Borland's Own ‘Journey' to Agile Development Forms Real-World Foundation for New Software Delivery Management Solutions

Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast on Agile Development principles and practices with Borland Software.

Listen to the podcast. Sponsor: Borland Software.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect. Today we present a sponsored podcast discussion about Agile software development.

We're going to be talking to a software executive from Borland Software about Borland's own Agile “journey.” They deployed Agile practices and enjoyed benefits from that, as well as gained many lessons learned, as they built out their latest application lifecycle management (ALM) products. [See product and solution rundowns.]

We're going to talk with Pete Morowski, the senior vice president of research and development (R&D) at Borland Software. Welcome to the show, Pete.

Peter Morowski: Thank you, Dana. It's good to be here.

Gardner: Before you get into Borland Software's journey, I want to get a level-set about Agile Development practices in general. Why is Agile development a good idea now? What is it about the atmosphere in the evolution of development that makes this timely?

Morowski: From the standpoint of software development, it's a realization that development is an empirical process, a process of discovery. Look at the late delivery cycles that traditional waterfall methodologies have brought upon us. Products have been delivered and end up on the shelf. The principles behind Agile right now allow teams to deliver on a much more frequent cycle and also to deliver more focused releases.

Gardner: There are also, I suppose, technical and business drivers: better quality, faster turnaround, more complexity, and, of course, distributed teams. What is it about the combination? Why is this important now in terms of some of these other technical business and even economic imperatives?

Morowski: With the advent of Web applications, businesses really expect a quicker turnaround time. In addition, when you look at cost structures, the time spent on features not used and other things are critical business inhibitors at this point.

Gardner: Let's help out some folks out who might not be that familiar with Agile and its associated process called Scrum. Tell us a little bit from an elevator-pitch perspective. What is Agile and what is Scrum?

Morowski: Agile really is a set of principles, and these principles are based on things like self-directed teams, using working code as a measure of progress, and also looking at software development in terms of iteration. What we mean by that is that when you look at traditional software development, we talked about things like design, code, and testing as actual phases in a development lifecycle. Within Agile, in an iteration, these are just activities that occur in each iteration.

Now, when you talk about Scrum, that is more of a process and a methodology. This is actually taking those Agile principles and then being more prescriptive on how to apply them to a software-development cycle.

In the case of Scrum, it's based upon a concept called a sprint, which is a two-to-four week iteration that the team plans for and then executes. In that two-to-four weeks, whatever they get done is considered completed during that sprint, and what work hadn't been completed goes into what they call "product backlog" for prioritization on what is done in the next sprint. You chain these several iterations together for a release.

The beauty of this is that now you have a way to induce change on the borders of those iterations. So, one of the things that's really advantageous to Agile is its ability to adapt the changing requirements.

Gardner: When I try to explain Agile to people, some of them come away thinking that it's an oxymoron or is conflicted because they say, "Okay, your goal is to do things better and faster, but you are telling people use fewer rules, use less structure, and have your teams be self-selecting." People see a conflict here. Why isn't that a conflict?

Morowski: I think it's a misnomer that self-directed teams and that type of thing mean that we can do whatever we want. What it's really about is that teams begin to take ownership for delivering the product. What happens is that, by allowing these teams to become self-directed, they own the schedule for delivery.

What happens is that you see some things like traditional breakdowns of roles, where they are looking at what work needs to be finished in a sprint, versus "Well, I am a developer. I don't do testing," or "I am a doc writer, and I can't contribute on requirements," and those types of things. It really builds a team, which makes it a much more efficient use of resources and processes, and you end up with better results than you do in a traditional methodology.

Gardner: It almost sounds like we're using market forces, whereby entrepreneurs or small startups tend to be more energized and focused than teams within a larger, centralized organization. Is that a fair characterization?

Morowski: Yeah, I think it is very fair.

Gardner: And, given that we're looking for this empirical learn-as-you-go, do what's right for you, I suppose that also means that one size does not fit all. So, Agile would probably look very different from organization to organization.

Morowski: It could. One thing we chose to do, though, was to really to set a benchmark process. So, when Borland first started developing in Agile, we had multiple locations, and each site was, in essence, developing its own culture around Agile. What I found was that we were getting into discussions about whose Agile was more pure and things like that, and so I decided to develop a Borland Agile culture. [See case study on Borland and Agile.]

