Object Mentor Blog: Short Reach

Short Reach

tottinger — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 15:33:00 -0500

I’m always trying to find newer, better, shorter, more powerful ways to explain what Agile is about. I suppose I’m some kind of obsessive about expressive power and economy.

Finally I decided that Agile, as I understand it today, is about the short reach.

It seems to me that all of the agile practices are about shortening our reach, the distance in time-and-space that one leaves an assumption, decision, or line of code untested and unconfirmed. All the practices seem to follow this one rule.

The customer/analyst is keep in the same room, in the same short reach.
We feed back the iterations to the customer/analyst so that his every decision has a shorter reach.
We do iterations to ensure our planning has short reach.
We keep our teammates very close, in the same room, so that it’s a shorter reach to them.
The test is written first, so that implementation has shorter feedback on correctness.
We compile/test frequently because our code time should have a short reach.
We pair so that our code is instantly vetted through a peer. We don’t pile it up and review it after the tests pass.
Our planning is based on “yesterday’s weather”, data collected a very short time ago.
We don’t plan the team structure and the assignments, we self-organize so that tasks are waiting for the shortest time possible.
We talk face-to-face, not across chat and email and official company documents.
Tell-dont-ask and the Law of Demeter guide us in keeping the reach of our objects very short.
We use unit tests to exercise a class directly, and we isolate with mocks to reduce the reach of our tests through the system.
Shared code ownership means that the guy sitting behind your keyboard has all the permission he needs to do excellent work, even if it impacts existing design.
Test-first development means that the guy who makes a change knows very quickly whether his change is safe or not. He doesn’t have to wait until the week before integration when the “real” tests are run.

Where does Agile run into logistical or operational difficulties? Wherever a long reach is required or imposed. Where an organization chooses to continue in waterfall-style management, where the team is distributed among managers with appointed “point of contact” and “official channels”, and where the developers are not placed in a common work area agility is very difficult.

I’m not saying that agile techniques can’t work for large companies, but that is an area where a lot of experts are trying (maybe succeeding) to extend the agile techniques and where the average “agilist” finds challenges. When it works, it is almost certain it will be because someone has found a way to shorten the reach of the teams so that all they need to know is never more than a few seconds or minutes away.

At least that’s my half-baked observation of the day. Let me know if I’m wrong here. Or if I’m more right than I think I am.

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"Short Reach" by Tenant Screening

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 11:04:49 -0600

So from this perspective your list of “short reach” items are a set of refactoring patterns from getting from a bad “present state value stream map” for a poor/waterfall software development process to a much improved agile process.

"Short Reach" by Criminal Records

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If you want to dive into the details the definitive authority on for lean software development is the Poppendiecks. They were here in Copenhagen.

"Short Reach" by Martin Jul

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 15:31:32 -0500

This notion of “short reach” rings a particular bell with me: the idea from lean about reducing cycle-time through “single-piece flow”, namely that when we start doing something we finish it completely.

From a lean perspective what you are describing is that for a feature in our backlog we look at the “value stream map” – the different steps to implement it. This is called the present state. Then “short reach” is all about optimizing the process.

If we have a lot of “waste” (the lean definition for the opposite of “short reach”) we will see that the feature gets stuck – it is blocked from completion by waiting for the customer to clarify the requirements, for walking to another building to talk to the database team, waiting for testing to check it (for the lack of up-front testing), waiting for the developer to remove the bugs found (the waste of defects) etc.

This is the present situation. Following lean tradition we now draw a “future value stream map” where we rearrange the steps that add value into a sequence where a feature can go from started to completed without any unnecessary delays. We also remove all the steps that add no value (for example, if we put the customer and the development team in the same room we take out a lot of the need for bureaucracy, if we fix bugs when we find them we don’t need complicated bug tracking systems and change procedures etc.)

If you want to dive into the details the definitive authority on for lean software development is the Poppendiecks. They were here in Copenhagen earlier this week

I’ve also blogged about lean on our blog, Ative at Work if you want my take on lean and its relation to software development.