RE: Test

One of the XP things that we cannot do is "customer on site." We support 
five call centers spread from New England to Tornado Alley.  Our direct 
customer in the call center is in several but not all of those 
locations.  So it's kind of a big deal to get everyone together. I don't 
think we've made an effort to rotate everyone out to a planning game, but 
that is worth considering.

We do have dedicated customer liaison people, and enthused focus groups of 
real users, and I think we get outstanding customer participation compared 
to many projects. We're on the phone, SameTime (like WebEx) or Instant 
Messenger all the time. The switch from our previous flavor of RUP to story 
driven has had a huge impact on the way we work with them for 
requirements.  Before the business folk focused on use cases for a couple 
months, then that part was done.  Now the requirements gathering goes on 
through every iteration. Customers love seeing product every three weeks, 
but are not yet used to the rapid requirements cycles needed to deliver 
every three weeks.

You asked before what we might try next. I've been pushing for more JUnit 
testing. We have some, but far from complete coverage. We purchased a 
framework that was written with 200-line methods and weirdly partitioned 
objects. It's pretty hard to write tests against them, and it's hard for 
people who just learned Java and just learned the framework to not copy the 
style that's there. We're trying to learn to write testable code.  It's not 
as easy as it sounds!

At 09:21 AM 3/11/03 -0800, you wrote:

>Jim,
>
>Thanks, it's a great adoption story.
>
>Regarding your statement "It's too bad we can't take everybody and let
>the whole team see where these stories come from:" So why not? Maybe
>you could send different people at different times?
>
>Charlie Poole
>[email protected]
>www.pooleconsulting.com
>www.charliepoole.org
>
>
>
> > 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.
> >



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