We broke that up on geographic bases, where we started with one site, had one "ScrumMaster" and we built what we call the reference process. As we've grown, and our projects are getting more complex, the fact that we evolve from site-to-site based on the same process and the same terminology has allowed us to now choose more complex agile techniques like Scrum of Scrums or work across organizations, and have a common vocabulary, and that kind of common way of working.

Gardner: It also sounds like you are taking the best of what a centralized approach offers and the best of what a decentralized approach offers, in terms of incentive; take charge, and local ownership, and then making them co-exist.

Morowski: That's correct.

Gardner: All right, let's get specifically into Borland's situation. What is it about the way that Borland has been developing software, which is of course a core competency for a large independent software vendor (ISV) like yourselves, and it has been for 15-plus years … How difficult was it for you to come into this established organization and shake things up?

Morowski: Initially, it wasn't an issue because, like most organizations, when we went through and looked at it, there were a couple of grassroots efforts underway. From an Agile perspective, one of the things we did was to begin to leverage that activity and the successes that it had to use as a benchmark with other teams. As we grew and moved into other organizations that were not necessarily grassroots efforts, there were some challenges.

Gardner: So, it might be quite possible that lot of organizations that do development have people who are Agile-minded and perhaps even followers of Agile doing this already. Perhaps they should look for those and start there.

Morowski: I would recommend that you start with your grassroots efforts, establish your benchmark process, and then begin to move out from there.

One thing we clearly did was, once that we saw the benefits of doing this, we had a lot of executive sponsorship around this. I made it one of the goals for the year to expand our use of Agile within the organization, so that teams knew it was safe to go ahead and begin to look at it. In addition, because we had a reference implementation of it, it also gave teams a starting point to begin their experimentation. We also paid for our teams to undergo training and those types of things. We created an environment that encouraged transformation.

Gardner: Let's learn a little bit more about you, Pete. Tell us a little bit about your background and how you came into development and then into Agile?

Morowski: I've been in this business a little over 25 years now. I started in the defense and aerospace industries and then moved into commercial ISVs later in my career. I've been an executive at Novell. I've also been a CTO at IBM Tivoli, and prior to Borland, was the vice president of software at Dell.

Gardner: You've taken on this Agile project at Borland, and you've written a paper on the “Borland Agile Journey.” I've had the pleasure of reading it. I think it's a really nice read and I commend for you it.

Morowski: Oh, thank you.

Gardner: Tell us about this particular product set [Borland Software Delivery Management information] that Borland is coming out with. It's a product set about helping people develop software. Is there a commonality between some of the lessons you learned and then what you may have actually visited in terms of requirements for your products? [See demo and see launch video.]

Morowski: Oh, absolutely. One of the interesting things about the products that we are delivering is that one of them is a product for managing Agile development, especially in distributed teams and managing the requirements. So, we had the advantage of actually using the tools as we were developing them.

Now, we were also very cautious because you can get myopic about that type of thing, where we also using Agile principles, and we involved our customers in the process, as well. So we were getting kind of the best of both worlds.

Gardner: What makes software development different? In reading your paper, I was thinking about how these principles about self-empowerment and working quickly and then setting these boundaries -- "Okay, we're going to just work and do this for three weeks and then will revisit any changes," -- that might be something it would apply to almost any creative activity where a team is involved.

Is Agile something you think applies to any creative activity, a complex team-based activity, or is there something about it that really is specific and germane to software development?

Morowski: If you look at Agile principles, conceptually, they do apply to a lot of things. Anything in which you are going into a period of discovery, one of the key things is knowing what your goal or mission is. In the case of software, that's a requirement, and what you want the product to be.

But in any kind of empirically based endeavor, this would be something that you could apply. Now, when you get down to the actual Scrum process itself, it's the terminology, the measures, the metrics, and all those types of things are really tailored for software development.

Gardner: When I read your paper, I also came away with some interesting observations. You say, there is a difference between how development is supposed to work and how it actually works. It's sounds like many companies are living in denial or a certain level of dysfunction that they are not necessarily facing.

Morowski: It's one of the issues with laying a manufacturing process over something that's inherently an empirical process. In the end, all software R&D organizations or IT shops responsible for applications are responsible to the business for delivering results. And, in doing so, we all try to measure those things.

What I have observed over my career was the fact that there really existed two worlds. There is what I call the "management plane," and this is a plane of milestones, of phase transitions and a very orderly process and progress through the software development lifecycle.

