A fair question to ask is why should your organization consider adopting the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework.  I believe that there are several clear benefits to doing so:

1. DAD shows how agile techniques fit together.  DAD is a hybrid that adopts strategies from a variety of sources, including Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), Agile Modeling, Kanban, Outside In Development (OID) and many more.  More importantly DAD's process-goal driven approach shows how this all fits together, providing advice for when (and when not) to use each technique and the advantages and disadvantages of doing so.  In doing so DAD enables you to streamline your efforts to tailor agile to reflect the context of the situation you find yourself in.  Furthermore, it provides this advice in the context of a full agile delivery lifecycle, explicitly showing how to initiate a project, construct a solution, and then deploy into production.  Instead of starting with a small agile method such as Scrum and doing all the work to figure out how to tailor ideas from other methods to actually make it work, why not start with a framework that's already done all that work for you?
2. DAD isn't prescriptive.  DAD is far less prescriptive than other agile methods.  For example, where Scrum prescribes a single strategy for managing changing requirements, a strategy called a Product Backlog, DAD suggests several strategies and provides advice for choosing the right one.  Where other agile methods define a single lifecycle, DAD instead describes several lifecycles (an agile Scrum-based one, a lean lifecycle, and a continuous delivery lifecycle to name just three) and once again describes how to choose the right one for your situation.  Your agile team is in a unique situation, and as a result needs a flexible process framework that provides coherent, easy-to-follow tailoring advice.   Isn't it better to adopt strategies that reflect the context that you actually face?
3. DAD explicitly addresses architecture.  Even after a decade of agile software development it still seems that the topic of how agile teams address architecture is a mystery for many people.  As a result DAD builds agile architecture strategies right in, starting with initial architecture envisioning, to proving the architecture with working code, to evolutionary design strategies during construction. 
4. DAD explicitly addresses DevOps.  DevOps is the art of combining development and operations approaches in such a way as to streamline your overall efforts.  DAD "bakes in" DevOps through explicit support for common DevOps practices as well as its robust stakeholder definition which explicitly includes operations and support people.
5. DAD explicitly addresses governance.  Although governance is often considered a dirty word within some agile circles, the reality is that software development teams can and should be governed.  Sadly, many agile teams have traditional governance strategies inflicted upon them, strategies which invariably increase schedule, cost and risk on the project.  But is doesn't have to be this way.  It is possible, and very desirable to adopt agile goverance strategies, strategies which are built right into the DAD framework.
6. DAD explicitly addresses many other important development activities.  Architecture, DevOps, and governance are just the tip of the iceberg.  DAD also shows how critical activities such as analysis, design, testing, quality, technical writing, and many more are addressed in an agile and streamlined manner throughout the delivery lifecycle.  As described earlier, this is done in a non-prescriptive and tailorable manner, thereby removing a lot of the mystery regarding how this agile stuff all fits together into a coherent whole.
7. DAD is solution focused, not software focused.  Although the rhetoric around "potentially shippable software" resonates well with developers it observably and empirically misses the mark.  DAD promotes the more robust idea of "potentially consumable solutions".  Yes, shipping is nice but shipping something that people actually want to use/buy, something that is consumable, is much nicer.  Yes, software is part of the equation but that software runs on hardware, we often also need to develop supporting documentation, we often evolve the business process, and even evolve the organization structure around the usage of the system.  In other words, we're really producing solutions, not just software.  Isn't it better to adopt rhetoric that actually reflects what we're doing in practice?
8. DAD promotes enterprise awareness over team awareness.  One of the great benefits of an agile approach to software development is its focus on the team.  This can also be a bit of a problem, because a team-focused strategy can result in suboptimal decisions for your overall organization.  DAD promotes the idea that disciplined agilists should be enterprise aware, working towards common business and technical goals while leveraging and enhancing the existing infrastructure whenever possible.
9. DAD provides a foundation from which to scale.  The starting point for scaling agile is to understand how agile strategies fit together from project initiation to delivery into production.  If you don't know how to succeed with agile in a straightforward situation then it will prove very difficult to do so in an agility @ scale situation.  DAD not only provides this tailorable foundation from which to scale agile it also takes a robust view of what it means to scale agile (hint: large or distributed teams are only a start).
10. DAD provides a basis for enterprise agile.  As organizations move towards a true "enterprise agile" approach they often find that they need to adopt either DAD as a foundation or invest a fair bit of effort inventing something similar.  They are also starting to adopt strategies from the SAFe framework, or reinventing such, as well as ideas from sources such as Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) (sadly, poorly named in hindsight), ITIL, and even CoBIT.  More on this in a future blog posting.

