A Standup Free of Should, Probably, and Hopefully

It's interesting to listen to the word choices that people use in the daily standup.

"I should be done with that today."

"I'll probably be done with that today."

"Hopefully I'll be done today."

"I'll try to wrap that up today."

I like to take a mental note of the "shoulds", "probablies", and "hopefullies", and see if the next day that work was truly finished.

There are serial offenders on every team. If a should one morning comes back with another should the next morning, you're really worried.

Why do people feel the need to give these hopeful yet indefinite pseudo-pronouncements about their progress? Is it natural optimism, a people-pleaser temperament, willful deceit?

More importantly, what is the temperature in the room where people feel more inclined to give optimistic projections over more realistic ones? Hopeful wishes over definitive statements?

It could be...

  • The person does not have a good understanding of the goal of their assigned work, so they don't have a good idea of what it will look like to be "done" with it.
  • They're operating within an environment where people routinely make weak promises and exaggerations of progress, so that seems like a normal thing to do.
  • They're operating in a chaotic environment, where it's hard to predict how much focused time they'll get on any given task on a given day.
  • They know they're not being given enough time or resources to complete work in a politically acceptable timeframe, but it's also not politically acceptable to just say that, so their best option is a hopeful statement about the timeframe in which they intend to deliver it.

But, hey, sometimes people are just inexperienced in the kind of task they've been assigned, and so they can't see the road ahead of them and the milestones along the way. That will absolutely make it hard for them to predict when they'll reach the finish line. Fair enough!

But...I think the "should", "probably", and "hopefully" indicate something else than inexperience. They indicate a foresight about the task ahead and a suspicion that they don't feel comfortable stating.

What is making it hard for people to tell the truth in this environment? We need optimists in software, but too many unchallenged "shoulds", "probablies", and "hopefullies" in the room is a sign of trouble.

How Many Spikes Is Too Many?

Spike is fun to say. Spike! For the unfamiliar, the spike is a concept from Agile methodologies that means a time-boxed backlog item where the end result is learning, rather than delivered software.

Mike Cohn from Mountain Goat Software offers this example:

As an example of a spike, suppose a team is trying to decide between competing design approaches. The product owner may decide to use a spike to invest another 40 (or 4 or 400) hours into the investigation. Or the development team may be making a build vs. buy decision involving a new component. Their Scrum Master might suggest that a good first step toward making that decision would be a spike into the different options available for purchase, their features, and their costs.

Because spikes are time-boxed, the investment is fixed. After the predetermined number of hours, a decision is made. But that decision may be to invest more hours in gaining more knowledge.

I've worked on teams where the process was spike-heavy. We'd commonly have backlog items within most sprints that were dedicated to learning about a topic that we knew would be important for future work. We had features we wanted to get into the software, but we didn't have a good idea of how we were going to accomplish that work on a technical level. For teams that put a big emphasis on accurate estimation and minimal to no carry-over of items at the end of sprints, they want to know that a technical foundation for work is understood before its implementation is "promised" within a particular sprint.

I've also worked on a team where spikes were basically not part of the process at all. Backlog items were oriented around features the product owner wanted in the software, but they wouldn't allot an item into a sprint without a "technical approach" filled out on the item first. The "technical approaches" were usually written ahead of time by team leads or architects that did not have "on the board" responsibilities within sprints and would work on these things ahead of the rest of the team, as time allowed. Sometimes senior engineers would also work on technical approaches for future sprints if they finished their assigned items for a sprint with time to spare.

One of the downsides of a spike-heavy process is that you're reducing the amount of "business value" delivered at the end of a sprint. If your entire sprint was consumed by spikes, I don't think the business would be very happy. On the flipside, learning has to happen somewhere. Whether you call it a spike, refinement, technical approaches, or anything else, the learning must happen.

I wouldn't necessarily say that the spike is an anti-pattern, but if it feels they're being leaned on too heavily, it might be time to stop and ask why they're necessary. Is it because we're shifting decision making to the engineers about requirements that a business analyst or product owner should be making? Are we not dedicating enough time to refinement? Is the product owner spread too thin? Is the development team stacked with junior engineers or lacking in engineers that are experienced with the technology at hand?

