RE: Managing Extreme Programming

Huzzah, Ron. Dan  ;-)

Dan Rawsthorne, PhD, Sr. Consultant
www.netobjectives.com
[email protected]
office: 425-641-0814

Net Objectives' vision is effective software development without
suffering. Our mission is to assist software development teams in
accomplishing this through a combination of training and mentoring. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Ron Jeffries [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Monday, January 13, 2003 9:19 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [xpAdoption] Managing Extreme Programming

 

On Monday, January 13, 2003, at 11:30:26 AM, Dinwiddie, George wrote:

> At the start of the project, you have a bunch of user stories, or some
other
> description of what the project intends to build.  You have some idea
of the
> value of this work.  Because the value of this work is likely to be
very
> difficult to determine via objective means, you're very likely to use
the
> simplifying assumption that it's worth what it takes to produce
it--else we
> wouldn't be doing it.  So, Budgeted Cost of Work Scheduled (BCWS) is
assumed
> to be the value of the completed work.

I want to gently suggest that this is a very bad idea. The value of a
feature is generally unrelated to how hard it is to build. If the
assumption were true, we wouldn't need the customer to order things in
order of value, we'd order them in terms of largest cost first.

Now ... it turns out this is nearly the worst possible strategy if value
is
randomly distributed over stories. The reason is that by doing the
expensive stories first, we minimize the number of stories we do. And if
value is randomly distributed, we thus neatly minimize value as
effectively
as we can without knowing the actual values. Of value.

Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) --Walt Whitman


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