Posts Tagged ‘Boundary Object’
Why Spend the Afternoon as well on Technical Debt?
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinksherbet/233228813/
Yesterday’s post Why Spend a Whole Morning on Technical Debt? listed eight characteristics of the technical debt metric that will be discussed during the morning of October 27 when Jim Highsmith and I deliver our joint Cutter Summit seminar. This posts adds to the previous post by suggesting a related topic for the afternoon.
No, I am not trying to “hijack” the Summit agenda messing with the afternoon sessions by colleagues Claude Baudoin and Mitchell Ummel. I am simply pointing out a corollary to the morning seminar that might be on your mind in the afternoon. Needless to say, thinking about it in the afternoon of the 28th instead of the afternoon of the 27th is quite appropriate…
Yesterday’s post concluded with a “what it all means” statement, as follows:
Technical debt is a meaningful metric at any level of your organization and for any department in it. Moreover, it is applicable to any business process that is not yet taking software quality into account.
If you accept this premise, you can use the technical debt metric to construct boundary objects between various departments in your company/organization. The metric could serve as the heart of boundary objects between dev and IT ops, between dev and customer support, between dev and a company to which some development tasks are outsourced, etc. The point is the enablement of working agreements between multiple stakeholders through the technical debt metric. For example, dev and IT ops might mutually agree that the technical debt in the code to be deployed to the production environment will be less than $3 per line of code. Or, dev and customer support might agree that enhanced refactoring will commence if the code decays over time to more than $4 per line of code.
You can align various departments by by using the technical debt metric. This alignment is particularly important when the operational balance between departments has been disrupted. For example, your developers might be coding faster than your ITIL change managers can process the change requests.
A lot more on the use of the technical debt metric to mitigate cross-organizational dysfunctions, including some Outmodel aspects, will be covered in our seminar in Cambridge, MA on the morning of the 27th. We look forward to discussing this intriguing subject with you there!
Israel
Beyond Devops
Based on feedback from participants in my Agile 2010 workshop “How We Do Things Around Here In Order To Succeed,” I am planning to offer the workshop as a one-day seminar. A tentative agenda for the seminar is as follows:
- Introduction to Cultural Framework
- Exercise #1: Determine Your Culture
- Exercise #2: Strengths and Weaknesses of Your Culture
- Change Behavior, Not Culture
- When Cultures Meet
- Exercise #3: Conflicts in Devops
- The Agile Flywheel
- Exercise #4: Using Technical Debt as a Boundary Object
- Bringing Individuals and Organizations Together
- Exercise #5: It is About Sharing the Process, Not Just Sharing the Information
- Exercise #6: From success in devops to end-to-end success
Until I publish a full-fledged outline for the seminar, here is the central theme:
Beyond Devops
Inter-departmental flow in a corporate setting is often envisioned as the inner workings of a swiss watch. Wheels turn other wheels in a precise manner. Not only is effectiveness maintained, it is maintained in an efficient manner.
Problem is, many individuals and most departments hold distorted views of the departments they interact with. Reasonable distortions can be mitigated as long as the operational balance between departments is maintained. Once the operational balance is broken the “swiss watch” stops to function as the inter-departmental distortions block any attempt to restore the balance.
The most effective way to get dev and ops on a path of collaboration is for the two departments to jointly construct a boundary object. As dev and ops are joined in the hip through the code, and even more so through its quality, technical debt is well suited to serve as the core of a boundary object around which the two department share meaning while retaining operational autonomy.
Similar boundary objects can be constructed between dev and other departments – customer support, professional services, marketing, sales and finance. When conceived and implemented in a manner that links numerous boundary objects together, Agile success in dev can be extended to both upstream and downstream functions.
A Recipe for Handling Cultural Conflicts in Devops and Beyond
My Agile 2010 workshop “How We Do Things Around Here In Order To Succeed” will weave together four trends that I am witnessing in my practice:
- The ascendance of Agile portfolio management in a world characterized by loosely coupled processes
- Devops dynamics are becoming more and more characteristic of end-to-end Agile/Kanban patterns
- Viral spread of technical debt metrics in software governance
- Increasing use of boundary objects in the enterprise context
The workshop is structured around three case studies/exercises that will take about two-thirds of the allotted time (the morning of August 9). The other third provides the theory and tools to be used in the three workshop exercises and (hopefully) in many future engagements participants in the workshop will carry out. Deep technical knowledge is not required – the workshop targets any Agile practitioner who has conceptual grasp of culture, software development, IT operations and portfolio management.
The #1 takeaway from the presentation is the details you need to know about creation and capture of lasting value through end-to-end Agile initiatives.
Here is the workshop agenda (still subject to some minor tweaking):
- Introduction to Cultural Framework
- Exercise #1: Strengths and Weaknesses of Your Culture
- Change Behavior, Not Culture
- When Organizations Clash
- Exercise #2: Conflicts in Devops
- The Agile Flywheel
- Exercise #3: Using Technical Debt as a Boundary Object in Devops
- Bringing Organizations Together Through Enlightened Governance Loops
I look forward to meeting you in the workshop and learning from your experiences and insights!
Israel
Boundary Objects in DevOps
Source: Flickr; Chrice‘s Photostream
The following recommendation was given in the post How to Initiate a Devops Project:
For a DevOps project, start by establishing the technical debt of the software to be released to operations. By so doing you build the foundations for collaboration between development and operations through shared data. In the devops context, the technical debt data form the basis for the creation and grooming of a unified backlog which includes various user stories from operations.
I would like to augment this recommendation with a suggestion with respect to the mindset during the initiation phase. Chances are the IT folks feel outnumbered by the dev folks. It might or might not be a matter of optics, but recognizing and appreciating this mindset is will help a lot in getting the devops project on track.
Here is a simple example I heard from a participant in the June 25 devops day in Mountain View, CA. The participant with whom I talked is an IT ops person who tries to get ops aligned with fairly proficient Agile development teams. She is, however, constrained with respect to the IT ops resources available to her. She simply does not have the resources required to attend each and every Scrum meeting as 25 such meetings take place every day. She strongly feels “outnumbered.”
Various schemes could be devised to enable meaningful participation of ops in the Agile process. The more important thing though is to be fully sensitized to the “outnumbered” feeling. The extension of Agile principles to ops will not succeed at the face of such a feeling.
Discussing the subject with my friend Andrew Shafer, he mentioned the effectiveness of boundary objects in such cross-organizational situations:
Boundary objects are objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual-site use. They may be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable means of translation. The creation and management of boundary objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds. [Source: Wikipedia].
As an example, the boundary object for the situation described in this post could be a set of technical debt criteria that make the code eligible for deployment from a product life cycle perspective. By so doing, it shifts the dialog from the process to the outcome of the process. Instead of working on generating IT resources in an “outnumbered” mode, the energy shifts toward developing a working agreement on the intrinsic quality of the code to be deployed.
Some technical debt criteria that could form the core of a devops boundary object are mentioned in the post Technical Debt Meets Continuous Deployment. Corresponding criteria could be used in the boundary object to satisfy operational requirements which are critical to the proper functioning of the code. For example, a ceiling on configuration drift in IT could be established to ensure an adequate operating environment for the code. A boundary object that contains both technical debt criteria and configuration drift criteria satisfies different concerns – those of dev and those of ops – simultaneously.
The Agile Executive 