Gojko Adzic's blog. Specification by Example, Impact Mapping, and more... https://gojko.net/ Tue, 17 Dec 2024 07:37:08 +0000 Tue, 17 Dec 2024 07:37:08 +0000 Jekyll v4.0.0 It’s never been really clear to me what’s the difference between a bug report and a feature request. Yes, of course, there are clear cases at the extremes, but there is a huge gray zone with a lot of overlap. And it recently dawned on me that clearing up this gray zone actually surfaces some very significant product opportunities. Both bugs and feature requests point to something missing from the product, and that something actually stands in the way of user success. Both need to be analysed, prioritised, developed and tested. Both come with a price tag. And in the... Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://gojko.net/2024/09/30/from-bugs-to-beam/ https://gojko.net/2024/09/30/from-bugs-to-beam/ favourites Last week, Specflow and I organised an interactive webinar. For posterity, and anyone crazy enough to do something similar in the future, here’s a quick summary. Read on to learn how we facilitated it, what worked well, what worked badly, and some ideas how to do it better. TLDR summary: we got 500 people to try collaborating over Zoom and Miro. Miro more or less held its ground, but I feel as if we broke Zoom. With a few tweaks I’d use Miro again next time, but perhaps look for a different video-conferencing system. Workshop set-up The Specflow team wanted... Thu, 09 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://gojko.net/2021/09/09/mega-workshop-facilitation-tips/ https://gojko.net/2021/09/09/mega-workshop-facilitation-tips/ favourites Our industry is full of oriental phrases and loanwords to describe strategies for wicked problems. From Kanban and Gemba, to Shu-Ha-Ri and Poka-Yoke, a far-east sounding name suddenly seems to bestow authority, and turn an ordinary idea into ancient eastern wisdom. So here’s another one, especially good for problems people say are impossible to solve: Nijute! Although it sounds like some secret ninja technique, don’t bother looking up Nijute in a dictionary. This is actually an acronym: Not Impossible, Just Too Expensive. This is one of the best mental tricks I’ve ever used working with difficult stakeholders, especially those that... Mon, 10 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://gojko.net/2021/05/10/nijute-solving-impossible-problems/ https://gojko.net/2021/05/10/nijute-solving-impossible-problems/ favourites software-profession “We delivered twenty points this week!” one of the Zoom squares declared in a proud voice. The rest of the grid in the virtual standup (zoomup?) nodded approvingly. This was apparently a big win for the team. Handing out virtual pats on the back would be a killer feature for videoconferences like this one. Yet the person reporting it was lying through his teeth, and everyone else was just going along with the hoax. And this wasn’t just some harmless half-truth, like the tooth-fairy paying children for dental discomfort, but a dirty, nasty scam that’s been hurting our industry for... Mon, 11 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://gojko.net/2021/01/11/the-play-the-points-the-lie.html https://gojko.net/2021/01/11/the-play-the-points-the-lie.html agile favourites software-profession planning A new enhancement has the potential to significantly expand the reach of Given-When-Then tools, and make them much more inclusive. I’m very excited to see this attempt to improve developer/tester collaboration, and I think anyone using GWT should pay close attention to this experiment. Given-When-Then, without any doubt, won the contest for the most popular BDD example structure. The supporting tools are now well established. Because people are familiar with those utilities, they often try to use them beyond the originally intended scope. Unfortunately, this is often with bad results. That’s only logical, and in many ways a repeat of... Mon, 02 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://gojko.net/2020/11/02/given-when-then-tweak-try-again.html https://gojko.net/2020/11/02/given-when-then-tweak-try-again.html agile favourites specification-by-example I’m very excited to partner with Specflow on a new series of weekly articles. Each week, we’ll post a challenge, explaining a common problem people face when trying to capture examples with Given-When-Then steps. We invite the community to participate. Send your ideas and solutions, and the following week we’ll publish an analysis with answers. Although the articles will be published on the SpecFlow website, they are tool-agnostic. You’ll be able to use most of the ideas with alternative tools, such as Cucumber, but also as more general techniques when doing collaborative analysis, even if you never automate any tests.... Wed, 10 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://gojko.net/2020/06/10/gwt-with-style-posts.html https://gojko.net/2020/06/10/gwt-with-style-posts.html agile favourites specification-by-example One of the best things about Specification by Example is how it allows a group of people to quickly get to shared understanding, and collaboratively discover and define exactly what they need to build. Specification workshops are the most effective when everyone is in the same room and has access to the same information. For better or worse, that’s impossible to do in most countries around the world at the moment. So here are some tips on getting the benefits from spec workshops without having to be in the same place. For remote work where everyone is in a different... Tue, 31 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://gojko.net/2020/03/31/sbe-remotely.html https://gojko.net/2020/03/31/sbe-remotely.html agile favourites specification-by-example It’s now been ten years since I submitted the final manuscript of Specification by Example to the publisher. In the book, I documented how teams back then used examples to guide analysis, development and testing. During the last two months, I’ve been conducting a survey to discover what’s changed since the book came out. Some findings were encouraging, confirming that the most important problems from ten years ago have been solved. Some findings were quite surprising, pointing at trends that prevent many teams from getting most out of the process. Here are the results. About the survey I surveyed people... Tue, 17 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://gojko.net/2020/03/17/sbe-10-years.html https://gojko.net/2020/03/17/sbe-10-years.html agile favourites specification-by-example Here are the slides, links, books and papers I mentioned in the closing keynote of the Agile Scotland conference in December 2019, on descaling agile. Download slides Parkinson’s Law - article from The Economist New analysis shows problematic boom in higher ed administrators by Jon Marcus, 2014 Official Scrum Guide - current and past versions - from Mitch Lacey’s archive, including the original 13-page version Essential Scrum by Kenneth S. Rubin; 500 pages SAFe 4.5 Reference Guide by Dean Leffingwell; 815 pages Largest Strip the Willow dance Weltrekord im Schuhplattln Detecting Agile BS, US Department of Defense Guide version 0.4... Mon, 09 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://gojko.net/2019/12/09/descaling-agile.html https://gojko.net/2019/12/09/descaling-agile.html agile presentations Basic laws of statistics imply that most developers work on average products, supporting usual business workflows, helping the proverbial mill run without too much excitement. Although the right choice for most such products should be to “Choose boring technology” (as Dan McKinley nicely explained), very few teams actually do that. This leads to overcomplicated software that is costly to develop, test and maintain. Over a long run, bad technology choices cause technical debt, require costly migration, and slow down delivery. Overcomplicated products obstruct change to businesses that they were actually supposed to help. In a sense, the unfortunate faith of... Sun, 01 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://gojko.net/2019/12/01/deliberate-side-products.html https://gojko.net/2019/12/01/deliberate-side-products.html favourites software-profession planning