Sally was a prospective customer of mine. She worked for a high profile but rather old school company and wanted a fixed price contract. Sally genuinely thought her business analysts had nailed down the scope and was confident nothing would change. From her perspective all I had to do was price the work and deliver the product. Sounds perfect except Sally was wrong. My experience is that, fixed price or not, scope is never fixed. Pretending nothing is going to change is a form of self-delusion. Sally was deluded. What should I have done?
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Bucket Planning – Helpful Metaphor for Agile Release Planning
I sometimes call a Release Plan a Bucket Plan and the process Bucket Planning. I like the metaphor because if you overfill a bucket you end up with a mess on the floor – and the business gets that.
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Glad Sad Mad Retrospectives
The guys at Agility in Mind (AIM) recently ran a retrospective for me. I thought their approach was cute and worth a quick post. They prompted the team for things that made them glad, sad and mad.
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What is an Agile person?
Agile people have a propensity to seek improvements, are more willing to consider information that is at odds with preconceived notions, and are more willing to be different and take risks – at least according to David Alberts.
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Which Gherkin Scenarios go in which Feature File
I believe that you should break the link between Gherkin files and the Epics / User Stories that triggered the Gherkin Scenarios. The Gherkin files should be organised in a way that usefully describes the evolving product. You need to accept that a User Story can affect Scenarios in multiple Gherkin files. Once the User Story is done you can and should forget about it. But the Gherkin Scenarios have a life long after the User Story is gone.
User Story Dependencies are more Apparent than Real
What do I do when a User Story is dependent on another? Well, the most important thing is, to quote the Hitch Hiker’s guide to the Galaxy, “Don’t Panic!”.
I believe dependencies between User Stories are often over played. Sure there are dependencies but often these don’t require any particular management. But even more common are invented dependencies, i.e. dependencies that are more apparent than real. This means dependencies for me are a bit a of requirements smell, i.e. something to be worried about.
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You can go a long way with a Shonky User Interface
“Shonky” means poor or low quality where I come from. I realised it was a Kiwi phrase, or at least Antipodean, when I told my current UK based team to “give me a shonky user interface (UI)”. They looked puzzled, then laughed, then asked me what I meant, then laughed again, then adopted the phrase into the team vocabulary.
Aside from the entertaining aspect of my request, it does raise two questions:
- What is a Shonky UI?
- Why on earth would anybody ask for a Shonky UI?
The Lean-Agile Fanatics are all Wrong
When Kanban folk talk to Scrum people the conversation can often get heated with recriminations and finger pointing. Personally I’ve got a pragmatic, or eclectic, style of Lean-Agile. None of the published methods are the silver bullet. But they all have something useful to offer.
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Cucumber is my tool of choice for Specification by Example
Cucumber is my tool of choice for Specification by Example. I like Cucumber for three reasons:
- The specifications are written in plain English
- The supporting tools are very mature
- The step definitions are clean
Reporting Percentage Complete on an Agile Project
What do you do when management asks for a percentage complete on an Agile project? The flippant answer is “tell them the percentage complete”. Agilists reject percentage complete when reporting on low level stuff. But for the project as a whole you can get quite an interesting metric, one that is based on real data, so why not calculate and share it.