If they were optional, why would you have them at all?

If you’re too busy to attend, you’re not a team working on a scrum, you’re an individual fighting on your own.

Too many times, early in the formation of a team when I would be unable to attend a scrum people would ask, “Do we need to scrum?”. Yes! It’s not optional! Even when we talk all day long about the issues facing us as we work through our tasks, we still scrum! Even when we’re down a team member (or several) we scrum! We scrum because we have been so busy working our tasks. It brings us back to focus on the big picture — what were we going to accomplish, did we get done what we said we would, if not why not and looking ahead is there anything that will impede us?

I use the scrum to take a deep breath, refocus, check our progress, see as early as possible if we’re sliding to the right and deal with issues straight up before plunging back into the work I said I was going to do. Even if there are only two of you on the team, take the time to scrum, collect your thoughts, check your progress, realign or reaffirm and then get back to work!

Period

Stick to your “contract” to perform a certain amount of work in a certain period of time and, as Scrum Master (not the team!), work with senior managers or others to find another way to deal with an “emergency”. In over six years of leading agile projects using Scrum, I have never stopped a sprint. I’ve seen them stopped, I’ve seen disruptions and I’ve seen teams negatively impacted for the remainder of the project because of it. Once you do it, everyone loses respect for the fundamental principles of scrum.

Unless the project or the company folds, do not stop the sprint!

Security Concerns Lead To New Forum Plugin

I had originally implemented Fredrik Fahlstad’s wp-Forum plugin to manage my forums. Shortly after implementation, a security alert was issued. I waited a few days to see if an update were forthcoming, but after receiving no news, I determined that my best course of action was to replace the plugin.

Fortunately, a very worthy forum plugin was readily available – Yellow Swordfish’s Simple Forum by Andy Staines. Besides being an elegant solution for providing a forum from within WordPress, Andy has been very active in supporting the plugin. Security alerts are immediately addressed, the feature set continues to evolve, the application has an incredible amount of control from the administrative pages, updates are easy to perform (single click), and the administrative pages are as elegant as the end-user interface. I think I would have changed anyway!

WordPress 2.5 Update Leads To New Visual Editor

When WordPress 2.5 came out, I tested it on my development box. The only plugin which did not work with it was wp-SuperEdit. I loved that tool, but the author stated that it was quite possible there would be no further updates due to the significant changes in 2.5. I therefore switched to the TinyMCEAdvanced plugin….at least temporarily. The good news is that Jess Planck has been working on a rewrite to wp-superEdit for 2.5! I can do my work with the TinyMCEAdvanced plugin, but it has this annoying problem of showing the text box as too wide and sliding behind the WordPress controls on the page. I’m looking forward to going back to wp-superEdit in the near future!

NextGEN Gallery – Slideshows!

I had created what I thought was a very attractive, functional home page using one of the WPRemix templates as shown below.

While helping a friend put together a WordPress site for Women’s Motocross Racing, I researched plugins to provide a slideshow in their header.

The best I found, in terms of compatibility and performance, was the NextGEN Gallery from Alex Rabe. After following David Potter’s excellent tutorial, we had it functioning in the header of their site. I then turned to one of my commercial sites with the intent of replacing my own home page (see above). What I came up with was a new look entirely:

The new home page uses eight images in a slideshow administered by the NextGEN gallery and slideshow plugin (required for a slideshow). The new home page is clean, simple and direct. It was easy to take another of the WPRemix templates, fill in the three blocks at the bottom and replace the body with the NextGEN code. It will be interesting to see how prospective customers greet the new format!

iBeginShare

I personally dislike seeing a lot of icons for social bookmarks at the end of each post, but I do like to offer alternatives for the end-user, such as e-mailing the post to a friend. I wanted a plugin that would allow me to do everything I wanted from one control and I found it in David Cramer’s iBeginShare.

iBeginShare puts a button at the end of each post.

