Coding, Agile & Scrum Go Mainstream

Why would BloombergBusiness (BB) devote a whole issue—38,000 words—to the subject of writing computer code and managing computer coders? Because that’s the future.

“Software,” they learned from Marc Andreessen in 2011, “is eating the world.” In the process, software is eating up organizations and executives who don’t understand it or know how to manage it. As the BB article says, “Now that software lives in their pockets, runs their cars and homes, and dominates their waking lives, ignorance is no longer acceptable. The world belongs to people who code. Those who don’t understand will be left behind.” So BB is offering a tour of the strange, magical, mysterious world of software for frightened executives—and everyone else.

This cleverly-written, and often-funny, article by Paul Ford begins with the quandary of an apparently successful executive whose experience and skills are useless in coping with languages he doesn’t understand, management practices with strange names he cannot grasp, people he doesn’t feel comfortable with and threats to his survival as a manager that are all too real. Software development is consuming an ever-larger part of his budget while it is becoming ever central to his, and his organization’s, future.

President Obama participates in an 'Hour of Code' event. (Photo by Andrew Harrer-Pool/Getty Images)

The article follows the executive through an extended lesson in what software is all about. It describes the different languages—Java, Python, C, C++, C#, Perl and so on—along with their strengths, weaknesses and personalities, and even more important the management practices that are used to direct it.

It is safe to say that in the 21st century, it will be as common in high school to learn a couple of languages like Java and Python as it was to study French and Spanish in the 20th century.

Managing Coders

With a light touch, it gives a simplified and amusing account of the executive’s encounter with the terminology and management practices of Scrum, with its daily standups, its Scrum Masters and its sprints.

This is real. A Scrum Master in ninja socks has come into your office and said, ‘We’ve got to budget for apps.’ Should it all go pear-shaped, his career will be just fine. You keep your work in perspective by thinking about barrels of cash.

It gives a fair account of the main management practices of managing software: Agile and Scrum.

There are as many variations of Agile. I’ve had terrible meetings in my life when I sat between two teams and one of them explained, at length, why Agile with Kanban was better than Agile with Scrum. You could smell the money burning

Here is Agile, as I’ve seen it done: You break down your product into a set of simple-to-understand user stories about who needs what. You file those stories into an issue-tracking system, often a commercial product such as JIRA.

You divide work into sprints of a week, two weeks, or whatever suits your management style, and you supply each sprint a name and a goal (implement search, user registration), then the programmers take stories to go off and make them happen.

Every day your team checks in and tries to unblock one another—if you are working on the tool that sends e-mail and the e-mail server isn’t working, you tell everyone. Then someone else steps up to help, or you stick with that story and do the best you can, but everyone needs to be working toward the sprint goal, trying to release some software. And once the sprint is done, you deliver something that actually, really works and move on to the next thing, slowly bringing a large, complex system into operation.

That’s an ideal case. Done well, it avoids magical thinking ('It will all work when they get everything done and wired together'). It has its critics and can seem to have as many branches (c.f. Scrum, Kanban, and 'Agile with Discipline') as Protestantism.

It gives an account of what happens when the troubled executive picks up his courage and attends a daily standup.

One day you go to the pen where they keep the programmers. Their standup starts at 10 a.m., and some hold cups of coffee. They actually stand. Mostly men, a few women. They go around the room, and each person says what he did yesterday, what he plans to do today, and if he has any blockers. Most of the people are in the office, so they’re doing the standup in person; when people are traveling, they do it over chat. Two people are dialed in, the new hires from Boston and Hungary, both with strong accents. They tell the same story as the rest.

The executive gradually becomes comfortable with the world of software.

They will do their standups. And after the standups, they will go off and work in the integrated development environments and write their server-side JavaScript and their client-side JavaScript. Then they will run some tests and check their code into the source code repository, and the continuous integration server will perform tests and checks, and if all goes well, it will deploy the code—perhaps even in August, in some cloud or another. They insist that they’ll do this every day, continuous releases.

Then will come reports. Revenue reports, analytics, lists of new markets to conquer, all manner of new customer data that will be yours to parcel out and distribute. That will be your role, as the owner of the global database of customer intent. Thousands, then millions, of new facts that can help the company plan its sales and product development cycles. A good thing. And, you hope, the new site will generate more revenue, being faster, better, API-driven, and deployed across platforms to Web, mobile Web, and multiple apps…

When the site is introduced, you’ll buy the coders a cake and send them to the JavaScript conference of their choice. You’ve learned that the only appropriate reward for people who write JavaScript is more JavaScript. TMitTB will get his bonus. The CTO is already considering him for new things. You like the CTO. She has become a friend of sorts.

You can feel it, the S, off in the distance, coming toward you. It will arrive in due time, and you will stick it to the front of the VP in your title and all will be well. The coders all smile at you in the hall now that you’ve sat in on code reviews and feature discussions and stood quietly in the middle of standups. You know some of their names, even if you could do a better job of pronouncing them.

Perhaps you have a future in software after all.

Hello World.

Change Or Die

Not all encounters between executives and software will end so happily. Many executives will not make the effort to understand the new world of software that is emerging or the management practices related to it. And the new world will gobble them up and spit them out.

Many will find that mastering software involves shedding some of their basic assumptions about how the world works and how it should be managed. Top-down directives don't work in this world: code responds to intelligence, not authority. Nor does maximizing shareholder value work in a world in which customers are in charge. So the learning involves more than mastering the technical aspects of coding. It involves a different way of understanding and interacting with the world. It is a Copernican revolution in management.

A bonus for executives: once they understand how Agile and Scrum can manage the extraordinary complexities of software development, they will realize they can use the same management expertise to manage the mounting complexity of the rest of their business. In effect, Scrum is a major management discovery.

BB has done executives a great service by providing us with a simplified Baedeker for this strange new world. Death is not inevitable. There is no longer any need to go on faking your way through meetings about software. It can be understood. It is the future.

So read the article. Then re-read it. And then re-read it again.

As the editor says, “It may take a few hours to read, but that’s a small price to pay for adding decades to your career.”

And read also:

Why software is eating the world

Scrum is a major management discovery

Why do managers hate Agile?

Inspect and adapt the Agile Manifesto

Agile: Best kept management secret

Follow Steve Denning on Twitter @stevedenning

Also on Forbes:

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How to Go Agile in State and Local Government: Scrum vs. PMBOK

In the past few years, as state and local governments sought to modernize and release more digital services to meet the needs of citizens during the coronavirus pandemic, they have embraced an agile approach to government service delivery.

In some cases, government agencies have partnered with nonprofit organizations such as Code for America to become nimbler in their development of government services.

“Adopting agile, iterative technology can solve some of government’s biggest challenges and have a transformative impact on people’s lives — building more equitable systems, improving outcomes and reducing the poverty gap,” Alexis Fernández Garcia, a senior program director of Code for America's social safety net portfolio, writes in a StateTech blog.

Agile methodologies have been on state and local governments’ radars for several years. A 2021 report from the IBM Center for the Business of Government explores how agencies have been using agile not just for software development but for a wide range of use cases.

Those include project management, human resources management, policymaking, and contracting and procurement. Agile builds and tests iteratively to ensure that what is developed is what the organization wants.

As agencies look to Strengthen their development and delivery of government services to be more responsive to citizens’ needs, they will increasingly — but not exclusively — need to rely on agile approaches and frameworks such as scrum, experts say. At the same time, they face cultural and organizational hurdles to adopting agile methodologies.

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Diego Lo Giudice, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, says it’s important to align with the Agile Manifesto, or the statement of principles that make up the agile methodology, when thinking about how it could apply to government and how scrum fits into that.

For example, in agile, the highest priority is “to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software,” according to the Agile Alliance.

Another key principle is that agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

Within agile, scrum should be seen as a framework geared toward change, Lo Giudice says. Scrum is a way for software development and other teams to execute and adhere to these principles.

“Scrum is about the way that a software team or a blended cross-functional team operates tactically” in day-to-day operations, says Mike Case, director of growth and delivery operations at Nava, a consultancy and public benefit corporation that works to make government services simple, effective and accessible. “How do they figure out how they’re going to prioritize and divvy up the tactical work at a task level?”

Scrum involves several key concepts, Lo Giudice and Case note, including ceremonies such as quick stand-up meetings to check in on the progress of work and ensuring that updates are focused on what team members need from each other and what the key impediments or blockers there are to progress.

Additionally, scrum is focused on autonomy for teams and delivering value for the business or agency. “It privileges communication between people” rather than one person writing a document that is handed over stating what the person requesting a project wants. In a traditional “waterfall” approach to project management, another person would read those requirements.

