RE: Test

Our customers have been very enthusiastic about the story planning 
meetings.  We have a direct customer - the call center - and their 
customers - the lines of business that contract for call center services. 
In maybe three out of four planning meetings so far both kinds of customers 
really got the story prioritization.  Handling physical cards is magical to 
watch. People weigh them in their hands, shuffle them around, chew on the 
corners, run down the hall to have a domain expert help put them in order, 
shove them up and down the table. In the one that didn't use card 
prioritization well, we were replacing an existing system and they felt 
they needed all or nothing, no point in changing the order. I got to go to 
the first group that we used the process with and introduce it and kind of 
coach, but one of the other managers has been running them since, and he's 
excellent. It's too bad we can't take everybody and let the whole team see 
where these stories come from.

Story planning per iteration has gone fairly well.  We have a lot of 
dependencies on other groups, and that tends to make stories take a long 
time. We're starting to split stories in two - the part we do before the 
dependency and the part after. That way stories don't stay "open" for too 
long.  For a while we had a lot of stories "almost done" which of course 
doesn't count and velocity looked bad, but now we're getting better at 
estimating and delivering.

Frequent delivery - now every three weeks - has been a great thing, too. 
The customer groups are getting the value there, too, and plan to bring 
more real users into focus groups for hands-on evaluation of each release.

But the best thing is we don't make a MS Project Plan with 1,200 tasks at 
the start of every release.  It's still kinda big just with the 
inter-dependency stuff like hardware installation and train-the-trainer 
materials, but the part that directly affects developers just shows 
iterations.

At 03:16 PM 3/9/03 -0800, you wrote:

>Jim,
>
>Youre StoryProcess is - as you say - definitely not XP, but as a
>step toward a more agile process from where you indicated you were,
>it sounds pretty good. So what have been the reactions to this?
>Where are you thinking of going next?
>
>I'm agree with your DefectStories approach. Some defects may be
>too small to be treated as a story by normal standards. You can
>of course combine them to make a half-day or so worth. Another
>approach is to merge them with some related new story.
>
>Charlie Poole
>[email protected]
>www.pooleconsulting.com
>www.charliepoole.org



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