How Healthy is Your Product? - Source Code Check

You are developing your product using agile and lean approaches. 

How can you check your approach and distill improvements? A health check of your product and your development approach is certainly a good solution.

This post is the first of a set of articles identifying health checks with different focus. We will identify strengths, potential weaknesses and hopefully find room for improvement.

The initial examination shall always be the source code. Your code base is a key asset of your company.

How Should You handle Definition of Done?

An agile team is sole responsible for the internal quality of the product they build and maintain.

And the developers shall be accountable to produce the expected quality and optimize long terms goals of the organization.

They provide the answer to the seminal question

Did we build it right?

Definition of Done DoD is a major building block to answer this question with a sounding yes.

Shu Ha Ri for Enterprise Agile

First teams have successfully used Scrum to develop applications. The news spread out and everybody wants to apply Scrum. It is time to introduce Enterprise wide Agile with Scrum or Kanban or XP.

Your Company wants to introduce Enterprise Agility in their product development, quality assurance and sales departments. The company as a whole shall transition to an agile organization and all teams shall adopt Scrum.

Try the "Shu Ha Ri" approach for such a change process.

What does an Agile Coach?

An agile coach has three main areas of activity:

Foster Autonomy: Teach and support the team and individuals to be autonomous within the given boundaries of the organization and its processes.

Create Ground for Motivation: Help teams to maximize their autonomy, individual mastery and make sure the team has a purpose.

Provide Coaching: Support teams and individuals to identify potentials with their roles and within the agile organization and improve.

Architectural Decision Record ADR

Architecture Decision Record ADR is a compact and traceable documentation of all important decisions taken during the realization of a product. Use asciidoc or markdown and Git to have an agile and lean documentation of your major decisions.

The huge advantage of ADR is the timeline of the decisions. It tremendously help to understand the technical changes during the product lifecycle.

How to reach the Software Quality Graal?

Lately I was asked how many bugs and smells detected through SonarQube were acceptable for a software product. And a Scrum master inquired which organizational changes are necessary to empower software developers to write good code. Speechless and dumbfounded I was unable to answer these questions.

After quite some time I realized these persons believe tools can measure the quality of software. But tools can only measure non-quality.

They tell you when you are doing it wrong, only your heart can tell you when you are doing it right.

But first that does it means to have a quality software product?

What Does a Great Product Owner?

Often organizations state that the product owner role is very difficult to fulfill. I heartily agree being a great product owner is challenging.

And I also clearly state that his activities are often not the ones of a super hero but regular techniques a motivated and interested product owner can easily learn.

Below I took the list of activities of a great product owner article from the scrum.org site and discuss which ones are regular activities of any well-trained product owner.