Agile team communication

Encouraging good communication within a team is one of Agile’s key areas of success. From daily stand-ups to pair programming, refinement and retrospective meetings, working in an open and collaborative way is a core tenet of Agile, whichever framework or methodology you subscribe to.

No hierarchy?

Many Agile approaches attempt to instigate flat organisational structures, where everyone on a team is (theoretically) on equal terms. You’ll also encounter evangelists using somewhat counter-productive phrases, such as “no more managers” or “remove all hierarchy” or similar calls promoting the abolition of traditional reporting structures.

In reality, you’ll find that the world (and by extension, all our work) is inherently hierarchical. Even a typical Scrum team has an implicit hierarchy in the form of the Product Owner. Sure, they don’t manage the team in the traditional sense – and in more mature Agile teams, they won’t be dictating what is included in each sprint – but they do have some authority. They get to choose this feature over that, set work priorities, time-box development activity and more – they’re just not micro-managing the technical development.

Scrum of Scrums

When there is more than one team, one approach to coordinate their efforts is the Scrum of Scrums:

With this approach, each Scrum team proceeds as normal, but each team identifies one person who attends the Scrum of Scrums meeting to coordinate the work of multiple Scrum teams. These meetings are analogous to the daily Scrum meeting, but do not necessarily happen every day.

The team member from each team attending the Scrum of Scrums is generally known as the team’s “ambassador”. Interestingly, the role that attends this meeting is not fixed (it could be the Scrum Master, Product Owner or one of the technical contributors). This leaves three important issues:

1. What is the agenda and knowledge of the attendee – business and technical roles often have conflicting priorities (and an Agile coach / Scrum Master may not understand either).
2. When there is inevitably some conflict between teams (priority, dependencies, solution architecture etc.), who is ultimately responsible for making those decisions?
3. Whose responsibility is it to maintain an overall product direction for the teams? What controls are in place to ensure the Scrum of Scrums team is able to reach a (consistent) consensus?

Network approach to communication

In Setchu, instead of using the Scrum of Scrums technique, it uses a predefined two-tier hierarchy. Multiple Agile feature teams are accountable to a single control team (made up of a Product Owner and Product Architect on equal standing):

Network based communication.

Teams (and any member thereof) are strongly encouraged to communicate informally and often, in a network manner, between each other to resolve minor issues and dependencies. There’s no hierarchy between the feature teams, but they are expected to try to reach decisions both sides are comfortable with, for most day-to-day interactions. Whenever that’s not possible or when a discussion highlights a wider concern, the issue is bubbled up to their (mutual) control team:

The control team is able to offer guidance and make decisions that are in the best interests of the overall product. As this team is a split between business and technical concerns, it is able to provide balanced solutions (and assess the wider impact) to their feature teams.

In this model, each team has clear ownership of its responsibility (and authority). When there is any ambiguity, there is a well-defined, central authority present to resolve the conflict – who are also ultimately accountable for the success of the product.

Managing technical debt

One common question I hear from teams new to Agile is “How do you manage technical debt?”. Agile is often blamed for producing more technical debt than more traditional approaches – whether or not that’s true, everyone should have a mechanism for tackling it.

What is technical debt?

For anyone unfamiliar with the term, very basically, technical debt is any underlying element of your software that you should rework at some point in the future. Usually as a result of a previous decision or (in)activity that will impact the long-term value of your product, if left unaddressed.

It differs from a change initiated by the business in that it will usually be something either imperceptible to anyone non-technical and / or not involved in the technical implementation of the product (or certainly not obvious).

Ward Cunningham, credited with coining the term, describes this concept in the following way:

“Shipping first-time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite. Objects make the cost of this transaction tolerable. The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a stand-still under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation, object-oriented or otherwise.”

He refers to object-oriented programming, but you’ll appreciate the concept applies universally, regardless of paradigm.

Unplanned technical debt

Unplanned technical debt is usually the consequence of external change, time pressures or a lack of understanding.

For example, maybe you produced a service that made heavy use of a rate-limited external API, on the assumption that your expected traffic volumes would never approach close to that value. Then, your product is a runaway success and you end up with more traffic than the rate limit allows, degrading performance.

Another example could be that your project made use of a UI library to produce your website, but now there are newer browser versions that the library does not handle, breaking layout and functionality in modern browsers.

You may have written an inefficient search algorithm, as you had to produce something very quickly at the time – but with further optimisation you could save significant server resources, needed for other processes going forwards.

From personal experience, I’ve had situations where I’ve discovered a much more elegant solution to a problem after the fact (where refactoring would improve pace of change and customer experience), towards the end of a project.

Planned technical debt

Sometimes you just have to accept that being able to produce something fast is occasionally better than (pro-actively) spending additional time on quality. For example, it’s quite valid to attempt to prove a concept in the quickest way possible, usually to answer an unknown factor (“will this work?”), over longer-term concerns.

This could result in things like a conscious decision not to include logging or perhaps you chose to skip adding any build automation, knowing that they would both be useful longer term. The key points with this approach is that the team has agreed the priorities, potential impact and any mitigation up front – the consequences of the situation are understood. As long as you address the issue later (or make a conscious decision to live with the issue), based on the business value balance, that’s fine.

When planned technical debt becomes particularly unhealthy, is when it emerges from a pressured, one-sided source – instead of as a natural result of collaborative effort. In Agile teams, this is usually the result of a dictatorial (bad) Product Owner – or someone else able to pressure the team into focusing on non-technical priorities, over the team’s overall agreed priorities. You could argue this is actually unplanned debt – but that divorces the responsibility from the stakeholders, who ultimately need to acknowledge that they have chosen this path.

The danger here is that the potential consequences of this type of technical debt are not understood. That’s a risky place to be – unbounded problems have a tendency to spread quickly – akin to spending on a credit card with no limit (and no one ever checking the balance). If your technical debt exceeds the value of the product, you’ve failed.

Balancing value

Successful software projects eventually need to achieve a level of balance between business functionality and technical architecture.

Too much focus on either side is not good. Businesses tend to focus on tactile features over practicality, while development teams want to produce academically elegant solutions that no one may actually want (or simply spend more time on it than the business value justifies).

Regardless on the cause of the debt, the way you tackle technical debt is largely the same. The team needs to prioritise effort together.

If your backlog refinement meetings are genuinely collaborative then you’d ideally have discussed and agreed your prioritisation of work to include a balance of business and technical needs – minimising debt in the first place.

While that may be the ideal, striking that balance isn’t always very successful, for a variety of reasons. Additionally, unplanned technical debt is a constant unseen threat – and it can build up at any time, even with the best of intentions.

Newly discovered technical debt should be bubbled-up (flagged) so that it can be addressed by the team. This means adding a story to the backlog with a description of the problem and optionally including a proposal to resolve it. When your backlog refinement meeting (grooming) occurs, you should have a mechanism to trigger triage of new stories, prompting a discussion about the issue. From there, your technical debt becomes like any other story being groomed:

• Flesh out the requirement – is it a problem?
• Break down any large chunks into smaller, manageable activities.
• Agree the acceptance criteria for it to be considered resolved (done).
• Prioritise based on the value to the product / feature.
• Add the stories to the appropriate sprint backlog.
• Review your balance of priorities again at the next planning session.

That’s it – when you become aware of technical debt, flag it by creating a story to represent it, let the team decide when and how it needs to be tackled – then deliver on your commitment.