Them: We've built a repository for our features, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
Test Manager: Does it integrate to testrail?
Functionals (people who write user stories. Don't ask): Does it integrate with Word?
Devs: Does it integrate to Jira?
Them: Export to CSV spreadsheets, and to confluence. We can use confluence instead of word. We can build additional functionality to do the rest of this, integration is easy.
Integrations developers: The hell you say.
Functionals: What ....get rid of word?
Me: .... it sounds like the scope has expanded. You've built the slice for this to be useful for your team, right?
Them: Yes!
Me: Great! Then maybe the other slices should be built out from user stories gathered from those most affected. We should put really good resources on it, and continuously improve our internal processes.
Them: No. It'll be what we have made it. And no resources will be put on building internal tools.
Me: ....
--- slighly later---
Me, offscreen: This is a waterfall.
Everyone: Oh, THIS is why we gather user stories early and continuously refine them!
Me: ::smiles:::
--- slightly later ---
Me, to my management: It's a waterfall.
Management: Plus ambition. And you know what Shakespeare said about Caesar's ambition.
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Just write your damn stories in Jira, ffs. Confluence is a documentation tool. You write your background and supporting docs there, then link your stories to their context in Confluence.
ReplyDeleteI wish I could fix it that easily. The user stories and acceptance criteria are outputs the client needs. These have been sent as pdfd word docs.
ReplyDeleteI know. I'm working on it.
Wha-- what?
ReplyDeleteSo they don't let the stakeholders into Jira?
It doesn't make much sense to encase your requirements in amber (a PDF), when the point is to have ongoing status updates and conversation via the toolset.
I get it, though, risk-averse trust-impaired organizations struggle with the agile method, and want to just do the same contract-over-conversation model they're comfy using.
We do let them into Jira. We encourage them to use it. We've held demo sessions, and encouraged The Client to use Jira.
ReplyDeleteThe adoption has been slow.
So, yeah. It's a problem. We're trying to do something relatively big and important, and a half dozen teams have failed and burned The Client before. So, they are super wary.
Still.
During a sprint review last week, our software broke. A SQL error in software we were demoing. The dev showing it was all worried, "William what do I do!"
Me: And, everyone, this is part of why we practice scrum and have this sort of review: To find the bugs in our working software. This is a great thing, blah blah blah, and we'll bring it into next sprint and solve the problem. Most importantly, when we deliver it this will be solved.
Which ... seems to have worked.
Better to see the bug now, than have it break in the customer's hands and have hundreds of customer support calls. Yup!
ReplyDeleteI would frankly kill for a Jira instance right now, so I could set up a nice ecosystem of stories. I am in a 'studio' with my client, and it's a bit skunkworks, so the best I have is spreadsheets to track a proto-backlog. It's... sub-optimal.
There's political reasons I'm not writing stories, rather just tracking concepts and ideas to be fed into dev teams eventually. But it's heckin' frustrating to know there's better tools and I can't use them... and then hear folks who have all that power at their fingertips are contorting themselves to do what's comfortable instead of what's right. /soapbox
I'm apparently the only one who knows JQL. I've been teaching, but didn't realize it was that not so good.
ReplyDeleteI learned JQL late one afternoon when I realized that I had been pointlessly lazy and the only block to me learning JQL was my own insecurity.
ReplyDeleteBut seriously, reply to all emails with Jira links until they submit. Not really, this is wishful thinking. (But I am super biased. I have a personal Jira instance I use for my own projects).
Given the clients desire for documentation, I understand the word docs.
ReplyDeleteGiven the word docs, I understand the desire for a database.
Given the database, I understand wanting to use confluence to build the word docs.
Given confluence, I understand wanting to make sure all systems integrate.
But, as you all have pointed out, there's an easier way: write the user stories in jira. Link then by release numbers. Use jira to autobuild the documentation.
The real problem is the folks who understand agile the least, and see everything as top down heiarchy championed this. They never even gathered user stories.
William Nichols I am on the climbing out side of exactly that problem, re: top down hierarchy, no or insufficient user stories. I feel this.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols Confluence is the doc platform, not Word.
ReplyDeleteThat's the first hurdle, to realize they don't need to write reams of Word docs if they have linked Confluence pages that provide a searchable archive of information.
Lex Larson \o/!!!! YEEEEESSSS.
ReplyDeleteThe pretzles people push themselves into!
ReplyDelete