Via NC State of Business,
Stumbled upon this John Shook quote which is too long to Twitter:
“There are three kinds of leaders. Those that tell you what to do. Those that allow you to do what you want. And Lean leaders that come down to the work and help you figure it out.”
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
I was talking to Erik yesterday and he was wary that I used the phrase "make the internal quality issues tangible" and said he preferred visible or explicit.
I suggested that explicit and visible aren't actually enough. I truly mean "tangible" because the particular situation I'm targeting is the non-technical audience that doesn't understand what is happening with the long-term health of their systems due to short-term project trade-offs.
Explicit is a number which is too abstract. Visible is better because then they can see. But I actually want people to feel, emotionally, the danger which they are putting themselves in.
Our target is tangible with visible being along the way there.
