agile needs storytellers

Illusion of progress

Calling something ‘agile’ doesn’t make it true

Peter Merrick Ph.D. Advanced Product Ownership, Berlin peterjmerrick@gmail.com

What’s agile?

Agile is a response to poor requirements specs

Peter Merrick Ph.D. Advanced Product Ownership, Berlin peterjmerrick@gmail.com

Enfant Terrible• Programmers dream methodology• Hostile to Requirements Engineers• Opposite of ‘waterfall’• Waterfall wants Agile to mature• Agile thinks it’s perfect • Scaling is accepted as hard• The ‘self-organizing’ team is ‘sacred’

Agile is the ‘Enfant Terrible’ of the RE world

Peter Merrick Ph.D. Advanced Product Ownership, Berlin peterjmerrick@gmail.com

If the hat fits (wear it) 2

• Ninja• Guru• Magician• Warrior• Badass• Overlord• Visionary

Peter Merrick Ph.D. Advanced Product Ownership, Berlin peterjmerrick@gmail.com

Culture• Agile is easier in ‘flat’ organizations• Big = hierarchy

• Requires cultural shift• No explicit role for managers

–managers become leaders• Equally hard to co-ordinate between multiple teams• Doesn’t work well with distributed teams• Requires disciplined product story management

The Spotify Process and the GmbH Process are different

Peter Merrick Ph.D. Advanced Product Ownership, Berlin peterjmerrick@gmail.com

Scrum slide

Requirements are now ‘stories’. Stories are bite-sized.Planning: [ID, Prioritize, Flesh out, Discuss, Play, Test/Accept]

Peter Merrick Ph.D. Advanced Product Ownership, Berlin peterjmerrick@gmail.com

Capacity and estimation

Planning = planning poker

Stories are accepted or rejected based on understandability

How many stories? Depends on team’s capacity. Depends on team size. Average size of story

10 day sprint = 8 days dev. Say team size of 5. Story point = 1 day. 40 points/days. Average story size = 2. Therefore 20 stories.

Why do I care? Because I want the team to have enough work to do

Start by guessing and get more accurate with data

Planning is an activity based on ‘stories’

Peter Merrick Ph.D. Advanced Product Ownership, Berlin peterjmerrick@gmail.com

PO as a team functionMarketing/CustomerService/Sales

Development

Requirements team

Peter Merrick Ph.D. Advanced Product Ownership, Berlin peterjmerrick@gmail.com

Horizontal and then vertical

Horizontal and then Vertical

Peter Merrick Ph.D. Advanced Product Ownership, Berlin peterjmerrick@gmail.com

Skeleton stories

Narrative scenario (persona)UI (what does it look like)Test (how does ‘done’ look)

Peter Merrick Ph.D. Advanced Product Ownership, Berlin peterjmerrick@gmail.com

As a…I want to…So that…

PO as a team function

Product owner

Storyteller/analyst

UserInterfacedesigner

Tester

Peter Merrick Ph.D. Advanced Product Ownership, Berlin peterjmerrick@gmail.com

Review• Calling it ‘agile’ does not make it so• Agile is a frustration response to slow and inaccurate specs • Agile is hostile to waterfall• Agile requires a particular culture to work• Because agile is ‘hot’ is not a good enough reason to try it• Scrum trivializes ‘planning’• ‘Planning’ is vital to support Scrum or it stops• Requirements team plays the Product Ownership role• Product Ownership role incl. PO, Storytellers, UI, Test• Storymapping allows for a description of scope• Interesting metrics open the door to accurate estimation

Review

Peter Merrick Ph.D. Advanced Product Ownership, Berlin peterjmerrick@gmail.com

Questions + follow up

Are you a ‘storyteller’?

Peter Merrick PhDAdvanced Product OwnershipBerlinpeterjmerrick@gmail.com

Medium.com/agile-storytelling

@PeterMerrick5

Connect with me on Linkedin!