Shape Up
I’ll admit it… I too have drunk the Basecamp marketing Kool-Aid. Over the years, I’ve found myself gravitating towards ideas coming out of the Basecamp camp, and while I’m aware that part of this is a marketing plot to draw attention to their products, I still find quite a few of their ideas very valuable. One of the more recent ideas to come out of the Basecamp camp is the newish software development framework - Shape Up, a distillation of their working practices developed over the years.
Since a full book may be too much time investment on your part, here’s a short introduction about Shape Up by Ryan Singer:
There are many interesting ideas in Shape Up, but I’m going to focus on just one: the separation of thinking and planning from doing. In this methodology, these two steps are actually separated into two different teams that work simultaneously in parallel, but shifted in time. One of the teams is responsible for the design of the work - deciding what features to work on and some of the high-level details and concerns around them. This team prepares the work that the other team will work on in the next sprint. Meanwhile, the other team works on the design, testing and implementation of the features decided on in the previous sprint.
I can see that this methodology is more appropriate for a product company than a software house, and I can see that the six-week work cycles may be too much for some people, but this idea of shaping, which is just a fancy term for taking the time to think about a particular problem/feature, is incredibly fundamental. Many managers expect their developers to be able to estimate how much work a particular task will require, with little to no context into the details of that work, either forcing developers to hone their fortune-telling skills, or alternatively to take time out and mentally drill down into the details of each and every JIRA issue, alone or in a group.
By having a dedicated team of experienced developers and product people start thinking about what could be worked on in advance, the general outline of the work that a particular feature will require begins to take shape and become clearer, possibly even finding reasons not to work on that particular feature or task, thus avoiding problems down the line.
There are other interesting ideas in Shape Up and I urge you to read the book or watch some talks about it.
Hopefully, one day, companies will revisit their project management choices and rethink their adoption of Big A Agile and the original spirit of Agile - continuous process improvement, with experimentation back in the spotlight. Shape Up or any other framework, we urgently need to rethink our development practices. For now, we are stuck with agile with a capital A.
Resources:
- https://www.youtube.com/@shapersbuilders