Underneath it though, in reality, is a world of chaos. It's a world of rework, a world of discovery, in which the engineers, testers and frontline managers live. We traditionally use Gantt as a measure that is task-based. It requires a translation from the implementation world to the management world to show indications of progress. Any time you do a translation, there can be a loss of information, and that's why today software is such an experienced-based endeavor.

Gardner: And it's often been perceived as sort of a dark art. People don't appreciate or understand how it's done, and that those who do it should say, "Hey, leave me alone, get away from me. I'll come back with the results in three months."

Morowski: Exactly.

Gardner: But that doesn't necessarily or hasn't historically been the best approach.

Morowski: Absolutely not.

Gardner: Also, at times, you see them downplay process and say that doing good hiring probably is the biggest issue here. What's the relationship between hiring and what people, not always affectionately, refer to as human resources? What's the relationship between HR and Agile?

Morowski: Well, first of all, just getting back to a little bit on hiring thing. Hiring is important, regardless of what methodology you use, and I tend to stress that. I do contend there are different kinds of personalities and skill sets you are going to be looking for when you are building Agile teams, and it's important to highlight those.

It's very important that whoever comes onboard in Agile team is collaborative in nature. In traditional software environments, there are two roles that traditionally you may struggle with, and you have to look at them closely. One is the manager. If a manager is a micromanager-type, that's not going to work in an Agile environment.

And, the other thing, interestingly enough, is the chief architect role. What's interesting about that is that you would think you would fit in Agile very easily, but in a lot of traditional software organizations, all decisions of a technical nature on a project go through the chief architect. In an Agile world, it's much more collaborative and everybody contributes. So for some personalities, this would be a difficult change for them.

Gardner: So there is that grassroots element, and you have to be open to it.

Morowski: Right.

Gardner: What is it about the structures here? Again, for folks who might not be that familiar with Agile, tell us a little bit about some of the hierarchy.

Morowski: There are really two key roles. There is the ScrumMaster and the ScrumMaster runs what they call the daily stand-up. This is basically a meeting, where everybody on the team gets together on a daily basis and they answer three questions. "What did I get accomplished yesterday?" "What am I going to do today?" And "What's blocking me?"

Everybody goes around the room. It's a 15- minute meeting. You solve any particular problems, but you log things. The role of ScrumMaster is to run that meeting and to remove blocks to the team, and it's a very key role.

The second major role within Scrum is really the product owner, and this is the individual that's responsible for prioritizing the requirements or what we call the product backlog -- what is what is going to be done during the sprint, which features are going to be completed. Those are the two primary roles, and then from there everybody is pretty much a team member.

Gardner: When you decided to bring this into play at Borland, a very large, distributed organization, you didn't try to bite off too much. You didn't say, "We are going to transform the entire company and organization." You did this on more of an iterative basis. It seems that most people, when they do Agile, will probably follow similar path. They'll take a project basis and then say, "Now we need to expand this and make it holistic."

Many organizations, however, across all kinds of different management activities, can stumble at that transition from the project, or the tactical, into the holistic, or general, across an organization. What did you learn in making this transition from small to large scale at Borland?

Morowski: A couple things. One is that, as we rolled it out, let's say starting by site-by-site, we grew from teams-to-teams. The ScrumMasters worked very collaboratively to help each other out, because, in the end, they were responsible for delivering at the end of those sprints. That was a very positive effect.

As we moved out to distributed teams, there were a number of challenges, things like the daily stand-up, or if I have people in Singapore that are supporting a particular sprint, say, from the system testing point, that made things difficult. But, what I found is the team was pretty creative in involving those individuals, whether they recorded sprints, whether they shifted time zones, and they did this all on their own.

That was the absolute positive, one of the things that surprised me. It was an interesting discovery.

As we started to be more broad with the interaction with the non-Agile parts of the organization, this was a little bit more of a challenge, and I learned a couple of things. In doing any kind outsourcing, if you try to match a traditional, contractual base -- the statement of work (SOW)-type outsourcer -- with an agile team, that's going to present problems. The outsourcer is expecting very detailed specifications as a statement of work and that's just not produced during an agile or sprint/Scrum type of development activity.

The other thing is internally, and what I would say at the end of the pipe and at the beginning of the pipe, working with marketing and our new product introduction processes and support and getting sales out. One of the things that we found is that we started to have a capacity to release more often, but the organization, as a whole, had to adjust now to: A) provide market requirements to us in a different manner, and B) we had to adjust our process at the end to be able to accept more rapid releases.

