No matter how hard I try, there’s always a hammer in my life. Sure, I try to use all those other new-fangled tools that are perhaps more appropriate to the problem, but I find that my hammer is a versatile tool that helps me bang my way out of many trouble spots. My recent agile hammer is “complete stories, not iterations.” In other words, collaborate! I’ve made a few blog posts and written at least one article on the topic.
Everything seems to keep coming back to this. A focus on completing stories as a team, and not moving on until the story is “done done,” tends to eliminate many of the questions that otherwise exist.
For example, “Should we create stories for defects?”
The glib answer is of course, “Well, if you’re doing agile properly, you don’t have defects.” But the more satisfying and less annoying answer is, “Well, if you’re collaborating to get stories completed, you don’t have many defects that survive the iteration.” If you can deliver a story every day or two through an iteration, the story can move into preliminary testing, and odds are that you’ll uncover many defects before the iteration completes. That means you can either fix them before the iteration completes, or you haven’t finished the story (it’s not “done done”), and the story is slotted wholesale into a subsequent iteration.
Voila. Concern over whether or not to create defect stories? Poof! (If you still have the question, the answer is “yes,” because they can be estimated, and because they take development effort that adds into team velocity.)
