One day, not too long ago, my team was suffering through a very boring retrospective. We were doing the old standard retrospective format of “What was good?” and “What was bad?” followed by “What can we do now?” That worked for us for a while because my team isn’t shy when it comes to talking about what can be better. But, one day it was unexpectedly and exceedingly awkward. I found myself saying things like “You guys normally have plenty of things to say” and “Do we have a case of the Mondays?” Well, ok, maybe not that last one, but I won’t deny it didn’t cross my mind. I definitely had to don my “pointy hair.” After that I realized that something needed to change. That was seconded by one of my seniors who came by and noted that it was probably time to do something different for our retrospectives. I began looking into what we might try next.
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Category: Agile (page 6 of 8)
I know developers who “just want to code.” Their love of coding is why they got a development job in the first place if you recall. You know the stereotype of the developer who likes to sit and code in a dark cubicle, right? For a long time, that was an acceptable, if not prized, condition for developers at companies across the world. In many places, it still is. This is because developers didn’t need to interact with anyone, much less end users, in the stereotypical waterfall world. Requirement documents were delivered to developer inboxes, quality assurance teams tested the code and business analysts conducted the user acceptance testing directly with the end users. Proxies and documents become your link to the outside so those with social skills need not apply.
I’ve begun to witness an all-too-common situation at work that I have dubbed “The Castle vs. Shack Conundrum.”
Problem
Customer A is adamant that we have to build a house in 4 weeks. When we begin to talk to our customer, we start to understand that the house that they envision is more like a castle. However, building a castle in 4 weeks is so unlikely that its barely worth discussing. When the team analyzes the situation, we are in agreement that, with focusing only on this project, we could build a house in 4 weeks. However, that house would be a very nice shack — most decidedly not a castle. The team begins to discuss this reality with the customer and we find that this news is deemed completely unacceptable.
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