This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Robby Russell. Original Post: Dialogue-Driven Development Feed Title: Robby Russell gets agile Feed URL: http://www.robbyonrails.com/xml/rss20/tag/agile/feed.xml Feed Description: Robby on Rails gets agile with Dialogue-Driven Development Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Robby Russell Latest Posts From Robby Russell gets agile

Just a few months ago, I wrote a short article called, The Art of Delivery, which outlined how we at PLANET ARGON approach iterative development and how it relates to quicker release cycles. I wanted to follow up with this and add some more thoughts to that and what we’ve been trying and learning since that point in time.

With iterative development cycles, we’re able to focus our attention on very specific and well-defined goals while we work with the client to organize the other goals that they’d like us to help develop solutions for.

An End to the Product Backlog

While everyone at PLANET ARGON has been doing some research on modern Agile-related methodologies, we’ve been throwing a lot of ideas back and forth… and often times we end up cherry-picking individual practices and throwing it into our evolving processes.

The problem that we’ve seen with most examples of using a standard SCRUM Product Backlog is that it focuses too much on tasks rather than providing solutions for goals that are central to the success of the project. It also requires that someone maintain, on a regular basis, a well-defined list of tasks, which often times the client (Product Owner) dictates. We’ve seen many situations where a client has more feature requests than is necessary in order to attain the goal that was originally set. If we had a nickel for every time we heard someone say, “wouldn’t it be cool if it did this?”

I’ve personally worked on many projects that fell into this routine too early in the development cycle. Most clients that we work with are trying to provide a solution for their users and aren’t always the best Domain Expert. Taking the whole less is more approach, it’s vital that the earlier you can get your users in front of your application, the sooner you can get them to generate feedback, which aids in you making educated decisions about what to add to the project later on.

Features are Expensive

Aside from the monetary costs of adding new features and functionality, it is important to remember that as you add new code to an application you increase the maintainability and overall scope of the project. With each new feature, the requirements change, complexity increases, and as far as your users are concerned, they are now being exposed to something new, which may or may not be what they want or need. For example, I was in a sales meeting yesterday and our potential client mentioned that at a former job during the dot-com era, their web team added e-Cards to their web site and it had nothing to do with their business model. The users did however use this new feature but they later went out of business. Perhaps they should have been an e-Card business instead. Imagine if BaseCamp added a local weather feature… I might use it… but it doesn’t help me manage our projects any better.

When clients approach us with a new feature that wasn’t previously discussed, we have to ask them they Why, What, and How? What goal is this feature providing a solution for? Do we already have a solution implemented that solves this problem? Is this a new goal and how (and why) did this goal come about? What are the costs of implementing such a feature and how will it affect the current stability of the user base and application? If we put it off 3 months, would it cause the project to come to a grinding halt? What about 6 months?

It’s important to always remember that one of the biggest problems in software development is feature creep. Many projects fail due to this and as a project manager, developer, or client… please consider the consequences and benefits of each new feature. Focus on the goals and connect the dots from there.

Get the goals clearly defined and provide clear and simple solutions for them.

Just Say NO to Bloat!

Start with a Mission Statement

One of the new things that we’ve begun doing with a few new clients is assigning them with an initial task of providing us with a Mission Statement. From the Mission Statement we can ask how each goal that the client and we outline relates to it. If one of the key goals of the Mission Statement is, “to provide gorillas with easy access to basketballs”... we will have to question any goals that imply that we might also need to provide access to soccer balls, car batteries, or scissors… or that when a gorilla is getting their basketball we might want to provide them access to stock reports. We’re not trying to solve all the gorilla’s problems and it would be naive for us to think that we know what they want before we’ve had a chance to really engage in that dialogue.

Users are the Domain Experts

Very rarely do we get a chance to interact with users before we’ve begun coding a project and getting an alpha release in front of a subset of users. Brian and I just got back from a few days in Washington DC, where we worked with a new client. They have an existing GUI application that began development in the mid-90s and we’re being contracted to help build a new solution to the problem that they began to solve ten years ago. The application has suffered from a lot of feature creep as many evolving products do. As they gave us a demonstration of their existing product, we saw first hand how it was even difficult for them to remember why Feature X was in the system. “Most customers don’t use that anyways.”

So, why is it there? Of course, nobody remembers why everything is there now. As developers come and go projects get managed by various people over the course of their life, many of different opinions and features get injected into the application. It’s a common problem and it takes a lot for a company to finally admit that it’s time to throw it out the door and start fresh.

The old rules don’t apply anymore.

One of the first things that we did in our meetings was discuss what goals their product was aiming to provide solutions for. What do they believe that their users want and need? To get this answer, we scheduled a few conference calls with real users of their existing software! I cannot describe how helpful those interviews were and we saw a lot of consistency in their goals as users of such a system. It became apparent that they were the Domain Experts and as we move forward with the project we are going to have access to interact with those users.

Rethinking the Dialogue

When thinking about delivery, we must consider the major obstacles to overcome during the course of an iteration or release cycle. More important than having well-defined deliverables is having well-defined expectations. If you’re delivering a prototype, be clear about what a prototype is and what is it not. Schedule regular meetings with your client throughout the process. Keep the client updated as much as possible. Ask questions as soon as you can… and be sure to ask them the right questions.

There is an art to it and it’s important that you keep this process lightweight and agile like you do your development process. Perhaps we need to think of development and project management under a new heading… Dialogue-Driven Development? DDD? ...just what we need… another acronym. ;-)