Being a coach is more than listening and giving advice

Socrates is one of my heroes from the history of philosophy. The idea of asking questions instead of giving the answers or well meant advice, has always been an inspiration to me. It might be my curious nature and that I want to know more about people and their thoughts on the world. But I have found that asking questions works really well.

"To solve a problem, it would be broken down into a series of questions, the answers to which gradually distill the answer you seek." [Wikipedia: Socratic Method]

The importance of questions is often mentioned in popular coaching methods and it often has the purpose of understanding a challenge or problem that someone has. It often opens up the conversation and you become an active part in the conversation instead of only being passively listening. Although this is a good conversation it is often important to ask the questions in a way that it is not possible to answer them with a simple yes or no. In this way you do not close the conversation and the person you are asking will often need to think more and differently before answering. This pulls the person out of the blind alley they were in.

If I am the one being asked the questions I feel inspired by it. There is a person that is actually listening to what I say. That person challenge me to go even deeper in my thoughts on the subject by asking all these questions that I am not able to answer with a simple yes or no. I'm forced to think and someone told me once that thinking is important.

Next time you feel compelled to give advice, maybe you should ask a question instead.

Visibility is important for motivation

People always say that visibility is important, but often they fall short when asked to give examples.

I thought I'd give you an example that is fairly obvious and can easily be tested. That's if you have a newer kin of Nokia mobile phone..

http://sportstracker.nokia.com

The sportstracker gives you a few data about your training trips, but it also give you motivation trough it's functionality.

You can have your own training buddies connected and then you can actually see what your friends have done. The application is actually quite simple using your GPS on the mobile phone and registering speed and altitude in your workout (cycling/running/walking++).

More important is the web site that creates the link between your buddies and you. This creates a sense of competition between you and your friends. I find it inspiring to see that a friend of mine has done a 10km track in an hour last night. I suddenly find myself wanting to do some running.

Maybe this can inspire you to do some of the things you do at work visible to others as well. Maybe it creates a small sense of competition and fun. Maybe it motivates you and your co-workers?

It surely motivates me! Too bad you can't use the mobile phone when swimming..

Motivation and Attitude

Most of our life we stick to some basic values. Sometimes we do things we would usually not do because someone or something motivated us to do so. Its the attitude to be open to change that is one of our most important traits.

It is time to start motivating for change. Its your life and it should be you who decide what you want to do with it.

Have a look at this movie from the HOME project. It speaks of motivation for change on a global scale.

http://www.youtube.com/homeproject

Maintenance project?

In software engineering, software maintenance is the modification of a software product after delivery to correct faults, to improve performance or other attributes, or to adapt the product to a modified environment.”(ISO/IEC 14764). [Wikipedia]

I have been bugged by the term maintenance project for a long time and it is time to vent the frustration here. The project I am working with has two parts, one for development and another for maintenance. While the project is called a maintenance project we actually do produce a lot more new functionality than correcting fault and adapt the product. Many projects are in the same environment and it is unfortunate that they are called maintenance project when they actually should be rid of the term maintenance. We do maintenance as well, but not to the extent that it should be reflected in the name.

The reason I bring this up is because maintenance is not a popular word and people start to get all kind of ideas when they hear the term. People often say that maintenance projects does not use any new technology, they do not do anything exciting (from a developers perspective). Well this is in our case wrong. We do new functionality every day and we make use of some of the newest technology out there. Our code grows and adapts with new technology.

Let me mention some of this years improvements to the code and environment:
New platform: Moved from IBM Websphere to JBoss.
New JDK: Moved from IBM JDK 1.4.2 to Sun JDK 1.5
EJB2.1 to EJB3
.Net1.1 to .Net2
New EpiServer version
RAD to IntelliJ
..and a lot more!

I think one of the important tasks in a project is using new technology, not for the sake of having new toys, but to be able to move forward. The changes we made in the project have made new functionality possible in new and better ways for our customer.

