The following is an excerpt from a recent presentation I did on Agile and Coldfusion - the subject of this excerpt is Vague Requirements.
|
Related Video: |
Transcript:
First I want to ask “are we agile” – [audience participation – show of hands who thinks they work for an agile organisation – who thinks they work in an agile team – who thinks their team could be more agile].
If we say “we use scrum” and we have sent the team on the requisite course - does that mean we are agile? – what if we use scrum badly? Often the team is trying to use scrum but the organisation restricts this with its traditional financial controls.
Many organisations think they run iterative software development when in fact they run incremental software development – these two are very different – incremental is a step in the right direction but the benefits of iterative are a whole order of magnitude greater.
So what makes us Agile? We can’t dismiss Scrum or XP - there are many organisations of varying size and complexity employing these methods to great benefit– but these organisations are not asking these questions “are we agile” – “what is agile” they are doing it
For organisations who are asking these questions – or should be asking them - we need to take a step back from the established methods to find the answer – we need to look deeper and ask more granular questions – I want to take us through a few of these now as I lead into why ColdFusion is such a great agile technology.
Vague Requirements – this is usually where problems start in software development even when there are mitigating measures employed – its quite common to see requirements that are poorly written or incomplete or a group of requirements that don’t quite hang together because something is missing – even if the requirements are well formed they might not necessarily be a fair representation of what the business actually wants to deliver – how can we know whether they are or not?
When the requirements are vague its difficult for technology to get a foot hold – its difficult for them to get started – difficult if not impossible to build up that momentum that naturally takes a project team from - storming into performing. If we are dealing with Vague Requirements or ambiguous requirements we can be confident we’re not agile.