August 2019

Story-Splitting #3: Easy Customer First

This entry is part [part not set] of 3 in the series Story-Splitting

A valuable trick I sometimes forget: first solve the easy customer. Before we continue, I feel we need to pull some real cases in this set of muses about story splitting. It can’t be super-concrete, because a) confidentiality and b) too much detail hides the idea. Hopefully, this will help a little with figuring out analagous ways to split stories in your case.) In a medical insurance environment, we manipulate a lot of claims data, sending out invoices, making reports […]

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Sociotechnicality: Odd Word, Odd Concept

I’ve described the basic concept of sociotechnicality before. I know it’s an awkward word. We don’t really have an easy word for it, because some very old and successful approaches to the world that didn’t need it. The world, however, has changed. Just about everyone I’ve spoken to has some idea of what "social" is and what "technical" is. Still, let’s take at least a second to reassert these conceptural clusters. By "social", we really mean to include every topic

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Coaching Pro-Tip: Read More Narratives

A new coach in the VBCA[*] world asked me what she should be studying. What, she asked, should she be reading, to get good at promulgating change in her large org? [*] – Very Big Corporation of America, see Monty Python. She proposed a bunch of topics, including management, psychology, sociology, a variety of geekery sub-topics. My answer: anything narrative, especially great novels and great history. She, as you might expect, splutter-laughed. I have read any number of works in

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Story-Splitting #2: Choosing Which Criterion To Relax

This entry is part [part not set] of 3 in the series Story-Splitting

I use my sorted list of story criteria when I have to back off getting the perfect story. We went into this yesterday here, and for the threading impaired, the blog will be up late tomorrow. There are a bunch of criteria for the perfect story, so many that at times I’m at a loss to find any story that meets them all. When I have to have a story, and I can’t get a perfect one, I have to

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Story-Splitting #1: Understanding the Criteria

This entry is part [part not set] of 3 in the series Story-Splitting

I sort my criteria for a story, so that when I step back from "perfect story", I step in the right direction. A "perfect" story has several attributes. Each of them contributes to its value in different ways, but maybe before we even list them we have to talk a little about what that value is. Remember our trio, the Made, the Making, and the Makers. Balancing these forces well is at the center of my agility. The value of

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One Story, One Day

TDD Pro-Tip: The step-wise technique has to account for what the user experiences when, so I have to build ways to control that when stories get bigger than a day. (A new friend asked the question: when stories get hefty, how do we "live at HEAD" without exposing our users to code that’s still WIP.) First the one-liner: don’t do that. Don’t work on stories that are bigger than a day. What I mean is, there’s a cost to controlling

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Large Stories Mean Side-By-Side Technique

When I have to have WIP that’s live in production, I pretty much have to use all the approaches for side-by-side development. In some recent muses, we’ve talked about "in situ" vs "side-by-side" approaches to changing code. First, let’s refresh our concepts for these two phrases. In both cases, we have a bunch of code A, and we wish we had a bunch of code B. B might incorporate all of A, or it might be more like A’, or

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