Thursday 28 January 2016

Who owns the backlog?

A conversation about bug lifetimes came up in a Slack discussion at work today, and a core question came up, that really summarised the entire tenor of the conversation: who owns the backlog?

The answer, if we’re being honest with ourselves, is everyone. The backlog of work to be done, and the prioritisation of that work, is not the exclusive province of any one member of the team, or any one group within your organisation. Everyone who has a stake in the backlog owns it, jointly.

No, seriously. This is especially true if you work in an organisational structure similar to Spotify’s popular squads model. It’s definitely a much more refreshing take on the division of labour than the fairly typical siloing of The Business, The Developers, and The Testers. Admittedly, even then, there really isn’t much excuse not to own your backlog, but when your work priorities are determined by someone on the other side of the office (if they even work in the same building as you), it’s at least understandable that developers might not have as much say about it as they’d like.

But at the end of the day, if you’re invited to periodic planning and prioritisation sessions, you own the backlog as much as everyone else in the room. Developers aren’t there to just be technical consultants on the projected time to complete a given feature. You’re there to contribute to what gets priority over something else.

This is all abstract and fluffy, I know, so here’s an example from my own life.

In the third quarter of 2015, my squad was charged with implementing a new feature on our mobile apps. As an organisation, we’d tried it once before, in 2010 or 2011, and it was an embarrassing failure, so I suspect that, throughout the business, people were a little shy about trying it again. But we had some new technology in place to support this feature, and we thought we could achieve it in a couple of months, by standing on the shoulders of giants, so to speak.

At the same time, we’ve been trying to commit to dual-track agile, so we’d set an aggressive schedule of in-house user testing sessions with the Android app, to validate our workflows and UI. This user testing is fairly expensive, especially if you miss a date, so we agreed upon certain milestones for each round of testing.

In order to make these milestones, we had to make a number of compromises internally. Lots of stuff where we said, “well, it doesn’t need to be complete for the test, but we need something in this UI element, so we’ll hardcode this thing, and fix it after the test.” The only problem—and you can probably see this coming already—is that we didn’t fix those things promptly after the user test. We continued plowing through new features to make the next test. Like I said, it was an aggressive schedule.

Cut to a month or so later, when those hardcoded elements start causing bugs in the interface. I probably spent a week and a half correcting and compensating for things we considered “acceptable” for the user tests, that if I’d either implemented properly in the first place, or immediately corrected it after that test, would have taken a day. This was obviously really frustrating, and I mentioned that frustration in my end-of-year review. I complained that because we were so focussed on the milestones, at launch, it wasn't properly monitored, and it delayed other work, and said I was disappointed with having to release something retroactively dubbed a “public beta”.

When my manager and I reviewed the year, both his comments and mine, he had one simple question for me that stopped me in my tracks: why didn’t you say something right then? And I didn’t have an answer for him. Because I didn’t say anything at the time it came up. I didn’t open tickets for the defects. I may have mentioned the concessions made, in passing, during standups, and counted on my project manager and product owner to open the tickets.

So why didn’t I say something? Because I was acting like someone else owned the backlog, and my job is just to take work off it. This isn’t true. I could have saved myself, and everyone else, a lot of trouble, by recognising that I own the backlog as much as anybody else. If bugs are languishing in the backlog, then it’s your responsibility, as a member of the team, to bring that up during planning sessions. Your manager will appreciate your taking the lead on reducing technical debt and advocating for improving your code base.

Wednesday 20 January 2016

On emotional labour

My awesome wife who's awesome wrote an amazing tweetstorm earlier tonight about the unpaid emotional labour women are socialised to do, and it’s made me pensive about a few things.

First up: I am absolutely guilty of a lot of these things. I hope less so recently than I used to be, but I have enough self-awareness to admit that yes, I have said and done these things. (She promises me it wasn’t directed at me, but that doesn’t mean I’m innocent—and I think I know her well enough to know she’d never subtweet the Hell out of me like that—but I think even that is part of the truckload of unpaid emotional labour that she, as a woman, has been brought up to do) And to be quite honest, if you’re a guy… you’ve done these things too. If you look at me and think to yourself, “well, I don’t think I’m like this,” you almost certainly are like that. Only if you can specifically identify things you do that are not like that… you’re like that.

Because, honestly, guys are socialised to do exactly that. And you even see a lot of it in what jobs in tech are coded as being “inherently” oriented toward men or women. QA and project management, which are both roles that require diligence, attention to minute detail, and an aptitude for predicting someone’s needs before they are aware of it, are coded as and performed by women much more than most other roles in the tech industry. Of tech roles within a tech company, they’re the only positions that I’ve consistently observed having anything close to gender-wise parity.

So why do I think that guys are socialised not to do this work? Because, let’s be honest, it is work. I had an opportunity to fill in for my team’s project manager (who, it’s important to point out, is a woman) late last year, and holy mother of God that job is hard. Like, Nintendo-hard. And at least she’s getting paid for it, but I guarantee she’s been doing this her whole life, because that’s what society’s taught her to do. And I haven’t. Instead, I’ve grown up around a lot of media that’s suggested that one set of gifts (chocolate, teddy bears, and diamonds) will satisfy any woman I may be involved with (here’s a hint: that’s a load of crap), and an escalating and never-ending series of ostensible jokes along the lines of “bitches be cray” when her birthday, or anniversary is forgotten.

And why the hell shouldn’t they be? Seriously, think about it for a minute. The person who you’ve decided to open up to and be most vulnerable with comes home on your birthday, or on the anniversary of the day you got married, and they have no idea what’s happened today, however long ago. They can’t bring it to mind at all.

Wouldn’t you be upset? I would be. I have been.

Long story short, just like math and art, the everyday things that women “just seem to do better than men” are things that they’ve practised, constantly, since they were very young. (Men have, conversely, been raised to ignore those things.) Anything you do every day of your life, for about as long as you can remember… yeah, you’re going to be pretty damn good at. Doesn’t make it easy, just habit. (Professional athletes are a great example of this) If you really want to show some kind of appreciation for the women in your life, and all the things they do for you… do them yourself.