Shape Up

Shape Up by Ryan Singer gives readers a clear roadmap of how to untangle the elegant puzzle that is software development. It specifically outlines the processes and tools that Basecamp uses to ship products.

The main ideas of the book can be split into three categories: bet, scope, and implement. It’s interesting to note how little of the book is actually devoted to implementation. This goes to show that when things are relentlessly planned out, little can go wrong in execution. It’s similar to the ideas from How Big Things Get Done.

The first stage of the process is to make bets. The idea with these bets is to narrow the scope down as much as possible to a chunk of work that can be accomplished in six weeks. This scoping period is attended by the main business stakeholders and comes with finality. Between these six-week cycles are two-week ‘cool off’ periods to help reset and plan for the next cycle. Importantly there is to be no carryover from one cycle into the cooldown period or the next cycle. This would start to accrue debt and defeats the purpose of the deadlines.

The next phase is the scoping phase. Once engineers have their marching orders, their priority is to set to-do lists of tasks to be accomplished by the time the cycle ends.

Finally, there’s the implementation phase. By this point everything has been scoped to a large majority so all that’s left is to execute. Inevitably there will be roadblocks in this phase, but the goal is to accomplish the hardest tasks first. This allows for Parkinson’s law to take effect (work expands to the time set to complete it).