“Scrum says, sit down and work directly — face to face or through collaboration tools — and communicate,” Lo Giudice says. “It’s communication over contracts.”

Another key element of scrum is to focus on making progress in increments, or sprints. In a sprint, Case says, teams focus on “dividing projects up into smaller chunks so that you don’t have this one giant deliverable in four months; you have a lot of different two- or three-week sprints to break up the project and also assess your progress as you’re going along.”

During that cycle, teams will go through the analysis, design, coding and testing, operating in a fashion of continuous iteration and continuous delivery. This allows teams to start delivering features that are valuable instead of the full product, Lo Giudice says.

“Instead of thinking about the full product, they start thinking about smaller features that can be delivered and added over time to build the product,” he says. “Instead of taking four months and having a big deliverable after four months, you start delivering every two to four weeks.” 

In contrast to scrum sits the Project Management Institute’s Project Management Body of Knowledge, a project management framework that is more prescriptive than scrum. PMBOK emphasizes a significant amount of upfront planning and a high level of detail early on in the development process.

PMBOK defines roles more clearly, Lo Giudice says. It also emphasizes documentation as well as the role of the project manager, who is tasked with maintaining and updating project schedules. In scrum, there is no similar organization and updating of project schedules because teams are self-managed.

In the PMBOK approach, project managers interface with the business and stakeholders and report on the project status. The scrum approach is more transparent and everyone tends to know what is going on because they can look at the progress being made on sprints.

There is no one-size-fits all approach to government service delivery, Case says. In cases where there are strict timeline constraints mandated by a legislature, it may be more difficulty to apply a scrum framework. “You have to pick and choose depending on your requirements,” Case says.

Most government agencies have not full adopted scrum or PMBOK, Case says, “so, even if you’re fully committed to agile, you need to be able to translate and connect that to other methodologies being used in other dependent agencies or systems so that you’re not totally separated.” 

In government, where the creation and launch of new services has historically taken significantly longer than in the private sector, agile approaches allow government software developers, project managers and program specialists the opportunity to iterate more quickly, pivot on projects and get new services out to citizens faster.

Case says it lets them “see the progress, not hear theoretical updates about percent complete, but to see, ‘What does that front-end user interface look like today? OK, they understand it’s not done, but great, you’re heading in that direction. They expect you’re implementing user research that they hadn’t considered. Great, keep going.’”

Agile allows government officials involved in policy creation to get involved in the development of services and make comments that can be easily incorporated into software or service development, Case says. “And if you’re waiting until the end to see working software, you’re more likely as a policy or program expert to hear, ‘Well, that would be too hard now to change or implement,’” Case adds.  

Lo Giudice says that with agile, government officials “will find out sooner rather than later” whether services are shaping up as expected. “You can make mistakes. And the mistakes that you’ll make are much smaller because you’re breaking the problem of it to sub-problems,” he adds. “You won’t find out six months later that this is not what the business wanted.”

LEARN MORE: Find out about how state and local agencies are moving forward on agile.

While state and local government agencies have made progress in adopting agile methodologies and frameworks such as scrum, they face obstacles to doing so, Lo Giudice and Case say.

One major impediment is the structure of government procurement, where contracts tend to adhere to the PMBOK approach for project delivery. Requests for proposals tend to be anti-agile, Lo Giudice says. A better approach might be to, for example, break up a $2 million contract into 10 $200,000 contracts so that the process can be more flexible. “It’s crucial to change how the work is given out to the vendors,” he says.

Doing so is difficult, Case acknowledges, since changing contract development processes that have been in place for years is institutionally difficult. But, Case says, it’s crucial to fund and “make the space for these different ways of working and let new good habits form in those spaces.”

Another big challenge is changing government agencies’ cultures to embrace agile, according to Case. “Doing organizational change like this can be a pretty massive undertaking,” Case says. “And to do it successfully, I think you have to scale it back and start small.”

Government IT leaders who want to implement agile should start small by identifying the most valuable opportunities where they can experiment, whether through procurement circumstances or having the right personnel in place. 

It’s important to not go all-in at first, Case says, and instead try agile on a small scale. “If it’s successful, we’ll introduce this new concept,” Case says.

Cultural changes and changes in the way teams collaborate pave the way for the introduction of new technologies and project management tools that can make approaches like scrum easier to implement. “I think you have to start with the culture and the intent and the change management of processes,” Case says.