Another Way to Pair Program: Generating Requirements

Scot Witt, Tuesday, May 6, 2008 @ 12:13 pm

The CTO (Chief Technical Officer) tells the BA (Business Analyst- me) and the IA (Information Architect) to pair program.

He's our boss' boss.

He's our Agile ubermensch (mensch is a Yiddish-Middle German word meaning, in this context, expert, coach, guide, all around super star; I don't know if it is in Modern German, but our CTO will tell me, he's fluent in German. I took Latin and Spanish).

We gotta do what he says.

I whine that I write faster than the IA.

The IA complains I can't do wireframes as fast as he does (true, VISIO isn't as easy as it looks, kids).

We are despondent and snarl at each other. Pitiful.

An idea.

How about we split the requirements in half. I pull the ones I wanna do, the IA grabs the more visually oriented ones. We write 'em up, do the wireframes and then have the other edit and comment on the other's work while we collaborate on the items we need to.

It allowed me to spit out the bug repairs like a machine gun and freed our IA into drafting wireframes and workflows he needed to do without slowing me down. While we edit the other fellow's stuff, we find small errors, ask some questions and significantly improve the requirements without turning them into novels.

The benefit was to the Developers who had very spiffy, concrete, succinct and directed requirements before the iteration started. They had time to read them, ask questions and begin their design work. The client was able to read them and sign off early making the sprint kick-off run smoothly.

The CTO gave his blessing.

And yeah, I started numbering the dang Business Rules to help the Developers, even though everything I ever learned about writing tells me non-hierarchal/unrelated lists should be bulleted. But it helps the developers refer to specific rules and my sense of technical writing dos and don'ts can suffer this arrow of outrageous fortune.

The Developers were not impressed. They like numbers. Especially ones with decimal points.

Turns out the PM (Project Manager) even likes the IBM-concentric deep diving numbering schemes of the 1970s. There's no accounting for taste, is there?

But I don't have to like it, do I?

tech development

Comments

• Leave a comment
• Comment feed for this post
• TrackBack URL

None so far.

Leave a comment