This button is unobtrusive, does not detract from the post or the page and hides a lot of functionality. When a user clicks on it, a dialog is drawn over the post. Initially, the end-user is presented with options for social networking sites.

Notice the tabs across the top. To me, this was a simple, elegant solution to offer the end-user with options for each post. If they so desire, they may e-mail the post to a friend or colleague.

iBeginShare satisfied my requirements with nothing more than the first two tabs, but installation brought additional welcome features. The user can click the MyComputer tab and download the post in Word or Adobe’s PDF.

Finally, and quite unexpectedly, iBeginShare allows the user to print the post.

At the End of the Day…

It’s time to put my feet up and count my blessings again. I plan on two more posts on the subject of upgrading my WordPress e-commerce site. The first will detail the remainder of the plugins I’m employing which are visible to the end-user. The second will detail the plugins I have found useful for administering the site. Until then, I hope you can put your feet up and count your blessings too!

1. You want to make a living from your online sales, not just a hobby that brings in some additional money (although much of this still applies)
2. You are establishing your first online store using WordPress

Hits != $$$

Many people looking to WordPress as their e-commerce platform do so because it blends the capability of selling with that of blogging. Blogging can be an effective means of promoting your product and should be a tool in any entrepreneur’s toolbox. WordPress’ flexibility with the multitude of free themes and plugins makes it perfect for blending the activities of promoting, selling, and supporting products. However, there is a fundamental difference between blogging (or promoting) and selling – the metric by which success is measured is not the same for both!

When blogging, you’re looking to build an audience. You want to see stats with lots of unique visitors, a high number of page views, and an rss feed with thousands (or tens of thousands) of subscribers. On an e-commerce site, promoting your product, that won’t pay the bills! You can try to sell ad space, but that can dilute your message, detract from your product, and confuse your potential customers.

Hits Are Not Equal To Sales

When selling through a WordPress platform, the metric used to measure success is the same as every other business; money. You can talk all you want about hits, visitors, page views, and conversion rates, but only the latter matters. You may be capable of presenting an online store front for basically no cost through free WordPress themes and plugins, but you still must pay for Internet access and bandwidth, domain names, hosting (be it self where you pay for electricity, hardware, licenses, etc. or remote), etc. The bottom line truly is the bottom line – revenue derived from your sales is the only thing that counts. It alone will keep you from eating buttered macaroni.

The advice here is to pay more attention to your prospective customer base than your fan base. The trick here is to know when you’re moving fans to customers and not simply educating the world (which isn’t a bad thing, but also isn’t your goal here). The information you need will be in your website access logs and that will require you to do more than install the WordPress stats plugin. Woopra has a sexy interface, but you may need to go even deeper. If your site is hosted, see if AWStats or any other analytical tool is available to you. You will also need to gather information from your visitors in the form of polls, forms, etc. If visitors aren’t buying, you need to figure out why – as fast as you can. Blogging more may actually hurt more at that point by adding to the confusion. If your hits (page views or visitors) are high but your sales are low, stop doing what you’re doing. Listen to your stats and your visitors, then refine your approach until the $$$ are soaring as much as the hits!

WordPress != Guaranteed E-commerce Success

There is no magical combination of theme + plugins that will guarantee the success of your online store. You must market and sell your product. It’s hard work! You will need to be flexible, try new plugins, perhaps change up your theme. After six months of using the default WPRemix Home Page #1 template, I just changed up the format by introducing the NextGEN Gallery plugin and a slideshow on the home page. I’ve gone from presenting a lot of information, to a far simpler home page. I have also changed up the plugins (and will write about the changes soon). Some of the changes were done because of security concerns, others because of a lack of support, and still others because they offered a solution to an emerging need.

