ActiveEngine

Fail Often, Fail Fluently March 27, 2010

What do you when your Scenario or User story just sucks? You’ve haggled with your peers over how to implement, the user has changed tunes and come over to your side of things by realizing that they want two things at the same time, but now that you’ve listened to everybody and re-worked your logic, you’ve just spend 6 or 7 extra hours testing. Now, you doubt that anybody really knows what the original intent of your use case was because there are so many different variants and vagaries from all the meetings, emails, hallway tests.

Now succumb to the brain death of Sarbanes-Oxley. Where is the traceability in all the discussion threads? How do you prove that you have what you want and that transactions are preserved and yada-yada-yada it just works? Before the project you thought that your team was like these guys:

But in reality you are this crew:

Sensei won’t pretend that there is a cool Zen technique to avoid hard work or failure. Maybe this type of failure of communication is a test of your core skills and your “fluency”. Look at the Elvis’ team. They’re practicing. They’ve been over the material again and again and again. That’s three again’s for each of the yada’s. To get to that point where they can adjust to his direction they’ve done much on their own time acquiring skills. Years of practice and adjustment.

Your project is like that path to acquiring a skill set, gaining mastery, being fluent. You have to build for flexibility, for

change. You CAN NOT give in to YAGNI just because this week you think you know all the answers. You won’t create a fan base that way. And just because something is written down does not mean that it’s set in stone. Remember Moses and the stone tablets? Even though he could part the waters he still had to go up the hill twice.  Things will go wrong, but if you put in the time your adjustments, while painful after a long haul, won’t be that bad.  6 hours could have been 6 days.  Be thankful you have good partners.