Here's a typical role and hand-off sequence that I encounter in "waterfall" shops:
Customer -> Business Analyst -> Developer -> Tester
And then they learn about Agile so the sequence changes to this:
Customer -> Business Analyst -> Tester -> Developer -> (Business Analyst + Tester)
... which really misses the point. We're not just re-ordering hand-offs, we actually want to remove them.
What I'm looking for is a sequence that looks more like this:
(Customer + Business Analyst + Tester + Developer) -> (Tester + Developer (referencing Business Analyst and Customer as useful)) -> (Customer + Business Analyst + Tester)
If the Customer time is constrained,
Customer -> (Business Analyst + Tester + Developer) -> (Tester + Developer) -> (Business Analyst + Tester) -> Customer
Goodbye Sydney Geek Girls
-
Dear Sydney Geek Girls,
I'm leaving Sydney for the sweltering heat of Darwin and the company of my
wonderful family.
You are in good hands with Catherine ...
1 month ago
4 comments:
If the -> represents a handoff in the first couple flows, then it represents a handoff in the latter ones. I'm thinking what you're really illustrating is collaboration at various points between handoffs?
And maybe you need a different symbol instead of -> to suggest what sort of transition you want between the sets of roles? If any?
I've tried promoting the notion of "sync points" where the business analyst, developer and tester synchronize their work rather than the concept of handoffs. The only "handoff" is when the customer explains the requirements to the team (BA, dev, tester).
However, this proved problematic most so with the testers who believed that their time was being wasted. It clearly felt inefficient to them. This may not be a bad thing but they rebelled against it.
Next, the testers delayed engaging until the BA had done a couple of iterations with the customer (and perhaps the dev) so that the requirements were stable enough to make testing efficient.
I inherently feel this is a bad behavior and that testers should embrace the agile principle of making progress with imperfect information even though it is less (intellectually) efficient.
But there it is...
Sync points - not handoffs!
Gee! I don't think I ever blogged this.
I think it would be good to blog about the "sync point" idea in some detail. The tendency to end up with mini-waterfalls can be strong. And, despite my respect for testers, they (or their management) can be a strong force toward a more sequential, hand-off approach.
Hey Jason, as always, very bright thoughts... I put them into images for a presentation I'm preparing...
See what u think about your words into images...
http://fabiopereira.me/blog/2009/08/05/roles-and-hand-offs-jason-yip/
Cheers,
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