Thursday, September 6, 2012

The "user story" and ALL preiteration artifacts should express the mission NOT the solution.

If some kind of documentation of an algorithm/formula/workflow is needed, it is a deliverable of the story and there is an acceptance criterion saying hey however you end up doing this it has to be documented.

People like the VP, the data scientist, the CEO, the helpdesk tech, the account manager... can have non-code deliverables as part of the story. So the "scrum master" is marshalling resources from throughout the company in order to accomplish the iteration.

The dev team is no longer some set of resources being managed by the PM in order to accomplish business goals. The dev team instead brings capabilities that they have developed during their own internal iterations and projects and time... to the table to help get the job done in concert with team members from all of the departments.

Full circle: this is not a dev pipeline into which is fed what the customer wants and the business needs. The PM/design team doesn't determine "what is to be done" and feed it to the devs. The business faces challenges and the customers want things... and teams are formed to solve problems during iterations. So the articulation of the problem properly, and the discovery of the solution, the trying of multiple possible solutions, the first working, releasable implementation of the solution: these are all done with full visibility of the whole team, during the iteration. Not before.

Arkowitz