Gardner: So in order to get the most out of Agile, it sounds like, for those organizations where software development is core competencies, important to their successes as a company, or as a government organization, or a public not-for-profit, that the edges of Agile start to blend into other departments. The whole competency around their organization can perhaps borrow some of these principles from development and extend them into the entire lifecycle.

Morowski: Yes, we no longer look at it as strictly an R&D thing anymore, just because of that. And, it's interesting. You know you are making progress from a development team perspective, when you are starting to output more than the organization can accept.

Gardner: Interesting. So, adjustments along the way, and that's again a principle of the approach.

All right. In this age of Agile and your Agile journey, you came away with three basic observations about the benefits. One was around self-directing teams; second around being able to manage change well; and, third, about how to do the relationship with the customer, in this case the customer being the folks who are interested in getting the software. Tell us about these three benefits and what you have learned?

Morowski: Well, we touched on the self-directing teams, and the key to that is one of the most important things as an executive is that you really have to take the lead and let your teams go and develop -- let them truly own their projects. There will be mistakes along the way, but once they do, it's an extremely powerful concept.

One of the great things about agile is that it's a very open and very visible methodology. During daily stand-ups, I can attend any daily stand-up and sit there and listen to what's going on. I can't contribute in those meetings, because that's run by the ScrumMaster. But, one of the times I was attending the daily stand-up, I knew the teams had progressed a great deal.

When they were looking at their remaining work backlog that they had for that particular sprint, and there were a couple of tests that need to be run that there was nobody assigned to. One of the developers had time, looked at that, and picked it up.

Now, normally, that would never happen, because we behave in a silo fashion. "I am an engineer." "I am a tester." It's an "I am a …" type of thing. But, when you really have a self-directing team, the team owns that schedule and it's very interested in making sure that they meet their commitments.

Gardner: I suppose that also fosters willingness of people to move in and out of role, without just saying, "Well, that's not my job …", but taking more group responsibility, and even as an individual.

Morowski: Absolutely correct, and that to me has been one of the more powerful things that I have personally observed.

Gardner: Change management has often been something that drives developers crazy. They hate when people come in and start changing requirements when they are in the middle of doing code or test. On the other hand, things don't stay the same, and change is part of everything in life and business, perhaps more so today than ever. How do you reconcile those two?

Morowski: Well, I think the reality is that there is going to be change during these development cycles, and so the question is what's the best way to handle it? If you look in a traditional waterfall methodology, you march along phase transitions. Even if you have iteration in place, if you discover a design or coding defect late in the game, you have to go backwards to a different phase and start going into the design or fixing the code. Then, you repeat the process again, and you continue to move along your space transition line.

The thing that's interesting is that with Agile you have an orderly way of injecting change. In other words, as a sprint completes and you've demonstrated the code -- and you demonstrate it after that three-week iteration -- if something has changed and you need to change the prioritization, you have a way to inject that change along that boundary, and then let the team go forward. That's what I always like to say, "We're always going forward in Agile."

Gardner: And how do the teams adjust to that?

Morowski: It's part of the process. The changes go into the backlog. The product owner looks at them and then prioritizes it based upon the complexity of the work and the timing and so on and so forth, and just how important that is. If it's important enough, it will go into the next iteration. The teams are used to doing that, because you are not, in essence, disrupting at a random point. They have already finished what work they were working on, and now there is a cleaner opportunity to inject that change.

Gardner: So, boundaries allow for those who want change to get it done without having to wait for a particularly long period of time or until the project is done. But, for those involved in the project, they have these sections where it's not going to become chaotic and they are not going to lose track of their overall process, because of this injection of change.

Morowski: No, as a matter of fact, the process encourages it.

Gardner: How about this, what you call customer relationships? It sound to me as thought it's just being transparent.

Morowski: It is. It's a different approach, in the sense that you are actually bringing in the customer as what I would call a partner in the development. They participate in sprint reviews, and sprint reviews at the end of a sprint, where you show the working code, what you have completed and so. Those are done on an every-three-week basis, and we involve our customers.

They also take early drops of the code and provide input into the product backlog on requests that they want, and things like that. It's proven to be very beneficial for us. The one thing is that, when you choose these customers to participate, it's important for them to be Agile, as well, and understand that, and they need to approach this as a partnership not just an opportunity to get their particular features or requirements in.

Gardner: And, that must also help keep expectations in line, right?

