XPDay 2007: Embrace Uncertainty - Jeff Patton

I came in 10 minutes late for this keynote. Train problems…

Results of stories don’t need to completely satisfy the customer — the aim is to get value and reduce risk. Iteration retrospectives should evaluate on these two goals:

• Did we get some value? Could we get more value? Biz should answer this.
• Did we reduce risk?

It’s ok to do the simplest possible thing that could possibly work, rather than the simplest thing that could be released.

Three different customer prioritising strategies:

1. Follow the money — go for a single business benefit at a time
   • cuts out whole swathes of stories and simplifies iterations
2. Don’t choose your solution too early — look at what the user wants to accomplish and defer choices as late as possible
3. Build up feature quality iteration by iteration — need everything but can build up quality and complexity
   • e.g. building a bus — can’t
   • e.g. leave out AJAXy stuff until later, improve performance gradually
   • if build to ideal quality in each iteration then may miss out vitally important function
   • customers say “great, it’s done, let’s move on”
     • so have a report card across the features: D to A
     • can say to customers, “you have your X but it’s D quality now. You’d really want better”

As soon as you start to be dogmatic about following the process, you’re dead!

Q&A

What’s your idea of the role of business analyst in agile?

• in commercial software company like Yahoo, there’s no such thing — instead they have designers
• would like to see BAs take more design responsibility for what they’re doing
• in enterprise software houses, have business people talking to BAs, talking to developers

How do you deal with multiple business voices?

• use user-centred design & scrum product owner
• product owner takes responsibility for direction of product
• understands the different factions and can answer to them why the development is going in that direction

In Yahoo, have designers but also product managers — how do they fit in and can we learn from them?

• they choose direction of business value from choices given by designers

If stay uncertain, how much is it going to cost?

• strategies outlined before came out of fixed price projects
• play space is users to support, kinds of things to do, quality of resulting product, etc

See Jeff Patton's blog version for more details