December 2010

agilezen review part 1: you got some ajax in my scrum

While I imagine myself always looking around for <a href="http:////en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)" target="_blank">Scrum</a> software, both to see if anything out there is better than ye olde cork board, and to see how other CSM’s are interpreting Scrum; I hadn’t heard of <a href="http://agilezen.com/" target="_blank">AgileZen</a> until last spring when one of our architects mentioned it during a project. It was during this project, knee deep in 3x5 cards, that I recognized we needed better methods of consolidating the backlog and communicating conditions of acceptance across the team. The stories were easily understood and tracked, but not the acceptance criteria, tasks and other documentation. I looked at AgileZen for an hour or so at that time and shelved it for when I had a project meaty enough on which to use it. After just an hour of play, it made the top of the list of software to actually try rather than just fiddle with - any new software, layered on top of a new process, is another potential risk vector that can help crash your project into the cold, hard ground. There’s a lot of new stuff spewing forth to support Scrum efforts, from free awesomeness like <a href="http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/" target="_blank">Mike Cohn’s online planning poker</a> to bank-account-crushing awesomeness like <a href="http://www.versionone.com/" target="_blank">VersionOne</a>. We’re in a bit of a Wild Wild West period these days, even 10 years out from the <a href="http://agilemanifesto.org/" target="_blank">Agile Manifesto</a>; people are still trying to figure out how to fit Scrum to their particular business models. The opportunities are huge for a piece of software that can do what people perceive they need for Scrum because the product space simply hasn’t been locked down to “This one is best” yet. That said, AgileZen made the cut to try and we’re using it to good effect after 3 iterations. My team hasn’t yet screeched for my head on a Styrofoam plate, nor bled me out in a dark corner - always a positive sign. So what is it? AgileZen is an online-only, subscription-based piece of software that allows multiple users to manage projects using some form of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development" target="_blank">Agile methodology</a>. It has a unique interface, the core of which is a “Kanban” board (or Scrum board) where User Stories can be dragged around to different, user-defined columns to track project progress. These columns can be renamed and reordered to fit the exact Scrum board model you like to use; the only two set in stone are the Backlog and the Archive. This simulates a cork board with User Stories on note cards - the traditional method of running a Scrum project. I’ve had good, not great, success with the traditional cork board and Excel spreadsheet. With a cork Scrum board, the team has to walk over to it and either take the cards off (then leave them somewhere never to be found again) or write down the tasks and acceptance criteria or whatever information may be attached onto something else. This annoys them. My last project had so much documentation attached to some of the User Stories that they wouldn’t stay on the board and would fall to the floor to be swept away to the recycling bin or placed in a random paper pile. There is almost nothing worse than losing a story card if all of your documentation is on said cards. I joked early in my current project that the stack of 3X5 cards in my bag were worth more than my car. This was funny because it was true. Even with the cork Scrum board, I still need to do calculations to create my burndown charts, track the backlog and run my budget reports via Excel. This means I have two versions of the backlog - physical cards and text in cells in Excel. Not ideal. If you ditch the cork Scrum board/note cards and use only Excel, even if you have a good set of spreadsheets developed to hold and display the User Stories, acceptance criteria and other sundries, and have it hosted in a file-management system of some kind, people still have to bloody use it. My teams have been extremely wary of mucking about with my release plan document, and typically download it and work with it locally (at which time it is immediately out-of-date). Those complaints aside, a cork board plus Excel is a solid means of managing a Scrum project. Any piece of software has to compete with this traditional (and cost-effective) means to be successful. At first blush, I was hoping that AgileZen would override the need for both the Excel Doc and the Scrum board - taking the good computer stuff that Excel has and the good visibility/usability of a set of cards in a series of simple status columns for the team to assess where things are at and what they need to do. Secondly, if the software helped me improve our team’s process and everyone is slightly happier, then projects are slightly more successful, and we all get slight raises and I can buy a new computer before Diablo 3 is out. Read the full article to find out where I feel AgileZen hit and missed. Visualizing the work – the Scrum board  <img alt="" src="/FullhouseInterim2010/media/MediaLibrary/Images/Blogs/Posts/AgileZen-scrum-board.jpg" style="width: 600px; height: 321px" /> AgileZen accomplishes visualization with a virtual Scrum board upon which you place User Stories.  