RE: How to measure SIP?

I like to think about it as the extent to which a story becomes a liability.
The simplest way to think about this is effort expended that is not
producing value.  In that context, I agree with Kent that 'B' seems
appriate.  For an organization that is using XP Planning, that is certainly
what I would do.
 
I think a more accurate indication of the liability would need to take into
account stakeholder expectations.  A story that an influencial stakeholder
expects on a certain date carries huge SIP, even if the whole team has never
heard the story, let alone written it on a card.  A specific example of this
would be a commitment that a sales person or executive made in the heat of a
negotiation that did not get communicated effectively to the team.  The
reason its SIP is huge is that it can extend the SIP of *everything* if a
release is delayed until it can be delivered.
 
This extends the definition out to the stakeholder community, which gives a
full end to end measure.  The difficulty of course is that this complicates
the identification of the starting time stamp.  
 
So, there's an accuracy/complexity tradeoff here.  I would start with 'B'
since it is easier to measure and then look out for missed expectations and
try to measure their impact to see if SIP should really include those
situations.
 
Lowell
 
=============
Lowell Lindstrom
Object Mentor, Inc.
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> 
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Kent Beck
Sent: 6/19/2003 11:17 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [SIP] How to measure SIP?



I "only" have an aesthetic/intellectual argument for when to start the SIP
clock, not any experience. You have some capital to invest. At some point,
you start applying it towards a particular feature, so you can't apply
towards any other feature (opportunity cost). At some future point, you
receive revenue, so you have capital again. Symmetry suggests to me that we
should start measuring when the capital becomes unavailable and stop
measuring when it becomes available again. This suggests B to me, since
writing a story on a card doesn't really prevent me from writing 100 other
stories on other cards.
 
Does that answer your question?
 
Kent

-----Original Message-----
From:
sentto-8007113-449-1056007899-kent=threeriversinstitute.org@returns.groups.y
ahoo.com
[mailto:sentto-8007113-449-1056007899-kent=threeriversinstitute.org@returns.
groups.yahoo.com] On Behalf Of pgbossi
Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2003 12:32 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [SIP] How to measure SIP?


Kent, thanks for your answers. I'd like to have a few more clarifications.

First of all, you don't want to consider release 0.0 because it has
never been used by end users, do you? I'd agree with you, but there's
another element to consider: release 0.0 goal was more to show results
to customer's upper management than to really go in production. In
this way, wouldn't be appropriate to measure SIP(0.0) ~ 40 days?

I like the idea to trace SIP release after release and not necessarily
as an overall value, it gives much more a sense of what's happening as
time goes by.

Which is the most appropriate way to consider the starting date of a
user story?
A) when the story is written down on a card
B) when the story is planned
C) when the developers start working on the story

I'd vote for B, because we are trying to ask the customer to write
acceptance tests right after the planning game: by specifying the
acceptance tests a lot of details behind the user story are written at
least narratively (we are shifting the customer towards FIT, but this
is an entirely different story).

Ciao, Giuliano


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