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Discussion on: Priority smells and professional ethics (part II)

 
edelvalle profile image
Eddy Ernesto del Valle Pino

You are right, sometimes we just try things and see what works. But if you have some data to take that decision use it...

I'm a little bit biased here because the software I make I have people at less than 50m that use it. So, sometimes I just walk around I see they are trying a workaround to do something, I ask them... but what if you could do that like this, if they like it I think about implementing it for them... I have it easy there... :P

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jhotterbeekx profile image
John Hotterbeekx

Having the users close by can make it a lot easier to find these things. I'm rather interested, do you have any formal way of getting feedback from them? Have you tried getting to a point where they report it themselves when they are using workarounds, so do their own feature requests?

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edelvalle profile image
Eddy Ernesto del Valle Pino

Aside form the informal one, I have a "process" lol....

I have this trello board that I use to track the progress and the backlock, and what we are doing. So the most left column is called «Add you crazy ideas here» and I encourage everybody to use this column exactly for that.

Every time we are done with some goal completion I go review this column (some times with the authors to get more context on what they want, what are they trying to achieve, what's the problem they wanna solve and what's the value they get from it) and I promote somethings to be executed, or I change them because sometimes the real problem is not what they wrote but something else underlying. Some things I reject or I put them on hold because the value we get is too small and the execution is too complex. Let's call this «grooming», even if is not "SCRUM's grooming" exactly.

Anyways, it doesn't matter what the read map is. I will try always to insert groomed tasks that are aligned with the read map or really help a lot, or are bugs... and get some of them executed during our iteration process.

Now that I mention iteration, the iteration is not time fixed, that would be insane. The iteration depends on goal completion. This also doens't mean that the iteration is just focused on a goal, there will be plenty of changes during execution, things popping up and so on. Because I can't pause the business and people from using our software while we develop it.

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jhotterbeekx profile image
John Hotterbeekx

Very interesting, thanks for the detailed explanation! Looks a lot like the way we are using scrum, the only real difference being the fixed time iteration, which we do have. Thanks again for all the info, love seeing how other people find their own way of working that suits them.

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edelvalle profile image
Eddy Ernesto del Valle Pino

Thanks, should I write a post about that? About our iteration process? :D

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jhotterbeekx profile image
John Hotterbeekx

I can't speak for others, but I'd love to read it :)