Involvement as Fun

[jducoeur]

There. After four years of my haranguing about it (and about three months of talking about how to *do* it), we took our first real baby steps in Agile Development today. We took one of the side-projects for the new system (one of the test harnesses), talked through the User Roles involved in it, and began to write the Stories for the feature.

It's going to take a while to get used to it -- much of the time was spent simply getting people on the same page of what a User Story *is* -- but overall it was a good experience, and reasonably productive. Best of all, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, specifically because everyone on the team, including the junior members, were explicitly equal in the process. Management will be responsible for deciding the priorities for these stories, and everyone is quite clear that some of them probably won't ever happen, but everyone got their say. If nothing else, accomplishing that may be worth the pain of changing how we do things.

It does remind me remarkably of Carolingian Great Council, in a way. One of the precepts I've always followed there is that you don't have to *do* what everyone says, but it's very important that everyone get to speak their mind. It produces much more of a sense of involvement in the whole thing...

Comments

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

you don't have to *do* what everyone says, but it's very important that everyone get to speak their mind. It produces much more of a sense of involvement in the whole thing...

Or it gets the yahoos all complacent so you can then do what you want to do anyway, a la Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

I often wonder this when I hear of new movements in an organization which invite commentary, and then wonder further if those new movements don't seem to produce any traction over months of effort. It's like Student Council taken into the real world.

However, I hope/expect that your company is not nearly so machavellian, and it bodes well, because certainly it can work well, if done with good intent.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

So: are QA and Documentation users, or part of the process, or something else?

You can imagine why I ask. :-)