Committing for the Sprint
by Joe Little, 23 January 2012 | The Agile Blogosphere
This post is from Agile & Business by Joe Little. Click here to see the original post in full.
This is, to me, still a New Year. And a friend suggested I talk about New Years' resolutions. Or something like them, Sprint commitments.Henry Ford said: Whether you think you can or you can't, you are usually right.So, let us work backwards.
To me, in most business situations, the main thing is satisfying the customer. Helping the customers solve their problem(s).
This is very hard because:
* the customer does not understand his or her problem well
* the customer cannot articulate the problem well
* the customer typically does not understand the technology capabilities that might be brought to bear in the solution, and what their strengths and weaknesses might be
* we (technologists) don't hear very well (we are human, after all)
* we tend to want to build what is cool to us
* our companies tend to be overly involved with existing products ('to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail')
* and several other reasons...
Still, satisfaction is what we are after. Unless silly lawyers and such get in the way.
Typically what we have to build to assist with gaining satisfaction takes several sprints. (The length of time depends on many factors, but first the general domain and what one might call the maturity of the product line or its current technological complexity.) Most products take more than 1 sprint. Some take 2-4, some take...read more
