I’ve been really busy with some exciting work-stuff this December. I know, what a let down. I’m sure you were expecting an article about a fat bearded man in a big red suit bungee jumping off of Hell’s canyon while drinking Mountain Dew. Sorry, but I’m trying out Extreme Programming for a work project. They are not totally unrelated, as Santa is working under a yearly gift delivery release plan, and I’m sure he’s got lot’s of worker drones (elfs) busily coding away to help supply lines deliver this Christmas. But that is probably where the similarities cease. This is for a software project, and Santa is all about the hard-goods.
So far things have been fun, scary at times, but very fast paced. We are in what xp’ers call the planning game, which is about creating a release plan by bringing customers and developers together to talk about features (or stories) they want to develop. It doesn’t sound very exciting, but the focus on verbal communication, short release cycles and direct relationships between groups has been a welcome jolt to the normal document driven Lazy B approach to software development. I have been using Mike Cohn’s work User Stories Applied for much of the requirements generation stuff, and it’s been a huge help to getting the theory down to practical action, from how to hold a story writing workshop to how to start estimating stories.
2 responses to “Extreme Christmas!”
Just surfing, and thought I’d check up on your blog. Your new project sounds quite amazing, tho I’m lost somewhere between the software production and “stories”. Are the stories web sites to be developed, or just parts of software? Well, you can try to explain it in person over the coming weekend. Santa has been bringing stuff all week….Polar Express Extreme.
Made rum balls and bon bons so far. Have stuff for currant tarts, and if I don’t get em made by midnight tomorrow, maybe we can assemble them together if we want. Can’t wait to see you both. It’s warmed up so Bogus has closed. Don’t bring your mittens.
Stories are just features, written from a user’s perspective. A story for writing a comment on a blog might be “The mom of the blog owner can add a comment to a post.” It serves as a discussion point for the customer (in this case the mom) and the developer to discuss development tasks that would make that happen like “Write a form with a comment field” and “Make a database entry for user comments”. This little nugget, or story, then can easily be prioritized by the product owner (whoever is paying to make the software) over other features like “The blogger can add a calendar of events.” A website, or software, is then just a collection of many different stories, and can be released in any order that makes sense. One week we may just allow a blogger to post entries (since that is the top story) and another week we let Mom post her comment. Since the possibilities of software development are limited only by the imagination of developers and time, it helps to constrain their activities to the most important ones.
Anyway, that is probably too much info. It is unseasonably warm here too. We won’t bring our artic gear, and plan to hole up and make (and eat) current tarts with you!