In short, DAD provides a lot of proven advice culled from years of experience applying agile software techniques in enterprise-class environments.  Instead of figuring all of this stuff out on your own, why not jump ahead and leverage the hard-won lessons learned from other organizations that have already dealt with the challenges that you're struggling with today?

The primary shortcoming of the DAD framework is it makes it very clear that software development, oops I mean solution delivery, is quite complex in practice.  As IT practitioners we inherently know this, but it seems that we need to be reminded of this fact every so often.  DAD doesn't provide a simplistic, feel-good strategy that you can learn in a few hours of training.  Instead it defines a coherent, tailorable strategy that reflects the realities of enterprise IT. 

There is a wealth of information at DAD posted at the  Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) web site and great discussions occuring on the DAD LinkedIn discussion forum.  For those of you interested in agile certification, the Disciplined Agile Consortium site will prove valuable too, in particular the list of upcoming DAD workshops provided by several IBM partners.  And of course the book Disciplined Agile Delivery: A Practitioner's Guide to Agile Software Delivery in the Enterprise (IBM Press, 2012) written by Mark Lines and myself is a very good read.

Recently I have been asked by several customer organizations to help them to understand how to account for the expense of agile software development. In particular, incremental delivery of solutions into production or the marketplace seem to be causing confusion with the financial people within these organizations. The details of accounting rules vary between countries, but the fundamentals are common.  In order to get properly account for the costs incurred by software development teams you need to keep track of the amount of work performed and the type of work performed to develop a given solution. Time tracking doesn't have to be complex: at one customer developers spend less than five minutes a week capturing such information.

 

Why is Time Tracking Potentially Valuable?

There are several financial issues to be aware of:

• Capitalization. For public companies capital expenses (CapEx) can potentially boost book value through the increase in assets (in this case a software-based solution) and increase in net income (due to lower operating expenses that year). On the other hand, operational expenses (OpEx) are accounted for in the year that they occur and thereby reduce net income which in turn reduces your organization's taxes for that year.
• Matching. One of the goals of good accounting is to accurately reflect the net income of the enterprise and to prevent income manipulation or "smoothing". As such a key tenet is the principle of matching revenues with the appropriate expenses. For software this means that we expense the cost of the software over the lifetime of the asset against the income at that time. An implication of this is that capitalizing software development, when appropriate, before the software goes into production clearly violates the matching principle since there is no benefit of the asset until such time.
• Tax Credits.  In some countries you can even get tax credits for forms of software development that are research and development (R&D) in nature.

The point is that the way that a software developer's work is accounted for can have a non-trivial impact upon your organization's financial position.

 

What Do Agilists Think of Time Tracking?

So, I thought I'd run a simple test. Last week on LinkedIn's Agile and Lean Software Development group I ran a poll to see what people thought about time tracking. The poll provided five options (a limitation of LinkedIn Polls) to choose from:

• Yes, this is a valuable activity (33% of responses)
• Yes, this is a waste of time (39% of responses)
• No, but we're thinking about doing so (2% of responses)
• No, we've never considered this (18% of responses)
• I don't understand what you're asking (5% of responses, one of which was mine so that I could test the poll)

The poll results reveal that we have a long way to go. Of the people inputting their time more of them believed it was a waste of time than understood it to be a valuable activity. When you stop and think about it, the investment of five minutes a week to track your time could potentially save or even earn your organization many hundreds of dollars. Looking at it from a dollar per minute point of view, it could be the highest value activity that a developer performs in a given week.

The discussion that ensued regarding the poll was truly interesting. Although there were several positive postings, and several neutral ones, many more were negative when it came to time tracking. Some comments that stood out for me included:

• It's a colossal waste of time unless you're billing a customer by the hour.
• We record time spent on new development work (as distinct from other tasks such as bug fixing in legacy code and so on) as this is capitalised as an asset and depreciated.
• I think the *most* pointless example was where the managers told us what we should be putting in.
• One day we will move past the "just do it" mentality and have some meaningful conversations and the reasons for what we do.
• In my experience time tracking is a massive waste... of time. It's a poor substitute for management.
• Why do you need to know more than the info available through Sprint Backlog, Sprint burndown and the daily standup?
• Some of my teams (I am SM for three teams) are skeptical about this. They do not think that keeping track of task hours this way will be any more useful than the daily standup reports. And they do not believe that Management can resist the temptation to use task hours as a measure.

