Complete transparency
Posted Wed, 28 Mar 2007 19:37:00 GMT
This blog hasn’t seen so many entries for a long time (may be that’s why it broke in the middle of the big entry I was writing half hour ago) but there you go… these conferences can be inspirational. On so many levels…..
Anyway, anyway… the thing I’m writing about now is the talk given by Dave Thomas on… I don’t remember what, but there was a lot of heroic epic tales there. Amongst them, the trained ear (from years of exposure to Rational, IBM, etc consultants) could pick out a lot of extremely wise ideas.
Some (in my opinion) extremely wise keyphrases were: “House of quality”, “Everything is a story”, “The code speaks to me as an executive”, “Why do I need management reports when I can see everything in real time as it unfolds?”
Not elaborating here as everyone can look them up. The wisest, and may be the composite idea was that of complete transparency.
Big Dave painted a picture where the executives could find out everything about a project by just looking at things produced from the source code and the issue tracking system as sole inputs.
Oh, yeah, diversion, I brought my notes here on the way back from the kitchen, the talk was on “Large Agile Projects”. Cool… Exciting! Arctic exploration and trained killers were in the vocabulary… oh the excitement!…..
So, how does it all become so disarmingly transparent, we asked, and we were given this link. It’s good. It does actually explain how you can make the code speak as an executive by making EVERYTHING a deliverable artifact and EVERYTHING a story.
Like, the management or the customer requires a regular report on progress. That is a requirement of the project. So the obvious thing is to make it a story. It takes some effort (has cost) and it produces measurable results. It is subject to prioritisation. It needs to be trackable and auditable. The time spent on it comes from the overall project time. So why not make it a story. That makes everything trackable, auditable, and ultimately transparent.
Rise to the meta-level, that’s what I call this.