Morowski: Absolutely. What I have found is that the customers we have involved want to get used to our cycles and our delivery rhythm. They are less adamant about getting every feature on a list in a particular release, because they know it's a relatively short time before the next one comes around.

Gardner: When we describe these customers, would that, in many organizations, include bringing the marketing people in, and the salespeople. Can they get involved so that this becomes something that will enter the market as an agile activity, rather than having Agile happening on the development side, and then falling back into a waterfall mentality when it comes to the go-to-market activities?

Morowski: Yes, we do, and the transparency that's there actually helps build confidence in the rest of the organization on what we are delivering, because they see it as we progress along. It's not something that mysteriously shows up on their doorstep.

Gardner: It certainly sounds great in theory, and it sounds like you've been able to accomplish quite a bit in practice, but what about metrics of success? How have you been able to say, "it works?" Has Borland cut their cost, their time to development? Do they have better products? All of the above? How do we know we are succeeding?

Morowski: I'd say it's combination of all the above. The first thing is that by putting these teams together, they are much smaller teams than in traditional organizations. So, if you look at it, my teams are almost 30 percent smaller on the Agile side than they are on the traditional side.

Gardner: And what's accounting for that change?

Morowski: I think one, is the ownerships of the teams, and two, the breakdown of very specific roles.

Gardner: Would I be going out on a limb in saying you have eliminated the middle management factor?

Morowski: There is absolutely that as well. The other thing is the fact that we're delivering working code and involving with customers. We are developing fewer superfluous features. When a product goes out the door, it generally has the most important features that were entailed for this release. So, it really helps the prioritization process.

Gardner: Not too many cooks in the kitchen?

Morowski: Exactly.

Gardner: Cool! Tell us a little bit about what surprised you the most about this Agile journey of Borland.

Morowski: I think the power of the daily stand-up. I mean, yes, we got a lot of benefits, and yes, we had a number of successes, we were able to transition code from locations and things like that, but I owe that a lot to the daily stand-up. The thing that surprised me is how powerful it is each morning when everybody gets around the table and actually goes through what they've done, basically saying, "Have I lived up to my commitments? What I am committing to the team today? And then is there anything blocking?"

Generally speaking, a lot of developers tend to be quiet and not the most social. What this did is that it just didn't allow the few people who were social to have input on what was going on. This daily stand-up had people, everybody on the team, contributing, and it really changed the relationships in the team. It was just a very, very powerful thing.

Gardner: It sounds like balance among personality types, but that balance directed toward the real activity that is developing code.

Morowski: Absolutely.

Gardner: Interesting! Well, congratulations. I enjoyed reading your paper, and this certainly sounds like the future of development, I know that's what many people in the business think. We've been talking about Agile development practices and principles and how Borland Software has been undertaking an Agile journey itself, in a development project around development process tools and application lifecycle management products.

Back to those products. Is there anything about the synergy between doing it this way and then presenting products into the field that you think will help other people engage with Agile benefits?

Morowski: Are you talking about the products themselves?

Gardner: Yes.

Morowski: The products themselves, absolutely. We have a product coming out called Team Analytics. The key to this is that, while we talked about self-directed teams, we still have responsibilities to reporting to the business and how we are progressing.

Team Analytics gives us a view into the process, gives us the ability to go ahead and look at how the team is progressing, and those types of things, what features have been included or dropped, without having to go into the team and request that information. So that's a very powerful thing.

Gardner: Right. So, it's one thing to agree that visibility and transparency are good, but it's another to actually accomplish it in terms of complexity in large teams and hierarchy.

Morowski: Absolutely. This allows us to move to what I call a "monitored" from a "reported" kind of methodology of metrics. What I mean by that is, typically, at the senior vice president or vice president level, you really get to look at the state of your products once a month, in the sense that you have operations reviews or some kind of review cycle where all your teams come in and then they report the progress of what's going on.

With Team Analytics, you are able to actually look at that on a daily basis and see if anything’s changed over time. That way, you know where you need to spend your time and that's why we call it monitored, at this point.

Gardner: Super! Well, thank you for sharing your insights. I think there is a lot to be taken away here and learned.

We have been talking with Pete Morowski, the senior vice president of research and development for Borland Software. We were looking at Agile principles in the context of Borland's Agile journey.

Thanks, Pete.

Morowski: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’ve been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast.

Thanks for joining us and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Sponsor: Borland Software.

Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast on Agile development principles with Borland Software. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2008. All rights reserved.