I think that there are several interesting implications from this discussion:

1. Agilists need to become more enterprise aware. It's clear to be really effective that agile delivery teams need a better understanding of the bigger picture, including mundane things such as tax implications of what they're doing.  In Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) this is something that we refer to as being enterprise aware.  There's far more to enterprise awareness than understanding pertinent accounting principles, for interest disciplined agile teams work towards a common technology roadmap and common business roadmap, but appreciating why time tracking is a potentially valuable activity would be a good start.
2. Management needs to communicate better.  It's also clear that management needs to communicate more effectively regarding why they're asking people to track their time. To be fair, management themselves might not be aware of the tax implications themselves so may not be making effective use of the time data they're asking for.
3. Management needs to govern more effectively. Several people were clearly concerned about how management was going to use the time data (by definition they are measures) which could be a symptom of both poor communication as well as poor governance (unfortunately many developers have experiences where measures have been used against them, a failure of governance, and no longer trust their management teams to do the right thing as a result).
4. Time tracking should be streamlined.  It was obvious from the conversation that several people worked in organizations where the time tracking effort had gotten completely out of hand.  Spending 5 minutes a week is ok, and to be quite blunt should be more than sufficient, but spending fifteen minutes or more a day doing so is far too much.  Over the years I've helped organizations design measurement programs and I've seen a lot of well-intention efforts become incredibly onerous and expensive for the people they were inflicted upon.  I suspect it's time for a reality check in some of these organizations people were alluding to.  A good heuristic is that for any measurement you should be able to indicate the real cost of collecting it, the use(s) that the information is being put to, and the value resulting from those uses.  If you can't quickly and coherently do that then you need to take a hard look at why you continue to collect that metric.  The lament "we might need it one day" is a symptom that you're wasting time and money.
5. Agile rhetoric is getting in the way.  Some of the team-focused agile practices, such as burndown charts (or better yet ranged burndown charts) and stand up meetings may be preventing people from becoming enterprise aware because they believe that all of their management needs are being met by them.
6. You may be missing out on the benefits of time tracking.  Many organizations are potentially leaving money on the table by not being aware of the implications of how to expense software development.

 

Parting Thoughts

Disciplined agilists are enterprise aware. This is important for two reasons: First, you want to optimize your organizational whole instead of sub-optimize on project-related efforts; second, you can completely miss opportunities to add real value for your organization. In the anecdote I provided it was clear that many agile developers believe that an activity such as time tracking is a waste when that clearly doesn't have to be the case. Worse yet, although someone brought up the issues around capitalizing software development expenses early in the conversation a group of very smart and very experienced people still missed this easy opportunity to see how they could add value to their organization.

Granted, time tracking on an agile project team is nowhere near as sexy as topics such as continuous integration (CI), TDD, the definition of done, continous architecture, or many more.  But you know what?  Although it's a mind-numbingly mundane issue it is still an important one. 'Nuff said (I hope).

On April 25, 2013 I gave a webcast for the Global Rational User Community entitled Disciplined Agile Delivery: Going beyond Scrum .  During the webcast a large number of questions were asked but unfortunately I couldn’t get to all of them.  So I’ve taken the opportunity to write up the answers in this blog posting.

