Re: Practice: Weekly Cycle

Certainly good coaching can help. Many teams choose to operate without
coaches, and I find that they fairly consistently have difficulty getting
focus away from the micro-scale.

  (I understand your point about pride now. Thank you.)

Recently I visited a team who had fallen into a couple of traps: big
refactoring "stories", and large numbers of independent tasks adding up to
more work and less story value. They were sure that they were doing
something wrong, but weren't sure what to do. Coaching would have helped,
and in fact I trust that it did. Brian Marick and I sat with them and
paired through what they thought was a many-day story and helped them to
get it spiked in a day. Based on their reaction the next day, it seems fair
to say that they were "enlightened".

I fully agree that the task list ought not be carved in stone. Agreeing
that it takes coaching, pride, and a certain kind of team spirit to get the
story focus and task flexibility to balance out right, I've come to prefer
the approach of having the team treat the task list as "one way", making it
clear that it's not "the way", by not raising the tasks to the point of
accountability.

I would think -- but have not measured this so I'm just thinking -- that
the more flexibly the team treats the task list, the less individual
accountability for tasks one would have anyway. As I'm more interested in
team progress and team accountability than individual accountability, I'm
probably setting the story/task balance differently. If individual
accountability came up as more important, I'd consider at least two
options: tracking individual performance on stories, and then breaking down
into tasks and tracking that.

And of course, in the presence of pair programming, individual
accountability at any level is somewhat mitigated. That would be a whole
'nother topic.

Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com
Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future. -- Niels Bohr

On Wednesday, November 24, 2004, at 1:13:14 PM, kent beck wrote:

> All of your arguments against tracking tasks can be mitigated by good
> coaching, keeping the team focused on
> delivering value to the customer. A team that gets focused on the
> micro-scale is what I was getting at with
> my comment about pride. A team proud of delivering will take the time
> to focus on delivery as the customer
> sees it. A team afraid of getting blamed will focus on plausible
> deniability--I got my tasks done, you can't
> blame me if the story doesn't work. The behavior you describe sounds like 
> symptoms of deeper problems.
> Eliminating tasks won't eliminate those problems.

> In my practice the task list isn't carved in stone. There is a picture of a 
> task list in Planning XP that
> shows tasks elininated, cut in half, and added in the course of an
> iteration. The tasks give you individual
> accountability and the sense of being a team keeps you focused on the big 
> picture. Both are necessary.

End quotation from kent beck, on Wednesday, November 24, 2004, at 1:13:14 PM




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