| Sounds like pro-forma agile - phagile - if you will. I was taught agile by a certified scrum master, but the dude was completely serious about 'this just lets you fail faster, and you will fail, and often, as this process starts' which really helped. He was right. It took a while to learn how to keep people honest and create succinct stories with a real scope. Particularly the guys who want to be architects or engineers perceive their jobs to start with the abstract and work down to specificity. They can struggle with "What should this screen to today. Right now, today?" and want to talk about database design, message passing, data structures or anything else that doesn't answer the question. At least for me and my planning it was far easier to make stories as small as possible and let the complexity build into a release which was roughly plotted out after velocity stabilized (even if into an upward slope). I was probably doing it all wrong, but the hardest part was always keeping anyone from saying "well 6 more 2 weeks sprints means your release date is x, right?". Everyone wanted to just take the backlog depth, divide by velocity and project a date. |