So my suggestion is to stop using the term maintenance when the project delivers more than 70% new functionality instead of maintenance as defined at the top of this blog. Make room for new technology in you project not only for your own motivation, but also for the sake of your customer.

Visibility

I have just ordered a 32" flatscreen for our project! I plan to use it to increase the visibility of the continous integration status. By this I mean the build status, the Cobertura test coverage data and the JUnit report.

This means that when we have the daily meeting, the screen will be very visible and as scrum master I want to increase focus on our test coverage. More coverage will enable us to make changes without the fear of breaking the application.

The last week I have used several hours to remove broken and useless tests from the codebase. This has been tedious work and the result is a lower test coverage than earlier, but now we have only tests that are running and not giving us an error (not the same as failure). We have made tests during our workshops and these tests now shows brightly on the JUnit report (-sky) as passed tests. Hopefully this will be motivation to actually go in to old code and bring it up to better standards with tests. We do all these changes one small step at the time and it actually seem to be working!


I will be back with some pictures when the screen has arrived.

Work Engagement

In my last post I talked about fear as an obstacle to be productive in development of a software project. Knowledge can conquer this fear, but there is also something else that can make people forget their fear. Engagement!

If you are really interested and motivated in your work you might just not be afraid of the huge codebase and the possibilities of errors and bugs when you do a change to it. In my opinion a motivated person often learn faster and are quicker to pick up on positive changes in their environment.

I often feel an "energy" when doing something interesting and it keeps me motivated. I read different blogs and I buy both management and system engineering books. This keeps me interested because I am constantly learning something new. But it is not what makes me actually tick, what does it is the actual tryout of an idea. Even if you only read it in a book or a blog. Does it work? If it does work it spurs me further in to the idea and I get motivated to continue to try new ideas.

How does one motivate others in the same way? To some extent I think it happens automatically when they are close to, or are working together with a person that has this energy. But is it enough?

My advice is to bring your colleagues or friends to the spot where you get your motivation from! Be an enabler and the motivator. Do not be afraid to bring new things to the table. Enable for others to bring new ideas into the work environment.

A day that nothing new is tried out can be a wasted day.. Can work be performed better for you and your company in any way?


Some of my favourite places to get ideas and inspiration:
The Practice of Leadership
Management Skill Blog
Management Craft
Agile Leadership
XP Meetup
*Technical*
Uncle Bob
(++)

Make it better

Easter vacations are over and we are finally getting back to work. I have a few exciting things happening this week as my role as project leader is getting more familiar. One of the things is a full day unit-test workshop with my project members.

Testing we do today:
1. Your own testing when you have written the functionality
- Verifies that you do not have any obvious errors
2. Someone else tests the functionality after your description of how to test it
- Verifies that you have not skipped the testing? Sometimes people do different approaches here..
3. We run a robot-test on main functionality of the solution.
- This ensures that we do not have errors that stops the solution or influence the core functionality.

After this our solution leaves the office and is delivered for testing by the customer.
This approach would work great if it had not been for the time between our beginning of the programming/coding and the time we get feedback. It has a high risk of creating a gap between what the customer wants and what he gets. To help with this gap, we have iterations in the implementation phase which is highly influenced by customer feedback.

All well and good so far.

The issues start showing up in Jira (our bug tracker) some time later. This might be issues connected to integration or even several years old code. The amount of code lines and the number of integration points are increasing every day. To avoid the problem of having feedback this late I think we need to increase the release cycle and write unit-tests before we code. The "write the test first" (or TDD) rule will enable us to think differently before we start coding. As well as seeing implications earlier and taking these in account when implementing our functionality. One of our goal is to increase the quality of both code and functionality and this will work as an enabler. After doing this a while we will hopefully be able to start with nightly builds and catch more bugs this way.

Oops..This post got a bit more technical than planned, but anyway thats the main thoughts.