AgileZen’s User Stories consist of a title, description, priority, size, color, date due, and an icon to indicate if there are comments and assignment. The virtual Scrum board is far and away where AgileZen shines and is quite a piece of Ajax wizardry to be sure. The Scrum board implementation is nothing short of amazing. It’s exceedingly easy to drag stuff around, see where in the list you are dragging it, change where it needs to go on the list, and drop it in. I went crazy on this when I first played with it to see if it would break and it performed really well with my RTS tempered AMP and it has worked great under normal conditions throughout. This is one aspect of the AgileZen interface that you don’t think about much as a user because it is just so easy and intuitive to use. That means it’s awesome incarnate. For me, Scrum is all about the User Story. This abstraction of work size coupled with even more abstract Story points plus velocity make for a magical moment when you see that planning in abstract actually works in the literal. AgileZen handles almost everything surrounding a Story exceedingly well. The interface allows a lot of “where I’m at now” editing, without having to go to many other screens or screen states to get something changed. It’s a bit wonky with the double-clicking to edit a Story’s main text, but once you know about the wonk, it’s really easy. Tasking The deliberate lack of focus on tasks is a core principle of Scrum and naturally is a core design principle throughout the AgileZen system - for the most part, if you have a competent team, the User Story is the thing: no one cares, collectively, about tasks.  However, some Scrum teams put vast importance to task disaggregation and AgileZen not only allows this within the context of the User Stories but excels at it. I found the implementation of task lists to be very Basecamp-esque, and bottom line makes it even more effective than both an Excel file and a Scrum board combined. All tasks are logically attached to a User Story, though there is nothing to stop you from creating a Story card that is itself a task and tracking its progress the same way you would an official Story. In fact, while AgileZen absolutely expresses how it wants you to do your Scrum board, it’s quite flexible and one could set it up to be a great task manager. Colors and Tagging With AgileZen’s Scrum board, visualization is key. Ever since a stint with Mantis Bugtracker, I have had a love affair with coloring stuff on screen to mean something. It’s just an easy, instinctual way of marking stuff as important or not. AgileZen handles coloring quite well; it’s easy, on the fly and more Ajax wizardry.  We use it to mark what User Role the User Story is assigned to. For example, Administrator User Stories are purple. Tagging works, but has no representation in reporting at all. What’s more, it’s a poor replacement for something I’m really missing in AgileZen - the importance of the User Role. User Stories consist of the User Role it’s for, the Story itself, the priority and the size estimate (either in ideal days or nebulous units of time). There’s no place in AgileZen to put the User Role except as a tag and this isn’t what I was looking for as I constantly sort and group Stories by User Role. Customization<img alt="" src="/FullhouseInterim2010/media/MediaLibrary/Images/Blogs/Posts/AgileZen-customization.jpg" style="margin: 20px 15px; width: 300px; float: right; height: 97px" /> As mentioned above, AgileZen allows users to set up their own columns to put the User Stories in. While this is very useful, new CSM’s may find themselves off in the woods right quick if they start messing around with columns. If you’ve never done Scrum and are using AgileZen as a crutch for your first project - I would leave the columns just as they are. Multi-management Like Basecamp, AgileZen allows any member of your team to add tasks, add User Stories, drag User Stories around the columns, block User Stories, and even change the column structure based on their rights. You can also create new a new User Role and assign a set of rights to it, all on the fly; yet another excellent implementation. Documentation and File Management Managing Story-focused, timely, relevant documentation has been a huge hurdle for my teams in the past, and AgileZen offers up a solid solution - simply attaching files (images, docs, anything) to a User Story on the board. This creates context around any piece of documentation, and while it appears documents could be easily lost and overlooked in AgileZen’s decentralized system, following Kaizan, the documentation you need is there within one click when you need it (i.e. when a team member is working on a specific Story). Reporting and Metrics The reporting tab (Performance) in AgileZen is quite different than the standard burndown chart I was expecting. It tracks what phase Stories were in over a period of time and the entire measurement is by number of Stories, not by Story size. This is a key issue as we may have 40 one-point Stories that get done during a sprint, and that will look like a ton of progress and cause joyous backslapping, however a single Story might take a sprint entire, and that won’t show much progress against the whole. In order to show that our process works, to my team and to our clients, I have to do two things: maintain a burndown chart to visually track progress and break the abstraction down into some real figures - percent done, percent of budget, cost-per-story point (I know, this is against all rules ever written), trending velocity, etc.; all of this is based not on number of Stories, but Story size. This is where AgileZen currently fails me - on its reporting tab. I still need to track my Stories, Story points and velocity through Excel to calculate and give the information I need on project progress. Just like having a cork board with note cards, I have to duplicate the information in Excel. This is not ideal. The pricing plans AgileZen is again very Basecamp-esque in its pricing model - it’s monthly, no user fees, cancel any time and follows the Basecamp model: “subscribe cheap and to a mess of people.” It’s very inexpensive for what it does. While not as inexpensive as the cork board + Excel (assuming you already have MS Office), a subscription to AgileZen is really a no brainer if you perceive the need for it. I think that’s the key for AgileZen’s future as Agile and Scrum methodologies continue to balkanize and evolve - filling a perceived need for this type of software.  Conclusion Not yet! You’ll have to wait until May 2011 (during which time my kahuna project will be done and AgileZen will most likely have had a major update).

