Paurian Café

For decades developers have abruptly stopped the work they’re doing in the morning to convene with a manager and give status. This practice has hurt our process, slowed our releases and even ruined good engineers. It needs an overhaul.

If you’re a scrum master or manager, you’re probably appalled by this statement, but there is a gamut of articles over the past few years that echo this sentiment and provide compelling evidence of our failure by tradition.

Three improvements that I see with the current practice are:
1. Its time of day
2. The questions asked
3. The meeting’s duration
4. The meeting purpose and meaning to its participants

The best time of day for a stand-up

Have you ever noticed how so many people are tired around 2:30 in the afternoon? Daniel Pink reveals in his book When that this is a natural phenomenon and one to be gravely aware of. Any hospital procedure (surgery, diagnosis, etc.) is more likely to go wrong in the afternoon. Car accidents peak between 2 and 4. And software engineers increase their bugs and sloppy code. The afternoon is when we need to pair program the most so we catch our bugs before checking them in and keep our quality high.

During a time in my life when I worked from 6AM to 10PM regularly, I noticed that my code was not at the quality level I expect from myself so I started to monitor when certain sloppy code and bugs were introduced. I discovered that 90% of them were after 2PM. What’s even more grim was that any work after 10 hours was counter-productive… it was so bad that it took more time to fix than it took to write.

It’s actually more productive to not fix the tough bugs that we discover in the afternoon, go home, relax, and fix the bug the following day. We want to handle difficult issues with a fresh mind, so why are we spending any of that precious time in meetings? That’s a mistake. We want to have our meetings in the afternoon – preferably at 2PM. This allows us enough time remaining in the day to start removing road-blocks, to wrap up our daily projects, and to combine efforts to end our day in a positive way.

By having a positive meeting at 2PM, we can inject some energy to the team through motivation and support that can help them cary through the remainder of the day. This is the best time to take a break, refresh ourselves and rejuvenate our efforts to make it through the rest of the day with our greatest potential.

Our most focused time and our highest peak in performance is in the morning. It turns out we have a reserve for willpower that helps gauge better decisions. That reserve is its highest in the morning and depletes throughout the day until, by 2PM we feel tired and bad things start to happen. Paradoxically, our best time for creativity and distractions is in the afternoon.

In a Scientific American article, The Inspiration Paradox, we read:

To be sure, if your task requires strong focus and careful concentration – like balancing spreadsheets or reading a textbook – you are better off scheduling that task for your [morning].  However, if you need to open your mind to alternative approaches and consider diverse options, it may be wise to do so when your filter is not so functional [in the afternoon].  You just may be able to see what you’ve been missing.

Scientific American, The Inspiration Paradox

Years ago, I was presented with a question that grew into an idea. What kind of data can we mine from project management software to predict how well a current project will perform?

Though there are many factors that play in project management, the most impact comes from the enthusiasm (or lack thereof) of the people doing the work. Emotion plays such a large part of a team’s success that I was able to create a predictive algorithm around the emotional state of the words used in defining the backlog items and tasks. I was working on Sentiment Analysis before it was a term.

It’s What You Say About What You Do

What we discovered was that words like “Refactor” and “Fix” tended to elicit negative emotions while “Build” and “Create” tended to be more positive. When work was tagged as a “bug” or a “bug fix”, I’ve seen spit fly and fingers flail. It’s no wonder anytime an issue arose, our clients suddenly tensed up. And certain words can be unique to an industry or even to an office culture.

For example, “BHAG” (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) was thrown around in our office as a positive thing, though I doubt many other offices in our industry would view it the same, as it often means an unending quicksand-like project that can easily stagnate a career.

So how do we fight all this and find our team zen? First, we need to be sensitive to the words being used. For example, WordPress’ mantra is “Code is Poetry”. That makes you feel creative, and a “bug fix” is really an “edit” … or better yet, an “improvement”. Consider how these work item titles make you feel.

1. Fix login page to let users view their password.
2. Edit login page so users can view their password.
3. Improve login page so users may view their password.

Fix implies broken. Fix means something is wrong. Edit is better, as it implies something needs to change, and improve IMHO is the best. We always strive to improve things. By doing your work on a task with “Improve” in the title, you made something better! By doing the same work on a task with “Fix” in the title, you just made something par! Fixing means taking something bad and making it neutral. Nothing special with a fix, but you can put “improve” on a resumé!