1. Fequently asked questions. Many of the questions are addressed in the DAD FAQ.
2. DAD elevator pitch - I will be starting work in a couple of weeks for a company that has just started its Agile journey this year by implementing Scrum. What would Scott put in an elevator chat as to why they should be moving towards DAD.  The Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) decision process framework is a people-first, learning-oriented hybrid agile approach to IT solution delivery. It has a risk-value delivery lifecycle, is goal-driven, is enterprise aware, and is scalable.  There are clearly some interesting aspects to the DAD framework. DAD is a hybrid approach which extends Scrum with proven strategies from Agile Modeling (AM), Extreme Programming (XP), Unified Process (UP), Kanban, Lean Software Development, Outside In Development (OID) and several other methods. DAD is a non-proprietary, freely available framework. DAD extends the construction-focused lifecycle of Scrum to address the full, end-to-end delivery lifecycle from project initiation all the way to delivering the solution to its end users. It also supports lean and continuous delivery versions of the lifecycle: unlike other agile methods, DAD doesn’t prescribe a single lifecycle because it recognizes that one process size does not fit all. DAD includes advice about the technical practices such as those from Extreme Programming (XP) as well as the modeling, documentation, and governance strategies missing from both Scrum and XP. But, instead of the prescriptive approach seen in other agile methods, including Scrum, the DAD framework takes a goals-driven approach. In doing so DAD provides contextual advice regarding viable alternatives and their trade-offs, enabling you to tailor DAD to effectively address the situation in which you find yourself. By describing what works, what doesn’t work, and more importantly why, DAD helps you to increase your chance of adopting strategies that will work for you.  The article Introduction to Disciplined Agile Delivery provides a more detailed description.
3. The book: Could you please repeat the name of the book that Scott is talking about?  The book is Disciplined Agile Delivery: A Practitioner’s Guide to Agile Software Delivery in the Enterprise published by IBM Press, June 2012.  The Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) website  and the Disciplined Agile Consortium website are also good DAD resources.
4. The Surveys: Where is the data published about geographic distribution and effectiveness?  All of my survey data, the original questions as asked, and my analysis can be downloaded free of charge from my IT Surveys page.  If you ever see a request from me to fill out a survey, please take a few minutes and do so.  I think you'll agree that my surveys page is in fact a very useful resource, so please contribute when you can.
5. Project success criteria: Where would a goal of defining success criteria fall?  In the DAD book we describe how the success criteria for the project should be initially identified during Inception. Success criteria, like other things, could evolve throughout the project.  You might find the IT Process Success Surveys to be of interest as several of them explored what success criteria projects actually have.  Interestingly, its rarely “on time, on budget, to specification”.
6. Transitioning to DAD: How would you typically phase a DAD implementation, let's say in a project pilot where they haven't been exposed yet to Agile?  Same question, any variance if the development team has already started Scrum?  This is a fairly complex question to answer.  The short story is that you need to invest some time to understand what your strengths and weaknesses are so that you can identify what you need to focus on.  You will then likely need to pilot strategies/techniques which are new to your organization before rolling them out widely.  You may also need to invest in training and coaching/mentoring depending on your needs.  My company, Scott Ambler + Associates, offers these sorts of services and more for organizations interesting in adopting disciplined agile strategies. 
7. Skills: I am aware that ideally developer should also be able to test but in reality theses are usually separate roles. Is it in line with your beliefs\suggestions?  Many organizations that are new to agile still have roles that reflect their existing strategy.  Non-agile approaches often have people in specific roles such as programmer, tester, designer, and so on. In DAD we promote a different set of agile roles that reflect agile thinking.  The implication is that you’re going to have to help individuals transition over to the new way of thinking, something we cover in Chapter 4 of the DAD book.  You might also find Mark Lines' blog, No role in DAD for an Analyst?  to provide some insights into issues surrounding the transition from traditional to agile roles.
8. Teaming: What happens with the Product Owner and the Architecture Owner don’t Agree?  See my blog What Happens When People Don’t Agree 
9. Skillsets: Different people of the team have different skills, experience, and time horizons.  We can't all be generalists, can we?  There are several agile roles in DAD, each of which have different rights, responsibilities, and skillsets.  So we’re not promoting the idea that everyone have the same skillset.  However, we do promote the philosophy that people should strive to be T-skilled generalizing specialists so as to improve their productivity.
10. Teaming: What are your thoughts on team cohesion?  Teams will gel over time.  Being co-located helps.  Having people who are dedicated 100% to the team helps.  Building a team of people who want to be there helps.  Self organization helps. 
11. Tool support: Is there an RMC plug-in for DAD + Is there any software behind DAD... or some software that supports it... such as Jazz (RTC) for Agile/Scrum?  Yes, IBM Rational does in fact have an RMC plug in for DAD.  There is also a template for Microsoft TFS from RDA Corp, Software Development Expert’s Practices Advisor supports DAD comprehensively, and I’m currently working with MethodPark to do so too.    Stay tuned to the Disciplined Agile Delivery website for information about tool support.
12. Governance: Regarding enterprise governance and enterprise IT, how do you start taking a culture that imposes common-process, common-tools, central (often outsourced) IT services, and heavyweight stage/gate across all organizations, and get that evolving toward a (still enterprise aware) lean/agile approach?  This is a hard one.  I’m often called into organizations to help with this very issue.  The challenge is that you need to have a deep understanding of IT governance techniques as well as how to govern agile teams.  Governance is something we discussed in detail in the DAD book as well as on the DAD site, see Adopting Agile Governance Requires Discipline. 
13. Executable specifications: TDD was mentioned, can you comment on Behavior Driven Development (BDD) and any impact on this lifecycle?  BDD is a slight nuance to acceptance test-driven development (ATDD).  BDD/ATDD and TDD are both potential practices that you might choose to follow on a DAD team.  I’ve written a fair bit about agile testing and quality strategies and about TDD in detail.
14. Architecture: When does the first version of architecture gets established and what would require to establish it? You typically start thinking about architecture early in a DAD project during Inception following a practice called architecture envisioning.  I’ve also written a fair bit about agile architecture techniques and the potential misconceptions about agile architecture that you may find interesting.
15. Travel plans: Will you be coming to South Africa at some point?  The good news is that Mark Lines, my co-author, will be in South Africa the week of May 20 in Joburg and the following week in Capetown.  Contact us for details.  I hope to be visiting SA later this year but exact dates haven’t been set yet.  So, please stay tuned on Twitter at @scottwambler for further announcements. 
16. Other travel plans: If you'd like me to speak at a local event, including corporate conferences or training events, please contact me.