The advice here is to be prepared to nurture your entire site, not just your blog. That takes time, effort and money (you do donate to the authors gracious enough to provide their themes and plugins, don’t you?!). While WordPress is a great platform for e-commerce, it’s just that – a platform. It’s up to you to put in the effort to make your store a living, growing concern. WordPress and the careful selection of plugins can work to make your efforts to earn your living from the Internet easier in many ways, but it doesn’t eliminate all the work. Come prepared to do what is necessary, make certain you have the time to contribute to the effort, use care in choosing your theme and in particular your plugins, and be flexible; listen to your prospective customers (separated from your fans), tweak your offering, rinse and repeat.

Go for it != Don’t quit your day job

I’m not one to tell people, “Go for it!” without the word of caution, “Don’t quit your day job yet!”. It is certainly possible to make a living offering the right services or products via the Internet, but the babies need food, Momma needs new shoes, and then there’s the cost of living. The advice here is to proceed with caution. Know your “tipping point” before you reach it.

At the End of the Day…

At the end of the day, when you have a chance to catch your breath, count your blessings not your money! Count your money during the “work day” – which leads me to a very important point; with the allure of global reach from your desktop, the ease of implementing WordPress, and the potential for riches, it’s very, very easy to lose track of time and your work-life balance. Don’t.

You should have several “tipping points”; the point at which it’s ok to slow down because the sales sustain the business, the point at which it’s ok to take the vacation – to be absent for more than a few hours or days, etc. At the end of the day, what matters most is your health and your relationship with others. Give it your best, then give it a rest!

This is a principle behind the Agile Manifesto. The Agile Manifesto itself states, “Through this work we have come to value: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.” Individuals and interactions is exactly what we had – a few of the former and a lot of the latter! In a perfect world, we’d all co-locate, someone would get my Diet Coke and rub my shoulders and….well, they didn’t specify the kind of interactions!

“Through this work we have come to value: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. – The Agile Manifesto”

What Others Are Saying

Jeff Sutherland, co-founder of Scrum, wrote an article with Peter Valhansky and Anton Victoroy for the Agile Journal, Hyperproductivity in Large Projects Through Distributed Scrum. In the article, the authors state that one of the”new best practices” is to have “no distinction between developers at different sites on the same team”.

There are two critical points in this one statement; “different sites” and “same team”. You do not have to be co-located to be on the same team! Everyone was equal despite someone having more familiarity with a particular topic, or a longer background in the field, or better subject matter expertise, etc. We were a team, with no “I”. If you are to be agile across long-distances, you must work to break down all barriers and form a team that behaves as-if it were co-located. As ScrumMaster, it was my job to ensure that everyone respected each other as an equal team member. To that end, I have a golden rule for the teams I lead: “You may critique anything, but you may never criticize anyone.” In other words, don’t make it personal!

“You may critique anything, but you may never criticize anyone!”

Scott Ambler, with thanks to Erich Gamma, John Kellerman, and Ian Skerrett, describes the Eclipse project in “Imperfectly Agile: You Too Can Be Agile!” for Dr. Dobb’s Portal. He points out that the Eclipse development team has “managed to successfully deliver six major releases over the years” and that “it has done so on time, every time, by following an agile process.” Sounds successful, right? Now, consider that, according to the authors, the Eclipse project is “comprised of 10 projects, with 23 subprojects, and 262 committees working for 15 different companies in 12 different countries“. It can be done on a very large scale!

Over on the Agile Software Development blog, a member by the name of Vaibhav posted the article, “Distributed Agile Development -1: Reinterpreting the manifesto”. In his post, Vaibhav points out that “the manifesto was put together in 2001; a long time ago by software industry standard.” The article goes on to point out that “offshore development (the primary scenario for distributed development) was beginning to gather momentum, but most such development occurred using the traditional heavy-weight development methodologies.” Vaibhav gets to the crux of the matter by asking, “How do such teams cope with being almost totally against the spirit of one of the principles of the Agile Manfesto?” Geographically dispersed teams encounter different issues the further the geographic dispersement is. Our team had no communication problems whatsoever. I have heard horror stories about US companies that have contracted with Russian firms only to sever the relationship and find all the class and method names in Russian after taking over the code base. I’ve also heard the stories of two and three hour meetings every day between dispersed teams just to review code and work out issues that arose because of a misinterpretation of earlier communications (i.e. specs). No one said it might not be difficult, but a large part of being agile is to constantly inspect and adapt. As the ScrumMaster, I always tried to keep the bigger picture in mind and inspect the team’s environment working to minimize distractions and disruptions. I tried to let the team focus on the Sprint tasks and jealously guarded them from outside interference while at the same time inspecting their inner workings to see that we were doing everything possible to be moving in a positive direction towards our many goals. The process of inspection and adaptation is never ending and being geographically dispersed only adds to the complexity that you must work to simplify!