Furthermore, you hardly hear of a “quick improvement” as being a hack, but “quick fix” is synonymous with spaghetti, duck tape and temporary. But when you suggest “improve”, you get something more like this:

Begin With The End In Mind

Considering the end-game as a work of art changes the perception – especially when compared to an industry standard of slapping “lipstick on the pig to release it” (as I once heard a manager order his team to do). If you can’t have pride in your work, you’re going to treat it like the crap it will become. Chris Reynolds has a fun piece on this overall idea. Code has a smell and a feel to it.

Usually the term “Begin with the End in mind” is applied to projects and start-ups, but it should be applied to teams as well. What do we want this team to be in 3 months? Burnt out? Probably not. Energetic? Maybe. Well-greased, but siloed? That’s a no. Upbeat, creative and able to jump into each others’ work? For the win!

Start leading your team (even if you’re just a team player right now) towards that goal by being there yourself … every day … until the team meets you there.

What You Measure Becomes Your Goal

When I work at companies that focus on Earned Value, guess what? Numbers are great each quarter because attrition rate is high. When I work at companies that focus on Customers, guess what? Customer feedback is high (though there’s much fakery in the office). But when I work at companies that focus on People, then employees are happy, customers are happy and the numbers are healthy.

To aim for a company of happy people, you have to start with yourself. But how do we measure happiness? Two ways: 1. Introspection and 2. Retrospection.

Outside Looking In

Both Introspection and Retrospection are similar in that they require you to look hard at yourself, your achievements, your pitfalls, and your abilities. Retrospectives happen after an event takes place. Introspectives happen before an event takes place. When you doodle on your notepad while the manager is lecturing your team, that’s introspection. You’re building thoughts, ideas and feelings on paper to initiate a mental tie with whatever you just heard.

But we have a bias based on our immediate circumstance and emotion. If you’re given a crap-load of junk work to do, suddenly everything leading up to that moment looks grim and unrewarding. If you’re given praise and accolades, then suddenly everything leading up to that moment looks positive and worthwhile. Even if it was the exact same work that led up to these two different results.

So I wanted to track my immediate feelings and respond to them. If I tend to feel negative when attending certain meetings, a track record would show it and I could do something about that – I can put a spin on those meetings if I can’t bail out. At the very least, I’ll know in advance what situations that I dislike diving into so that I can prepare accordingly. At the very best, I can improve the situation for myself and everyone else as well. Chances are, if you feel that meeting with Mr. X is like a visit to the proctologist, others do as well.

Tracking Happiness

I began with the sheet I use to track my own work. What am I accomplishing right now? How does it make me feel? What just happened in the office that makes me cringe? Who walked through the door that brought a smile to my face?

Originally, I was recording each hour. That became cumbersome. Then I figured the same outcome could be achieved if I just kept the overall vibe of the day. I would put a number in the thumbs-up and one in the thumbs-down (with tally marks as they happened). No need to cross reference things, yet. Wednesdays are highlighted because the company used that day to measure milestones. Also, note that Fridays began the sprint cycle instead of Mondays. This was so that code could be released at the end of the sprint and give us a day to work out issues on the release before the weekend began. Fewer calls on the weekend meant happier company.

Currently, I have this in a Word document. You can download the macro version, which automatically updates the header and dates for sprints starting on Fridays, here. If you want a blank PDF version without the macro, I’ve got that too.

As an alternative, you might like the Mood Tracker Planner by Sourcebooks, or you could find some printable ones from online by searching “mood tracker planner printable“.

Other Paths To Happiness

Tony Robbins has an easy solution to fixing the overall happiness problem:

I do three things for 3 1/3 minutes each: I focus on three moments in my life that I’m grateful for, because gratitude is the antidote to the things that mess us up. You can’t be angry and grateful simultaneously. You can’t be fearful and grateful simultaneously. So, gratitude is the solution to both anger and fear, and instead of just acting grateful, I think of specific situations that I’m grateful for, little ones and big ones. I do it every single day, and I step into those moments and I feel the gratitude and the aliveness.

Tony Robbins

Other guides to happiness lead to “helping others”, as doing so means you’re not as fixated on yourself and your problems and the action in itself usually provides perspective that diminishes your personal issues. So does “thinking good of each person in the room” and “forcing yourself to smile” … there are so many different ways to improve your nature. In short, you have to experiment and try things out. Books like The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin and Happiness by Zelig Pliskin provide ideas on different ways to do so.