You might ask "why we need a 1 day workshop on this?". The keyword is ownership and engagement. If I just say that we are from tomorrow writing tests before we code new functionality, who would do it?
By doing this together we lower the barrier for something new and we increase everyones competence by working together on the different problems that comes up. We have focus on this for a whole day and might actually remember it.

The ultimate goal is an increase in quality and pride in what we deliver. Even if we work with legacy code and others mistakes, we can make it better! And we will!

Scrum - something for maintenance projects?

Phew.. Been a couple of busy weeks. I have just become the project leader in a 5 person project. I've been in this project with various roles since I started in May last year. This is a great opportunity for me to be part of something and to change it to something better if possible. Not that you always need change, but I tend to think that change is good in so many ways that some changes should be made in order for people to stay with a project over a long period of time. I really wonder why so many people do not want such a job. The possibility to be a change-maker!

The challenge in our project is that it is an "old" project by IT standards and it is in maintenance phase. The project consists of 5 people in a good blend of experienced and not so experienced. Me being part of the latter when it comes to my new role. What I find interesting is the energy I feel about this! I've always felt that I put out the questions to my surroundings. It now seems that I will be put to the test myself and have to do action based on others questions and requirements.

Hopefully I will be able to change some elements in the project so that we can work in new ways and see change bring new energy in to the project. I have a dream about an energic group of people working together to make the best they have ever made. When we deliver we should be proud of what we have done and feel that it was worth it. This is a bit childish and naive, but I think it is possible if one can create the right circumstances. It can happen! I really look forward to work with the people, the environment and the product from within this role.

With this perspective I have looked to Scrum. I see elements in Scrum that can be usefully applied in our project. These elements being the product backlog, sprint backlog, daily scrum and burndown charts. Especially the sprint backlog as this will allow developers to focus on these issues and then the burndown chart to see the progress and make it possible to feel that we are moving toward a goal.

Our project is in maintenance phase which I find exiting for this kind of "method". This means we have bugs being reported as well as new functionality into Jira. This will be our starting point when we begin to work on our product backlog.

So there you have some of my thought on change in our project. Maybe someone have seen Scrum used in maintenance projects earlier and would like to give a comment?

The seven-day weekend

I just started reading a book called The seven-day weekend (excerpt from chapter 1) by Ricardo Semler. Looking forward to see the thoughts behind the success of his company Semco. So far I've read alot about responsible adults and how people use their time differently when employed by Semco. The have really taken the idea of flexitime to another level. Semler mentions that one of the important goal is to have motivated employees. The example that is often referred to is answering emails on Sunday's and watching a movie on Monday afternoon. Freedom to think and to enjoy life, be it while working or fishing. It reminds me of what I read from Peter Senge when doing my masterthesis. Senge proposed an idea of work being meaningful to yourself and be connected to your own personal goals. Work is integrated, your life and your time not divided into spare time and work time. It also seems that Semler have ideas similar to those from Peter Drucker about workers are able to manage themselves without supervision and control.

I will come back with a full review and more thoughts when I have read the whole book. While waiting you should head over to CIOinsights and read an interesting interview with Semler here.

What about a stereo?

Today I got myself a stereo with loudspeakers and the lot. It was great and I can now enjoy music in a new way. Even found my old CD's to play!

But when doing the work of setting up the different parts as DVD player, amplifier and loudspeakers the thought struck me again as so many times before. How much had I not learned about loudspeakers and amplifiers while searching the internet for the right price and something that suited my "needs". In the process of searching for the "right" components for me I learned a lot about the technology and how it was to be used. When I now have the technology here in my flat that information that I earlier read of the web is transformed into knowledge by me actually acting upon that information. This information have enabled me to have a mental idea of what to expect and what to do with the different components. I have somehow an understanding of how the whole system works.

I've been reading the manuals with a genuine interest in how things work and what I can get out of it. Imagine if we could inspire this kind of engagement in schools and other learning institutions. Creating an interest that goes beyond that of getting a good grade or just "because i need it for my work".