Monthly Archives: December 2010

If it hurts…

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In software, when something is painful, the way to reduce the pain is to do it more frequently, not less.

Or

If it hurts, do it more frequently, and bring the pain forward

I am quoting the excellent Continuous Delivery (Humble & Farley). The authors describe this as a heuristic; Don Reinertsen might describe this as seeking to alter the economics of delivery by forcing transaction costs down. Either way, it is very good advice. To paraphrase another quote, to defer pain only makes it worse.

The A3 challenge

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My previous post has been sitting there at the top of my front page for too long now, and it doesn’t reach my usual levels of positivity!  So let’s change that with a quick challenge:

  1. Can you relate the features in your development backlog (or at least the prioritised and in-progress portion thereof) to an identifiable business initiative?
  2. If – for real or in your imagination – you justified (compellingly), scoped and planned each of these business initiatives in just two sides of A4, how many of the features in your backlog would deserve a mention?

I take it for granted that you organise most of your development work by feature.  Large initiatives are allowed sub-initiatives, each also described (compellingly still)  in no more than two sides of A4 (real or imaginary).

The “A3″ of this post’s title refers to an A3 report, presented on a sheet of A3 paper (the size of two sheets of A4).  I wholeheartedly recommend John Shook’s Managing to Learn if this concept is new to you.