Wherein the brand spanking new program manager is hazed by the team

"I know that you all need a detailed specification before Bianca and Lucas can start designing their architecture, and that Daphne and Jason need the spec in order to start planning test cases, and that Oliver needs to know what it is he's designing. I'll be working on that today and tomorrow."

Well, that is what Hazim intended to say, but he didn't get any further than "I know that you all need a detailed specification" before the team chorused "No we don't!"

Hazim blinked. Twice. "You don't?"

Oliver tends to be the least snarky of the bunch, so he jumped in before someone else could make a wisecrack. "Nope! We do things differently around here than you are probably used to. You're used to interviewing customers to learn what they want, recording all that information in specifications, having customers sign off on the specs, passing the specs off to developers who turn them into code, developers passing the code off to testers, testers throwing the code back to developers because it's full of bugs plus it doesn't work the way they interpret the specs as saying it should work, developers and testers batting the code and specs back and forth until upper management decides it's time to ship the thing, at which point it's passed off to the customers who say that it's not what they wanted at all. Am I correct?"

"Well...." That wasn't the way things were supposed to work, but Hazim had to admit that that's more-or-less what usually ended up happening. "Yes. Do you do something different?"

"We sure do!" Oliver replied. "I'll borrow you some books that will explain in detail, but the short version is that we do just-in-time everything: feature design, architecture, coding, testing - everything. We have found that by working closely together and being in continuous communication we don't need nearly as much documentation as you're used to working with."

"And - especially at this point - we don't really care how exactly the application will work" Jason added. "We start by determining what our customer is trying to do. Everything else comes from that."

"Oh. Um. Hrm." Needless to say Hazim was a bit nonplussed right now. He knew that MMS was going to be a big change, but he didn't realize it was going to be this big of a change. Luckily for all concerned, he not only realizes that he's out of his depth but he is willing to admit the fact. (Possibly he has read Jerry Weinberg's Becoming a Technical Leader, Secrets of Consulting, and More Secrets of Consulting.)

"I think I'm out of my depth here. If you're willing to help me through this, I promise to pester you to pieces with lots of questions and come up to speed just as fast as I can."

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink