d3 in practice
Nathan Witmer
- How large are the teams at PA who are using this process now?
- Dialogue plays the central role, but who does the talking? Are all
the developers involved directly with your client, or is there a
single point of contact to translate between your client and your team?
- How would you integrate this with a larger team (20+ people, huge
project?)
- What other agile methods have you integrated? It sounds like you're
moving away from SCRUM. What about the daily standup (I recall
reading you guys were trying it out), short iterations, etc?
-------------
Nathan Witmer
Robby Russell
On Aug 8, 2006, at 8:06 PM, Nathan Witmer wrote:
>
> Couple questions to get the discussion started:
>
> - How large are the teams at PA who are using this process now?
Nathan,
Everyone at PLANET ARGON is playing a part in the manifestation of
this methodology. Generally, a team consists of 3-5 individuals that
represent the design, development, and project management aspects for
each project. This varies depending on the size of the project and as
we continue to build up our team, we don't see any real constraints
that somehow make d3 unable to scale to 10, 20, 30 people or more.
> - Dialogue plays the central role, but who does the talking? Are all
> the developers involved directly with your client, or is there a
> single point of contact to translate between your client and your
> team?
It depends on the phase of a project. During the early stages of a
project, it's important to put the right people in front of the new
client to begin introducing them to your approach to goal-driven
requirements gathering and small iterations. Some of this groundwork
should be discussed during the first points of contact between you
and the potential client so that there is no surprises when it's time
to start pushing a project forward. We often put two people in front
of a new client during the first few meetings to begin extracting
goals and requirements. Too many people can be distracting and we've
seen better success for capturing goals if there is more than one
point of contact during this phase. For example, Brian Ford and I
recently went to visit a new client in Washington DC for two days of
meetings. We were able to spend a lot of time after the first day of
meetings to discuss how we each interpreted what the clients goals
were, which made our second day of meetings much more effective once
we solidified our ideas and open questions. I believe we stayed up
til about 3am documenting our notes and their goals in a wiki, which
we presented to them the following morning. From there, we showed
them how to interact with the wiki (something none of them had done
before) and explained how we could collaborate with them through this
tool. Several weeks later, we are now in prototype stages of
development and we can both serve as a point of contact between the
clients and our team. Our designer and developers have us available
for immediate feedback (since we do have a good understanding of
their goals)... but they also have direct access to interact with the
clients, should they have questions that require client feedback.
This transparency is vital to allowing everyone who plays an
important role in the project to have quick access to getting the
right information.
What is important to remember throughout each interaction, is that
the dialogue needs to be consistent, documented, and only initiated
when necessary.
> - How would you integrate this with a larger team (20+ people, huge
> project?)
>
> - What other agile methods have you integrated? It sounds like you're
> moving away from SCRUM. What about the daily standup (I recall
> reading you guys were trying it out), short iterations, etc?
Actually, we integrated the daily standup through our own inventing
and need for a consistent feedback loop on a daily basis. I actually
blogged about how we came about this here:
* http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/2006/05/22/the-daily-stand-up
In regards to short iterations, the developers pushed for shorter and
focused iterations and during a process day, we agreed on a 1-2 week
maximum length on iterations made the most sense for our small team.
It became much easier for us to group use cases and solutions into
smaller iterations and to attach better cost estimates to each
iteration, which adds a lot of confidence to our estimating process.
Overall, we've done a lot of inventing on our own and have picked up
books on various methodologies (scrum, xp...) and have cherry-picked
certain features of them, but haven't yet found a methodology (aside
from the Agile umbrella) that we can all agree to subscribe to.
Dialogue has been one consistent area that we've been focusing on and
Dialogue-Driven Development has evolved from that.
I'm sure Brian will have some feedback as well on this.
Thanks for the questions... look forward to hearing your thoughts!
Cheers,
Robby
--
Robby Russell
Founder & Executive Director
PLANET ARGON, LLC
Ruby on Rails Development, Consulting & Hosting
www.planetargon.com
www.robbyonrails.com
+1 503 445 2457
+1 877 55 ARGON [toll free]
+1 815 642 4068 [fax]