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January 28, 2005
Closing the feedback loop
I'm soon to be rolling off my current project and, as tradition demands, have been lumped with the "shitty work" of bugfixing for the next month or so . That's right - no shiny new stories for me to work on, just "go into the corner and don't come out again until you've fixed all those bugs!". And guess what? I'm loving every second of it!
The reason for this strange attraction is the feedback loop we have with bug-fixing which isn't in place or our normal iteration work...
Up until now only the development team has really had the final say on whether a story card was finished or not within the iteration. Effectively, we'd come to the end of what we think the work entailed and it'd would be subsequently ticked as complete. This is all most irregular I know and decidedly un-Agile, but until recently I'd forgotten one of the major positive side-effects you get from external sign-off of stories.
I'd been thinking that the sole reason for having such a tight feedback loop for story sign-off is to ensure the highest quality code is released at the end of each iteration. This is a valid point, and we do have a uncomfortably large number of bugs raised against our stories once the testing team gets to looking at our "completed" stories, usually well after the iteration has closed.
However, there's another key benefit to this approach... it provides great closure as well. There is nothing better for a developer's morale than for a third-party (i.e., customer, customer-proxy or tester) to say "Yes. That's exactly what I was looking for!" And that's what I'm getting several times a day (usually) when the testing team looks at each bug I've resolved and passed onto them for review. It's a small difference but the end result is infinitely more satisfying.
Now, we just need to get the same immediate, objective feedback in place for our main story card development.
Posted by Andy Marks at January 28, 2005 07:36 AM
Comments
*laughs* Actually, the "shitty" bugfixing work is some of my favorite. If I'm in any kind of agile environment (e.g., at TW), its an excellent opportunity to refactor the bad corners of old code into shiny goodness. It's like the good feeling from spring cleaning.
Posted by: B. K. Oxley (binkley) at January 29, 2005 12:03 PM
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