Learning has to happen somewhere—that's the nature of software engineering. But an over-reliance on spikes for decision making can indicate deeper organizational issues.

Escaping the Bikeshed

I wrote in 2017 a post called Don't Trap Your Clients in the Bikeshed. That post was about avoiding the trap of seeking feedback on trivial decisions from clients before they're necessary.

Sometimes in software development a group of stakeholders will become very suddenly interested in a particular aspect of the software, and intense debate will ensue with a flurry of changes discussed in an area that everyone has an opinion about. In these occasions, as an engineer, your clients have put you in the bikeshed.

What do you do as an engineer when you find yourself in the bikeshed?

Slow Down

The pressure to immediately address every opinion can be daunting. Try not to get caught up in the whirlwind. Let the group debate while you maintain a healthy distance.

Pause for Documentation

Gently remind people that in order to get features into software, they need to write down clearly what they want. They have a responsibility to be clear about what they're asking for. That's the bargain.

Invoke the Process

QAs need to know what to test. A larger audience needs to know what changes are making it into the software. Customers need to know what's on the horizon. Releases need to be organized. Changes in one part of the codebase impact other areas.

Your engineering team has an established process for making and releasing your software. In the fervor to change the bikeshed, interested parties get excited to see their opinions realized. How long does it take to paint the thing blue? It's clearly not blue right now, and I want it to be blue.

Remind people why the process exists, and the drawbacks of making changes to a software system that don't follow the same process as other changes.

Expose the Bones

Sometimes it's really an issue of transparency. Non-engineers get frustrated that they don't understand why a feature is behaving the way it is. It can help to "expose the bones" as it were. Make a report that anyone can see that shows key metrics (how many requests, how long is it taking, who's using it, etc.). It can help to surface the internals of a feature. Make a page that shows diagnostic information about the input to a feature, how the feature calculated a result, and what the "raw" result is.

Remove Engineering From the Loop

Ultimately the goal is to remove engineering from the debate. If there's an intense debate about the color of the bikeshed, engineering can build a configuration option into the software where non-engineers can change the color at will. Try to distill the points of contention down to self-service features that don't require engineers to make code changes to the system.

Make Your Thing Work Like the Thing Everyone Knows

Users build up expectations about how applications should work based on the applications they're already familiar with.

If you're including a search box in your application, it should work as much as possible like Google. Even if you have some clever idea about how it should work, if that way makes it act differently from Google, that's probably enough of a reason alone not to do it. We'll make the terms they typed in automatically match an exact phrase because our users would probably like that! Nope! They won't because Google doesn't do that. 

How will we let users know that there's fresh content for them to see under a tab of our application? Hmmm...got it! Let's underline the tab title! Wrong! You put a little dot to the side of the tab title, because that's what every app your users are familiar with does.

An invaluable skill for product owners, product managers, business analysts, etc. is that they are widely familiar with popular software and applications. And more importantly they are able to map requirements for the product they manage onto the conventions of other existing software.

Please, by all means, if you're a startup building a general purpose search engine from scratch, go ahead and wildly violate the conventions of Google search. That's literally why you exist. But if you're building a search box for your forklift parts website, make it work as much like Google search as you possibly can.

If you're building a feature for your accounting application where a user can send another user a message, this is not the time to innovate. Just make it work as much like Slack, Instagram, Twitter DMs, etc. 

I feel like well-meaning product managers sometimes misunderstand what innovation means in software. Innovation in the realm of what I would call commodity features is not good for your users. Features that are present in many applications are not the place to innovate unless that feature is at the heart of the value proposition of your application--if your product is that feature.

Wow...if you're violating users' expectations about a commodity feature in your application, you better have a damn good reason. Everyone else: make your thing work like the thing everyone already knows.

Tell Us Why We’re Doing This

I’m constantly shocked that business people don’t make much of an effort to communicate to engineers the impact of their work. It’s par for the course that the engineers don’t know how many users their product has, how many clients they have, how much revenue the product makes, etc. It’s so common in fact that I wonder sometimes if it’s intentional.

