Blog (agile) - Fred Wu's Tech

Launching Focussist Landing Page - An Upcoming Agile Project Management Tool

ifredwu@gmail.com (Fred Wu) — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 11:04:55 +0000

Over the past few years as I gain more and more experience in not only building software and products but also in leading teams and projects, I realised that my desire of wanting an agile tool that’s super simple to use yet super flexible to adapt to different needs has grown stronger and stronger.

Given the COVID-19 situation that’s going on at the moment, I’ve finally decided to spend a few nights working on a pitch deck for myself to validate the value proposition, and some high level wireframes to visualise the ideas.

Over the weekend I’ve put together a landing page to “market” my ideas. It’s a quick job, but the underlying thinking has been on the back of my mind for years now.

Introducing Focussist, or rather Focussist’s landing page: Focussist.com.

Please check it out and give me your feedback, and don’t forget to sign up. ;)

]]>

History Text Analysis Over Spreadsheets - A Poker Player and Developer's Road to Agile Project Management

ifredwu@gmail.com (Fred Wu) — Mon, 09 Mar 2015 21:50:23 +0000

Ever since I started transitioning into a team leadership role over three years ago, I had been trying to find ways to eliminate waste caused by repetitive work and to keep myself on the fringe of pushing the technical boundaries.

Four months ago I started my current role where my official job title is Delivery Lead. People don’t often know what a delivery lead is, but in my mind it is a role to ensure the success of the project delivery by identifying and closing the gaps in the team and in the organisation. And in order to do that, one of our responsibilities is to measure, understand and improve our team’s agile process.

It is very tempting to rely on the wonderful and powerful Excel formulas to help record and analyse data points and generate metrics such as cycle time. However, punching things into a spreadsheet is tedious, error-prone, time consuming and violates the DRY principle.

The spreadsheet I used to use for tracking cards.

Introducing Amaze Hands

As someone who strives to keep writing code even in a non-technical role, I started building a tool called Amaze Hands to help reduce the amount of waste I accumulate as a delivery lead.

Amaze Hands’ simple Web UI.

Analyse Cards Like Poker Hands

I used to play a bit of online poker and one thing you do in online poker is to look at your hand history to understand the game and your opponents.

If you think about it, agile boards are just like poker games - there is history to what has happened in the past, and in order to optimise for future gains, we need to understand what went wrong and what to improve on a case-by-case basis.

One of the teams I am apart of uses LeanKit, whilst it is a good tool, its reporting functionalities are very limited and its XML export function is completely broken. As a result I started building Amaze Hands to parse the copy-pasted card history from LeanKit, and to eventually generate the metrics I care about.

The LeanKit strategy which consists of a parser and a transformer is able to parse the copy-pasted text from a card as shown below:

And below is the high level architecture of Amaze Hands:

    +---------------------+
    |        Text         | <- Raw text input.
    +----------+----------+
               |
+--------------v--------------+
|         Strategies          |
+-----------------------------+
|   +---------------------+   |
|   |       Parser        |   | <- Parses text into an AST.
|   +----------+----------+   |
|              |              |
|   +----------v----------+   |
|   |     Transformer     |   | <- Transforms the AST into a common AST.
|   +---------------------+   |
+--------------+--------------+
               |
    +----------v----------+
    |       Builder       | <- Builds the dataset from the common AST.
    +----------+----------+
               |
    +----------v----------+
    |       Reducer       | <- Filters the dataset.
    +----------+----------+
               |
    +----------v----------+
    |      Analyser       | <- Analyses the dataset for metrics.
    +----------+----------+
               |
    +----------v----------+
    |      Producer       | <- Produces metrics.
    +----------+----------+
               |
    +----------v----------+
    |      Presenter      | <- Presents metrics.
    +---------------------+

Incremental Analysis - Zero In On Metrics That Matter

No projects are equal, and no project teams are equal - the goal of Amaze Hands is to incrementally add intelligence to our agile process that matters to a particular project and its delivery team.

By incrementally adding and/or filtering data points for analysis, we will be able to zero in on the problematic areas of our agile process. The following is a list of potential areas we could perform analysis on:

cycle time
wait time
blocked time
knocked-back time
context switch (between different streams of work)
other factors such as meetings, attrition, etc

As of the time of writing, Amaze Hands supports the following common metrics:

cycle time (mean and median)
cycle time rolling average (mean and median)
wait time (mean and median)
wait time rolling average (mean and median)
standard deviation rolling average
cycle time scatter

It’s Just the Beginning

Amaze Hands started off as an REA Hackday project - on the technical level (hey I still see myself as a developer!), the tool was built in a way that it isn’t over-engineered (a.k.a. slow to get it out the door and validate its usefulness) but at the same time has multiple layers as shown in the architecture diagram above so I could refactor and optimise each layer independently when necessary.

It is still early stage, but I thought I’d share what I have right now to gather some feedback and perhaps inspire fellow project leaders to look into optimising your own workflow.

When I started Amaze Hands I was only leading one project team that uses LeanKit, but since last week I started leading another team that uses a physical wall - I can’t wait to adapt Amaze Hands to support the new input stream.

So, do you have any interesting tools or techniques to help you lead projects? If so, I would love to hear about them!

]]>

Agile is not a Sham

ifredwu@gmail.com (Fred Wu) — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 11:35:00 +0000

This blog post titled “Agile is a Sham“ offends me a little bit. The post screams hey, I am a cowboy programmer, and it almost implies that if you employ processes then you are stupid.

In this day and age, I would have thought finding the right tool for the right job is common sense. Apparently not.

Agile, among many other things, is not a silver bullet - it never was and it never will be. The key thing is to experiment and find what works for you, your team and your company. Most software projects are done in a team environment - putting a bunch of talented developers and designers together actually isn’t as simple as many seem to think. One example is right out of that original blog post:

Given that I am not a fan of prescribed process as the solution to our problems, you can infer my opinion of the general quality and effectiveness of those programmers who teach these courses.

From that attitude, I can already see that he is an interesting developer to manage.

A team needs to function efficiently as a team. Having one or two ace developers aren’t going to help a lot if they can’t get along with the others.

Not to mention that people have spent time and effort proving that techniques such as TDD work for certain projects.

As many things in life, there are always people who try to take advantage of others. No doubt there are questionable ‘agile consultants’ who try to make a fortune out of uninformed clients. Just because some people aren’t using agile effectively or even correctly, doesn’t mean agile itself is a sham. Developers constantly make mistakes and write shitty code - should we say all the programming languages out there are a sham?

Keep an open mind is important, and a lot of times even necessary. To dismiss agile all together is in my opinion childish, and offensive to others who try to improve things and create more value.

]]>

On Hiring: Use Kanban for Managing Candidates and the Hiring Process

ifredwu@gmail.com (Fred Wu) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 04:20:00 +0000

Hiring is usually a long and difficult process - in order to streamline and simply it, I use Kanban to manage the whole process. I believe, hiring should be as lean and agile as our development process.

My Kanban board for hiring (we just started hiring at SitePoint!):

Using a Kanban board offers a number of advantages:

a clear picture of the candidates with their feedback from code tests and interviews
a straightforward view of where a candidate is at in the hiring process
limited number of candidates in some stages to prevent chaos
visual reminders to get in touch with the candidates, it’s always a good idea to keep them in the loop
a tight WIP limit for shortlisted candidates, there’s no point to shortlist too many candidates

What do you think?

]]>