Comments on: New to agile? Remember, sometimes things get crazy!

By: Cathy

Cathy — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 10:00:47 +0000

In an testing environment lot of things happen unexpectedly (just as in life!). Under those conditions even if we work diligently the situation is not in our hand. People get crazy mostly in these situations. Unfortunately I have no solutions for these conditions.

By: Bob Hartman

Bob Hartman — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:53:58 +0000

Lisa, good point. But “value” encompasses more than just the value to the customer. That is a point I was hoping someone would make because if we focus only on CUSTOMER VALUE then we will fail. We have to focus on BUSINESS VALUE which encompasses internal needs, risk and other items as well. It is why I made sure to point out the things I did with my family. To me they are “internal value” and not “customer value” for my business.

I tell workshop attendees that focusing solely on customer value will lead to a happy customer – for about 10 minutes when the software breaks and can’t be fixed. Focusing only on internal value means the customer has no reason to purchase the software. We need to have the right mix of customer value and internal value which we roll up into business value.

As far as things “going crazy all the time” being equal to overcommitting, I’m not sure I agree with that. In some cases this may be true. In other cases it can mean a variety of things having nothing to do with being overcommitted. For example, it could have to do with overall focus. Or something external to the team causing consternation of some sort. Craziness can and will happen. I agree in general that if it happens all the time it is symptomatic of something that needs to be investigated – quickly! I just don’t think the answer is always the same.

Thanks for the response! I agree with almost all of it and was happy to see someone point these things out so quickly.

- Bob -

By: Tweets that mention New to agile? Remember, sometimes things get crazy! -- Topsy.com

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:37:37 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by lisacrispin and Bob Hartman, Rob Myers. Rob Myers said: RT @AgileForAll: New #agile blog post: New to agile? Remember, sometimes things get crazy! http://bit.ly/ddiW6l #li [...]

By: Lisa Crispin

Lisa Crispin — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:33:40 +0000

Gosh, you ARE busy. I think I get what you’re saying, but I’m worried some readers might get the wrong message. Yes, the prioritized backlog is our focus. However, we will never be able to deliver business value frequently at a sustainable pace if we do not have the time to learn how to write “clean code” that is easy to test and maintain, if we do not have the time to learn how to automate regression tests so we have time for exploratory testing, if we do not have the time to learn the business domain so we can better server our customers.

We can’t always prioritize delivering stories above all else. We need slack time to experiment, make mistakes, innovate, learn, improve. Otherwise, we will get buried under technical debt.

If things are going crazy all the time, the team has over-committed. Even Scrum teams can borrow the Kanban idea of limiting work in progress. Focus on finishing one story at a time – including all the testing, all the refactoring, all the automation. Only commit to the amount of work that can be done properly – not the amount of work that can be hacked out without adequate thought and testing.

Of course we have to be flexible when it comes to business priorities. There are times where we may have to compromise and do a quick fix we’re not happy about. But if we learn the business domain, we can help our customers find trade-offs, where they may get the most important things they need quickly enough and leave the “nice to haves” for later, or implement something that does most of what they want more cheaply (but still cleanly).