for various reasons they generally don’t operate this way but attempts to reproduce profitability in new innovative manners. These become complicated matters.

A profitable business has generally spent a great lot of effort to achieve their profits. As a game designer knows you will be conditioned by expending effort at achieving a goal. So the profitable business has been conditioned by its own success. This conditioning is cultural within that company. This culture tends to have an agenda which prioritizes protecting the profitable business against risks. The practical implementation of this protection is commonly called bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy causes risky product experiments to have such a great cost that they have to be cancelled before they reach the market. It is better to send the investment immediately into the trash bin than to use it to cause a potential harm to an already profitable business. This also has the benefit of creating plenty of work for bureaucrats who thereby can be hired to handle the paperwork.

Eventually this causes polarization within the company where creative forces such as marketing eventually is urged to brute force the bureaucracy to revitalize a now aged brand. They can see their market share slowly being poached by competitors. At this point in time the culture has set really well. The creative forces rally enough of a budget to overcome the cost hurdle set by the bureaucrats and begin their project.

Since times change and you learn that using “traditional methodologies” will cause failure this project must begin to work with an Agile methodology, they usually try to work with scrum.

The root of the problem here is that scrum does not remove the cultural conditioning which practically has become embodied within the bureaucratic parts of the company. There will be plenty of reasons to interpret the new project as a risk to the profitable business and thereby justifying interference.

I don’t know if there is any particular solution to this problem but I do believe that a better understanding of this structure will reduce the costs of failure for any business which is investing in any type of projects. And this is just the beginning.

To propose a practical solution to this I will recommend making investments into new business areas at a healthy distance from currently profitable businesses. Mere proximity might increase the cost of failure.

From my experience with scrum I interpret some of the rules as engineered to refuse interference from bureaucracy. These rules cause a kind of cultural power struggle within an already profitable business when scrum is introduced. Power is usually owned by the bureaucrats and scrum becomes the loser and an embodied target for the blame game.

The Symptom of Repeated Success

This is a post about something I have heard about happening from some distance. Organizations working with scrum or similar methodologies reach the conclusion that the methodology does not fit them. This is a hypothesis about why that tends to happen and a bit of reasoning around the problem.

As developers begin working with scrum or other agile methodologies it often appears as if they manage to achieve a productivity boost and gain features at a faster rate than they were used to. The teams really like this and find it to be a good practice. There is however one problem surfacing relatively often which present itself as a positive symptom of continuous and rapid success. However, behind this seemingly great facade hides a problem that seems eeringly common. The rapid increase in productivity and success is often a symptom of well... failure.

Now I'll have to explain, yay!

The problem is that the team is not achieving manageable failures. Every backlog item which comes from the product owner is successfully implemented and done within a sprint or two of work. Often each sprint contain several backlog items and the product takes on several new features in rapid succession. Now there is one of two possible states that you are in, one of these is more probable to be true and the other is likely closer to resembling a joyous pipe dream:

1: Awesome!!

• The production is going on rails and creating fully tested and reliable user value with every backlog item which is started. The Product Owner is a domain expert in the field, has incredible insights in design and production techniques and is well connected with the market.

2: Hmm, what did the user feedback say again? Does that really match our Definition of Done? Or what does it really say?

• The testing of user value does not inform the team about how much value they have been producing and they are developing features blindly.

If your team is experiencing this symptom of the repeated success you have a statistically troublesome scenario. The problem is that for the "Awesome!!" result to really occur you need to have one of the best Product Owners in the world. These guys are quite rare. You might also be part of an organization which is building an existing product within an existing market, this is the metaphorical equivalent of a Nuclear Power plant. The problem is known and the solution is known.

The user Values you develop are not known beforehand

It is quite likely that you are developing a product which aims for a niche market or a low-cost alternative within an existing market. In these cases your Product Owner will need to use the development team to run experiments against the market to find out how to handle the unknown factors. Be especially aware if you are making a new product in a new market, that means your hypothesis will be wrong almost all the time.

As any scientist will know you will not always validate all hypothesis as being true from their first experiments. This is where the failure of agile and scrum screams its loudest, at least from my perspective as Game Designer. I know that even the best of designers will only have a theoretical foundation which pre-validates a portion of the designs. A generous estimate says that you will be roughly correct maybe 70% of the time, but each feature contain several sub-hypothesis which in turn has about the same probability of success. This means that more than 20% of your Backlog will be dead wrong. And now I am being very nice about that number...

Features which are not valid user value is waste which is expensive to clean up

If you are part of an agile team which fails to invalidate the hypothesis within the Backlog be aware that you are most likely producing a huge design debt within the product you are working on. Not only are you failing to find the defects before they impact the user experience, but you are also failing to understand where the real user value actually reside and are thereby effectively torpedoing future design efforts aimed at cleaning up the debt.

Personally I would advice that the only reliable way to step out of this trap if you are sitting in it is to treat design debt just as you treat technical debt. Design Debt most commonly rears its ugly head as increased complexity within the user experience. Once there are many features of surmised value within the product which has been deployed it becomes quite difficult to separate the ones which have user value from the ones which don't. This is a type of debt which grows fast with compounding interests because the probability that any future backlog actually does anything good to the user value drops with the complexity of the already faulty design. This is well supported by how system complexity also increases exponentially with the number of components as neatly described by Metcalfe's Law.

The way out of Debt is slow and painful

You will need to slow down and begin to refactor the user value through effective measurement within the product. The more common attempt is to increase the volume of features which has the result of increasing the volume of produced waste.

I am not too sure about development teams which have had the ability to climb out of this type of mess. The most common exit strategy I hear people deploy is to package the failed product as "valuable experience" then starting over with a new vision, mostly to achieve the same experience next time. There are also other tricks of business magic which some have been able to perform where they can sell the work done to wealthy customers.

Conclusion

Beware of agile teams that do not report failures from the interpretation of relevant feedback from valid tests. These projects are quite likely to be creating delayed waste which have impact enough to be fatal to the project. When working on a particular backlog item ask yourself: "How would the statement that this feature is waste be defeated by a valid proof to the contrary?"

If the best answer you think you will get is a whole lot of opinions then you have a good reason to help improve the development process.