balancing act: generate more traffic through universal search

Like other fellow search marketers in the industry, I spend the majority of my day at a desk, in front of my computer. For that reason, I make it a habit to hit the local fitness five or six days a week to stay in shape and relieve stress. While at the gym a couple of weeks ago, I heard an interesting conversation between a personal trainer and their client. They were talking about the importance of working all the muscles in your body – not just the noticeable ones. Doing so would promote overall fitness and support for everyday activities.

After thinking about it a bit, I came to the conclusion that just like many people spend too much time focusing on their arms, chest and abs - too many site owners are going after the traditional “10 blue links.” A balanced search strategy designed to generate consistent, qualified traffic by including optimization for video, images, news articles, products and reviews will prove far more beneficial in the long run. After all, optimizing your web site organically is an ongoing process – as is a healthy lifestyle.

Multi-faceted approach to SEO

Aside from the traditional organic results we typically see when performing a search, major search engines like Google and Bing began introducing results from other verticals back in 2007. The inclusion of results from other verticals is termed “universal search,” and displays listings from:

> Image Search
> Video Search
> News Search
> Shopping
> Maps
> Social

New verticals are always being introduced, with the most recent being social results that aggregate information from social sources like Twitter.

A perfect example of a universal search results page is a query for “Milwaukee Art Museum.” To the left you will see results for its local entry at Google Maps, images of the Calatrava, and a video as well. At first glance, you can probably guess the value of having an image, video thumbnail, or map guiding the potential visitor to your site. If it’s not so obvious, take a look at Enquiro’s eye tracking study of traditional vs. universal search results.

Universal Search is Almost Everywhere

The fact that blended results have been served since 2007 is proof enough that the concept isn’t just a fad. Furthermore, according to a recent Search Engine Watch study of search results, Google displays results with images, video and other rich snippets one out of every three searches. Bing takes it even further and serves universal results over 50% of the time. With 34,000 total searches per second on Google and just over 4,000 on Yahoo and Bing, there’s quite a bit to be said about a page of results served 33-50% of the time. Through our own research and monitoring of client campaigns, we’ve found that the best way to take advantage of the ever-changing nature of universal search results is to have a balanced strategy and plan of attack.

Start Optimizing for Universal Search

It’s one thing to know that you need a balanced strategy, and a whole other to actually build and implement one. Our advice is simple: we like to have our clients take it one step at a time and approach search engine marketing for what it is - an ongoing process that never stops. That means starting from the top by identifying your target audience. Who will visit your web site? Why would they want to buy your product or service? After you’ve identified your ideal visitor it will be much easier developing content, including images, video and news articles that will bring them in and sell what you have to offer.

Laying Out the Foundations of a Strategy

Like anything that takes time, energy and resources to succeed, optimizing your content for universal search should always start with a strategy. After you’ve identified your target audience, the first step is to identify the location, quantity and quality of images, videos, press releases and other downloadable documents you have on your web site. With all of your assets identified and accounted for, you’ll need to look deeper and ask what value, if any, it provides to your visitors. If it serves a specific purpose (i.e. an image on TheTieShop.com’s web site that shows step-by-step how to tie a tie) then make sure you take every step you can to ensure it is searchable on the web. This may include adding the “alt” attribute to images, generating a video sitemap, or even making sure your PDF’s are saved in the best way possible to be indexed by search engines. Whatever it may be, the important thing to remember is this – just do it.

When the Dust Settles

Once you begin acting on your universal search strategy, you’ll notice a couple of things. Aside from receiving more traffic to your we bsite, you’ll come out with:

A better understanding of what you are marketing and who your most qualified visitors are.
A well-balanced plan going forward so you can develop and distribute your content in the most beneficial way possible to both your company and your visitors.

Even if you don’t see that big increase in traffic you’d been hoping for, can’t it still be counted as a win?