Time Boxing

Time Boxing Antonio Terreno ThoughtWorks UK Away Day 23 June 2007

Agenda
What is time boxing?
Why?
How?
When?
Tools?

But first of all
Why are you attending here?

Ok, Timeboxing
Wikipedia says:
In Project management, a timebox is a period of time in which to accomplish some task.
The end date is set in stone and may not be changed.
If the team exceeds the date, the work is considered a failure and is cancelled or rescheduled.
Some timeboxes allow the team to adjust the scope of the task in order to meet the deadline.

But I am not a PM!
What if we think in the same way in the small?
Split a story in tasks
The end is still set in stone
If I exceed the time I cancel the activity or I reschedule it

Some history
Rick Mugridge wrote once upon a time (2003) a paper on micro iteration in XP
He wrote:
Micro-iterations are missing some explicit elements from the iteration level
Stories
The Planning Game to prioritize stories
Time boxing
And then:
For people learning to apply TDD, it may be useful to suggest time boxing of a few minutes to get them used to cycling quickly (Kent Beck)
Ron Jeffries reacted on the XP ML asking what if we always timebox micro iterations?

Ok maybe is not a bad idea to time box
I found it good with people not used to the TDD rhythm
The Delaney experiment
I found it good not only for this, I think that you can have value also as a skilled dev

How then
30 min boxes
We have a task, we estimate how many slot to finish it.
If the task needs to many boxes, let’s split the task in sub tasks
After each slot we take a break
No complex activities
5 min
After 4-5 slots a longer break
No interruptions at all during the box

Timebox Format
A post it or a story card
Task name, indeed
Slot estimation, how many slots in order to complete the task
Real number of slot used to complete the task
Keep it simple

Objectives
Tracking progress
Improve Estimation
Avoid Distractions
External
Internal
Avoid Perfectionism
Increase assimilation

Tracking progress
We we’ll have a fine grain tracking of what we are doing
A deep knowledge of what is blocking us
What is speeding up us
What can be improved in our process

Improve Estimation
We’ll have to estimate every morning
Typical day is
8.30 allocate one box for planning and estimating
9.00 start with the tasks of the day
Every day you will have to estimate what you can achieve everyday day
The biggest consequence is that you will have a better idea of the (in)famous ideal day
Allocate boxes for ANY task: email check, meetings, …
It’s easy to see then that a day with 16 boxes is impossible, that’s the ideal day, right?

Avoid distractions
The box is not interruptible
Team&pair communication of course is part of the task completion
Phone calls are not
Googleing is not (if needed to achieve the task will be timeboxed as well)
No email check
So external but also internal distractions

Avoid Perfectionism
Sometimes it happens…
Over design
Over engineered
Complex solutions
Allocating a concrete number of boxes for a story should prevent to spend to much time on not valuable tasks
A bunch of boxes can be always allocated for refactoring, design changes and so on, if needed
Avoid YAGNI

Assimilation
The break is for two main reasons
Assimilate what we just did, it looks like that human brain works well for 20 to 40 min, it takes a bit to serialize then all the infos (I/O is slower!)
Have a sustainable pace
RSI guys will be happy
The tube/bed solution, never happened to you?
Working hard during the whole day, blocked on some silly problem
Find the solution on the lift, in tube or in the pub
Lift tube pub depends on how much tired you were!

Consequences
Improved Effectiveness
Improved Productivity
Improved Focus
Improved Consciousness

Consequences
We are aware of time
Time in the end is a sequence of events
We can focus and prioritize the tasks that really mater
MoSCoW prioritizing, but finer grain, code level
It’s a good tool against procrastination
We know better what we did
What we accomplished and what not

It may be useful for…
Uninteresting, boring tasks
Well, I can do it, it’s just for 30 min!
Very good for rolling back tasks
Chosen a wrong solution
Allocated N boxes
Fail, rollback and choose another solution

When?
Dave Cheong uses Time Boxing even for Xmas gifts
As a Developer
Spiking a solution
Performance fixes
Every day coding
Estimations sessions
When working unpaired
As a Developer at home in order to tidy my flat
Spare time as well
Blogging
Googleling
…
Generally, doing activities

Tools
Someone uses a physical device such as a Kitchen Timer
There are few free timers online
It’s important that the tool will be simple
Delaney wrote Ntimer :)
I am trying to make it portable, it’s written in C#

Open discussion
…

Time Boxing

by Antonio Terreno on Jun 29, 2007

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