Martin Fowler wrote about the pain offshore development inherently brings with it in an article on his website entitled “Using an Agile Software Process with Offshore Development”. In the article, he points out “the weak spots of offshore development come from culture and distance with the business. Because agile development works best with close communication and an open culture, agilists working offshore feel the pain much more than those using plan-driven approaches.” He concludes his thought on this by saying, “but it’s still less pain than the plan-driven methods themselves!” If I interpret this correctly, he is stating that while there is definitely some pain associated with a geographically dispersed team that a co-located team would not experience, it’s not only acceptable to use agile methods in a geographically dispersed environment, but preferable!

Distributed vs. Dispersed

One thing that has interested me about the above perspectives is the intermingling of “distributed” with “dispersed”. To me, these are two distinctly different scenarios. Dafydd Rees appears to agree with my interpretation (or I with Rees) in the article “Distributed Agile Development” on i.t.wales.com. In the article, Rees points out the definitions of Distributed development and Dispersed development:

“Distributed development: This usually means co-operation between several teams located at different sites.”

“Dispersed development: Dispersed development refers to individual developers located separately, working together over a network.”

I would have reworded the definition for Dispersed development to something like “refers to geographically dispersed developers working together as a team.” What I have been examining in this post then is not a distributed development environment, but rather a dispersed development environment.

In my opinion, dispersed development refers to geographically dispersed developers working together as a team. Therefore, dispersed agile development refers to geographically dispersed developers working together as an agile team.

Co-location, While Desirable, Is Not Absolutely Necessary

Yes,physically being face-to-face is the most desirable means of communication. However, it is not absolutely necessary in order for an agile project to be successful. There are many, many organizations proving this today. What I am looking forward to is the realization by large organizations that onsite presence of the developer is not necessary! After all, if you can make it work across continents, then you can make it work – period.

The productivity on our small team shot through the roof when I sent them all home. They knew it was a privilege, not a right, but more importantly, they knew that the company truly valued them to show them that kind of trust. Believe it or not, there was a significant reduction of distractions (these are professionals with “real” home offices) and they were able to focus in like lasers on their tasks. Now, make no doubt about it, there were things we would have done differently, but co-locating the team is not one of them. No one could argue with our success!

It took a lot of work from me as ScrumMaster to make sure the company as well as the customer were comfortable with the arrangement, but once both saw that the productivity was not dropping off but continuing to increase over time, they were on-board with the arrangement. I took it to be my responsibility as ScrumMaster to ensure that the company and the customer knew on an ongoing basis the continuing high-level of productivity that was coming from the team. I know at least one of my trainers from my Certified ScrumMaster course would argue that this was outside the role of ScrumMaster, but as I’ll post later, I believe the ScrumMaster serves all the needs of the team, not just the easy ones or the ones they’re best prepared for. I believe the velocity of the team has as much to do with the ScrumMaster’s ability to serve the team’s needs as it does with the capabilities of the team members! In the case of a geographically dispersed team, the ScrumMaster is a busy individual!

So, the next time someone tells you they’re doing distributed agile development, please correct their misuse of “dispersed agile development”. And, the next time someone tells you that you can’t be agile if you’re dispersed….give them some body language to help them understand that you can indeed do dispersed agile development!