Steve Neiderhauser

Should people working in software layers have a theme song

 

A story needs to be valuable. We don't care about value to just anybody; it needs to be valuable to the customer. Developers may have (legitimate) concerns, but these framed in a way that makes the customer perceive them as important.

This is especially an issue when splitting stories. Think of a whole story as a multi-layer cake, e.g., a network layer, a persistence layer, a logic layer, and a presentation layer. When we split a story, we're serving up only part of that cake. We want to give the customer the essence of the whole cake, and the best way is to slice vertically through the layers. Developers often have an inclination to work on only one layer at a time (and get it "right"); but a full database layer (for example) has little value to the customer if there's no presentation layer.

― Bill Wake

 

Riffing on Wake’s cake metaphor, I wondered if people who are working in layers could be playfully coaxed to those tasty vertical slices through a theme song. Perhaps we play the song at sprint demos. You know, to fill up the space where the team normal shows working software.

Try eating only the frosting on a cake and see how quickly you develop a sweetly sick feeling. So I felt that the sweetly sick song MacArthur Park would be apropos for all layer lovers.

Listen to these lyrics: 

MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark

All the sweet, green icing flowing down

Someone left the cake out in the rain

 

I don't think that I can take it

'Cause it took so long to bake it

And I’ll never have that recipe again, oh no

 

This is a 60s song so let me translate the lyrics to Agile:

 

The customer’s love for your product is melting

During integration your sweet, sweet tests flow from green to red 

When a market storm rolls up on us, we couldn’t deliver the cake fast enough 

 

The cake’s features are no longer valuable to our customers, and we don’t think we can take it 

Takes a long time to bake a whole new cake

We missed a major market opportunity, and we’ll never have that chance again, oh no

PS. Note to self. Never again read Mike Cohn's book User Stories Applied while watching American Idol.

ScrumMaster Checklist

If you're a ScrumMaster and have ever wondered if you could be doing more during a sprint to help your team, you may consider Michael James checklist for ScrumMasters.

Agile Product Owner Workshop in 15 Minutes

A concise and visual description of the Agile product owner role.

Distributed Scrum Primer

Pete Deemer created the Distributed Scrum Primer, the primer shows distributed teams how to practice Scrum.

One key is communication. And with disturbed teams poor communication places a larger tax on the software project. Why? Because if you spend more time trying to transmit an idea, you spend less time creating working software.

Pete describes a richness scale. The higher a communication method is on the scale, the greater the communication value.

 

 

 

Scrum Patterns

Jeff Sutherland describes two Scrum patterns.

"Yesterday's Weather" is powerful because it limits planning time and helps the team finish their work and achieve their goal.

"Yesterday's Weather," how does the pattern work? When the team is planning for the next sprint, simply look at the number of story points completed in the last sprint and pull in that amount of work.

What is Marketecture

Cutter explains Marketecture in this blog post.

My favorite tip? Create a compelling story that shows the architecture's benefits.

Sprint Demo as Market Research Method

Roman Pichler describes how to put on a product demo that elicits market research from users and stakeholders.

If the customer provides sweetly faked praise, "Those drop down menus look wonderful," you may want to ask some powerful questions.

What changes would you like to see?

What key features are missing?

Does our working software still align with market conditions?

The Brilliance of Blake Snyder

Like the rays of the sun, the more condensed the words, the more powerful they are.

Blake Snyder shines in Chapter 3 of his book Save the Cat Strikes Back like a super nova. In this one chapter he lays out the three acts, describing them as Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis, in a clear, concise, and clever way that could spring only from Blake's genius.

The rivers of Blake's understanding flow together in this chapter, gifting you with the wisdom of story structure. 

Go ahead! Read the chapter, watch the movies, write your story.