There is an Agile concept known as the information radiator. Some companies will put dedicated big screen TVs throughout their offices that show key metrics at a glance. If you have a remote-first culture, a television isn't going to do much good, but a web-based dashboard placed somewhere the whole team goes every day (like your issue tracker) is a great substitute. 

These ideas are more about passive awareness, but I think the next step up is active discussion. If you're doing some kind of regular all-hands meetings, like a retrospective, that's a perfect time to pull up that dashboard as a team and discuss it together.

How do we know we did a good job over the last sprint? Yeah, we marked all of our tickets as "Done", but so what? How do we know that our customers are happy with our work? Company leaders always want to know how to get their employees more "engaged" in their work. Show your team how their day-to-day tasks impact real end users. Working a backlog of items sprint after sprint is so far removed from the impact of the work. Why are we doing these things?

How many users did we add over the last two weeks? How many new customers came on board? How many usages of [NEW FEATURE X] did we have? 

I feel like I'll be banging this drum for the rest of my career: Engineers are not robots. We want to know the high level goals of our work and how our work impacts real people.

Please, tell us why we're doing this.

Slow Is a Superpower

Every company needs people who can work quickly. Stuff happens. Production goes down. We found a showstopper bug right before a big release. So-and-so called in sick--can you finish their thing that was due today?

Some engineers distinguish themselves by how much chaos you can throw at them. The plate-spinners. The late night heroes. Someone has to save the day. 

But it's also possible to distinguish oneself--and build a reputation--as a slow and methodical engineer. Someone needs to take really deep, nasty problems, and figure them out once and for all.

Someone needs to do the work where the attention to detail required is so tedious and annoying to mere mortals, that only a select few are steadfast enough to see it through to completion.

After five different engineers have spent a couple hours each on that bug, and only emerging with theories about what might be wrong, someone needs to spend a week going all the way to the bottom of the rabbit hole, and emerging with the rabbit in hand.

After generations of engineers have struggled to set up Project X locally on their machines, relying on hearsay and ancient scrolls to get to barely functional, and then moving on and never thinking about it again, we need a hero who goes through the process from scratch, writes down every damn thing that goes wrong, every caveat, every blind alley, records the verbal legends, takes screenshots marked up with the important bits circled, and meticulously documents in a format so easy-to-understand and beautiful, that the next generation of engineers will never again waste another moment setting up Product X in a breezy afternoon with all of their questions anticipated and answered before they even have a chance to ask them.

Who will think through the edge cases, draw the diagrams, note the long-term implications, ask the hard questions (and answer them), write the comments, edit for clarity, and study every changed line in a 57-file merge request?

Slow is a superpower. Not everyone can do it.


The Experience to Say "I Don't Know"

One of the difficulties with managing a software project is simply getting people to be honest about the progress they're making and the difficulties they're facing.

I think one of the signs of experience in engineers is that they're not afraid to admit when they don't know something or are having a hard time with a bit of work. I know that when I was a junior engineer it was hard for me to feel okay about not doing something perfectly, and I didn't want anyone to see me struggle with anything.

There's a sense of security that comes with experience. You know enough to know that you're never going to know everything. Just surviving in the industry as a working software engineer for several years, experiencing the inevitable ups and downs, and then simply continuing on. You realize that feeling out of your depth is a common feeling in a line of work that is constantly changing.

So I think it's important to encourage engineers and other technical folks, especially more junior folks, to raise their hand high early when they're bogging down. For most teams that are using an Agile methodology, any kind of daily stand-up is a great time to check in on progress. But of course, we can't help each other out if we aren't honest with each other about our progress.

Say these things as early as possible:

  • I have too much work assigned to me this sprint, and I don't feel confident I can get it all done on time.
  • I know less about this area of the project than Person X, and I think it will take me longer to do it than they would take.
  • I've run into some unforeseen difficulty with Feature X, so I think it will be necessary to wrap up the part now that I understand, and tackle X again in a future sprint.
It's okay to say, "I don't know." It's okay to say, "I'm struggling." We should all say them more often! In fact, the health of a software project depends on it.