Agilicious - Part 2
In this episode of "Adventures In Agile", our heroes met their greatest enemy so far - ambiguity! After electing "Paranormal Investigators" as our semester project, the creator took on the role of Product Owner for the week. He fleshed out his vision for the game, and the group began breaking the project into individual pieces.
When a project first starts off, you rarely have all the details handed to you immediately. Similar to designing a programming project from scratch, you have to employ your abstract thinking skills. This requires you to start from the top, and work your way down. An idea breaks down features, breaking further down into tasks. When these tasks are well-defined, team members can take the work and run. When the tasks are ambiguous though, you'll get a science experiment gone wrong.
Once each person is done completing their tasks, it can be thought of as a puzzle piece. They gather together at the end of the Sprint, and present their piece. Now, to build working software, you have to actually make the pieces fit! And so the team tries... and fails. One piece doesn't fit into the other. The puzzle is missing pieces. One person brought a Lego block. How is this ever going to work?
At the moment, we're experiencing symptoms of the problem, and it is becoming very obvious as each person reports in their Stand Up. At the end of the Sprint, we're sure to have a lot of discussion to bring to the table!
Featured Picture: Maps styles that I created as we came up with ideas
When a project first starts off, you rarely have all the details handed to you immediately. Similar to designing a programming project from scratch, you have to employ your abstract thinking skills. This requires you to start from the top, and work your way down. An idea breaks down features, breaking further down into tasks. When these tasks are well-defined, team members can take the work and run. When the tasks are ambiguous though, you'll get a science experiment gone wrong.
Once each person is done completing their tasks, it can be thought of as a puzzle piece. They gather together at the end of the Sprint, and present their piece. Now, to build working software, you have to actually make the pieces fit! And so the team tries... and fails. One piece doesn't fit into the other. The puzzle is missing pieces. One person brought a Lego block. How is this ever going to work?
At the moment, we're experiencing symptoms of the problem, and it is becoming very obvious as each person reports in their Stand Up. At the end of the Sprint, we're sure to have a lot of discussion to bring to the table!
Featured Picture: Maps styles that I created as we came up with ideas
Comments
Post a Comment