New project, new examples

As of a couple of days ago, I’m splitting my time between two projects. As it happens it’s also on two different locations here in Stockholm so I’m happy that we have a warm autumn here in Stockholm so I can ride my bike between the projects, but what is really fun is that we’re using Specification By Example in both projects.

One major difference between my work will though be that I’m a core team member in my “old” project, while I will be an outsider/stakeholder in the new project. I’m supporting our product owner and writing examples but not be an active team member. This will very interesting to experience in combination with Specification By Examples – does example writing business people have to be part of the team?

This means that I’m that fortunate that while learning this I get lessons in two rather different projects and from two rather different styles of implementation of the examples.

Today, I had the first specification session with the new project and we started of discussing what we want to catch in the examples in the project. We then started writing examples, both some that are included in the scope of the original user stories but also the framework for examples to be implemented in later stories. Tomorrow we will test the examples on the team. This will be really interesting to see and hear.

Another difference between the projects is that we will be using a more conservative form of scrum in this project which is also very interesting when comparing with the other project where we have used something more of an almost post agile process with few fixed artifacts and more a continious adaptation of our process in order to improve productivity.

A clear objective is no silver bullet

I’ve many times, as so many others, stressed the importance of clear and shared objectives, but is that enough?

Just because you and everyone else know the objective does not mean you share the same view on how you measure if the objective has been reached and what is key to reach the objective. I believe that the measurement and and the main road is as important. The high focus on just setting the objective(s) is simply not enough. If the group does not share the same view on how success is measured and what is important in order to reach the objectives, I believe there will not be a factual common objective within that group.