From Meetings to Success

It can be all too easy for a projects user stories to be copied and pasted directly from the annotated minutes of a meeting where 'stuff' was discussed and declared. These stories tend towards suggested implementation. When this happens, the odds are that the structure (and requirements) will not be clear.

 

Pragmatic analysis and Clarity are key to Success.

 
When pulling stories from meeting minutes you'll end up with the flattening out of data producing spaghetti requirements, leading to spaghetti code. Based on the muddy stories, a hotch potch of testing will be produced, proving a risk to the  successful delivery of items buried (or missed) in the documentation.

 

Lets make the change.

 

Consider the following structre when writing user stories:

 

A User Story should be designed as follows:

As a …

I want …

So that …

This describes the need of the change.

 

These stories can then have Acceptance Tests in the form of:

Given …

When …

Then …

This describes the behaviour of the change.

 

Once we understand the behavioural change required, then we can work out what tasks are required to make the behavioural change. Once all of these tasks are completed then the Acceptance Tests should pass, the story will be resolved and importantly, all of that stuff that was declared in the meeting can be put to bed.

 

A successful meeting leading to a successful implementation.

Meetings: Where Work Goes to Die

For no reason at all, I was reminded of one of Jeff Atwood's blog posts the other day Meetings: Where Work Goes to Die

Basically it suggests that, although communication is what we need to succeed, we need to make sure that time spent in meetings is time well spent.

Here are a few of his methods to keep a meeting succinct.

• No meeting should ever be more than an hour, under penalty of death.
• Every meeting should have a clearly defined mission statement. (Agenda/Goals)
• Do your homework before the meeting.
• Make it optional.
• Summarize to-dos at the end of the meeting.

If meetings are part of your life, please watch the following video, as recommended by @Toopots