I remember going “Hey, this is fantastic, we’re pairing.â€? I remember that there were all sorts of things about pairing, but one of them I remember was that we could work on a task and when we’d worked it we’d go and work on another task. And so we had that code ownership. I remember just how fantastically liberating that was to finally not be a bottleneck. But certainly having that sense of this task is completed: when we’ve just designed, implemented it, tested it and we’ve got the test to prove it. There was a real sense of liberation in this way of working. I’ve done really good, you know, I can go home. I’ve got this thing that works, these tests to describe and show that and this… The whole intensive working environment was exhausting but immensely satisfying. It was like a drug. I mean both [T] and I… well, all four developers went away going “This is the way we want to work.”
One of the responses we had when asked “Well, do you want to come and join us?” was “but we wanna do XP.â€? The director was very conscious of XP and Agile and was actually completely supportive of that. Particularly because it was a start up. It was a perfect fit really, but it did mean that actually in the beginning our pairs never changed because it was [T] and I or [T] and I or [T] and I. [LAUGHTER].
It was an interestingly evolutionary thing to do. We started with, as I say, the three of us sitting round the table in the library with our cards which we probably did on a weekly basis. We’d talk through what we were going to focus on and what we were going to do. We were very poor at distinguishing between stories and tasks. It’s a distinction that actually has been quite late in the company’s development.
Interestingly, from time to time back then, we’d run a big planning game and then we’d very clearly deal with stories. Somehow as soon as we moved on from that it all went out of the window; we’d talk about what we were doing in stories when really we were talking about engineering tasks.
As I said when we first started the three of us, we used to work with index cards. As we started to recruit more people, things moved very fluidly, we made things up as we went along. We’d have our two weekly iteration planning and the whole company would be there, sitting round in a circle and we’d talk through the stories that we were interested in.
So, what we found was that we weren’t very good at working with cards. People would complain “Oh I can’t see that one” and “I can’t see what you’re talking about.” So we started to write down the stories we were talking about on flipcharts, with a one liner. Gradually the flip chart replaced the cards.
We also experimented with writing new things on Wiki pages - with each story having a Wiki page. That didn’t work very well for us either because actually at the end of the day if we’re all sitting round in a circle then having a Wiki didn’t help, so you’d then have printouts of them, which was no different from using cards and so on…
With the sheets everyone could see: “Okay, I can see what you’ve written up on the sheet.” We could all talk and we’d go “Oh, that one…” Immediately we started losing it, we couldn’t make notes on the thing, we couldn’t write on the back of it, but somehow that seemed to be okay. Everyone seemed to value it all being visible.
I don’t know how restrictive we were in terms of what we could put up on the wall. They were service offices, so they were short term, and sticking cards up on the wall was probably a problem. It meant they just sat in a stack, so they weren’t visible, so a flipchart was much easier to have.
The things that we’d lost no longer using the cards we didn’t seem to value. That all happened within a year of setting up the company and it remained the same for almost five years.
At some point we brought in iteration retrospectives. At the end of our three week iteration each team would talk through problems. Our team found things not being clear, we’d talk about a story, look at it, and not know what it meant: “Oh well, you know, really we need Mike, because there’s thatâ€? and so on. I said, “Well, you know, we could always experiment with using cards” and so we did.
We brought in cards and we wanted to stick them up on a particular wall but we told by Biz “No, no, no it’s really important, it can’t be touched. We need this.” We went “Fine, okay.” On the whole we have an open plan office, but we have one or two meeting rooms which are separated by glass. We went “Right okay, if we’re not allowed to put them up on the walls, we’ll stick up on the glass.” So we claimed some glass wall and we stuck up our cards and we wrote on one glass panel “To Do”, on another we wrote “In Progress” and on another one we wrote “Done.” We moved our cards, we wrote on our cards what we needed and we wrote on the back. Within two or three iterations, almost the whole company had adopted cards because they saw what we were doing and they were like “We want that”.
At the end of each iteration we still had to fill in our sheet, because biz said that was needed. We said “Well, you know, come on biz, tell us really why you need these sheets?” “Oh, well, we need them because this or that…” “Okay, well if we satisfy this, this and this, do you still need your sheets?” “Erm… Give us a couple of iterations to think about it.” Eventually they came round and said “No, we don’t need our sheets after all.” And now we use cards.
It was interesting evolving the processes into something that worked for us. It was probably related to the office space. Looking back, as soon as we moved into an office space where we could do what we liked with the walls that should have been a time to think about things. I don’t know, it’s a puzzle.
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