Re: Practice: Slack

Kent Beck wrote:
> In any plan, include some minor tasks that can be dropped if you get behind.
> You can always add more stories later and deliver more than you promised. It
> is important in an atmosphere of distrust and broken promises to meet your
> commitments.
> ...
> I suggested to the middle
> manager that he encourage his teams to only sign up for what they were
> confident they could actually do.

I agree slack is a must. All good decision-making happens in the 
wiggle-room that is slack.

There is a flip-side, however. Firstly, remember Parkinson's Law. 
Padding one's schedule may encourage one not to be energized about the 
work. I find it best for energized work to estimate not optimistically, 
not pessimistically, but just to estimate it. This means a fairly high 
likelihood that any given story will take longer to implement. And 
high-risk stories, perhaps much longer. Therefore, to combat distrust, 
I've seen some put off the riskiest features till last, because they 
weren't confident they could deliver a working solution in time.

I'm not sure all the tactics that can be used to cope with a hostile 
environment. I'm not even sure if you can truly do XP in the midst of 
distrust. One thing I tried, successfully, was to keep many estimates 
private to the developers. The customer saw one set of committments; we 
were shooting at a different set. When we adjusted what was going to be 
delivered in a given release, the customer was happy because the main 
things he needed were there.

This is very similar to what you, Kent, suggest above, including tasks 
that can be dropped, sometimes delivering more than what was promised. 
But I feel like the customer then isn't a first-class member of the 
team, and therefore this is a step away from XP. Comments?

-TimK


------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> 
$4.98 domain names from Yahoo!. Register anything.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/Q7_YsB/neXJAA/yQLSAA/nhFolB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->