Agile Software Development - The Eye Glaze Test

20 March 2017

A couple of years ago, I was managing a team of developers at Fairfax Media to build the new Australian Financial Review website. We started with a relatively small team of about 6 individuals (developers, designers, product managers etc) using a fairly basic scrum methodology. The build was on a development platform we were entirely unfamiliar with and as we soon discovered, our projected delivery date was far beyond the date desired by stakeholders.

The decision was made to add more team members to improve development speed (by the end, we were a team of just over 20). Those of you that have heard of the Mythical Man Month might be shaking your head in dismay. Fortunately, we were able to split our team into 4 separate sub-teams with their own responsibilities (from memory the teams were “authoring”, “content migration and search”, “index pages” and “articles”).

In hindsight, deciding on this split was probably the easy part. Implementing the team boundaries for meetings/rituals and agreeing on the right scrum management approach was far more difficult than expected due to numerous factors including change resistance and uncertainty.

Some people were fighting to run planning sessions with 20 people in them.

The Eye Glaze Test was one of the most helpful and straightforward indicators as to whether the process was working. It’s not as fancy as it sounds and it won’t solve all your problems but I found it helped immensely as a change enabler. Put simply, during an activity/ritual/meeting, how many of the participants had that glassy sheen over their eyes that showed they were zoned out? Using this as a feedback tool, we were able to quickly agree on what wasn’t working and could try something different.

This sounds absurd but I think this is an effective test. Why?

• It measures how engaged the team is in the process. The process is there to help the team plan. If they’re not engaged in the process, they’re not planning effectively.
• It changes the conversation from “can you please pay attention?” to “is this relevant to everyone?” - a much more constructive question.
• It is a very visual test and it is obvious when the test is failing

What do you have to do to implement the Eye Glaze Test?

• Ensure everyone on your team knows it’s a metric to look out for
• Ensure your team knows the outcome of a failed Eye Glaze Test is to re-assess your meetings, rituals and process - it’s not a disciplinary test
• Review the effectiveness of a specific ritual after a couple of failed Eye Glaze Tests

The Eye Glaze Test isn’t just helpful in proving the 2 pizza team. It can also help to impove the format (or existence!) of meetings like the daily scrum.

If you’ve already got an awesome agile process, maybe this won’t help but if you’re having trouble implementing the change you need, give it a go!

---

More about software-development