I hear a lot about emergent outcomes, and progressive elaboration, and self organization on Agile projects. These are slippery slope concepts, and far too often are applied irresponsibly. Emergent outcomes don’t mean we have no idea what the business is paying for – they have a pretty clear idea of the problem they are investing to address. Progressive elaboration doesn’t mean the team will figure out what they are doing as they go along – it means they will gain clarity on mitigating risks and meeting the technical and customer experience aspects of how to solve the business problem as they move forward. Self organization doesn’t mean the team can work on whatever it wants – it means that the team collectively decides the best way to focus their efforts and skills on a specific effort.
The business is willing to make an investment, to solve a specific problem, within a specific timeframe. In the first four posts of this series we discussed that the way that requirements are captured should express the purpose and outcome, they should establish a shared language that communicates context and intent, is should be a stable view of the problem, and it should support progressive elaboration. In addition, Agile requirements include clarity on what "done" looks like. Agile requirements also include identifying the impediments to getting to "done".
Agile Requirements should be Testable
Not having a clear outcome does not make a development effort Agile, it makes it irresponsible. If we don’t communicate requirements in a way that we can ensure the requirement is accomplished then we are being unclear about the value proposition we are trying to achieve. By testable, we don’t mean the “how” of implementation, we mean understanding what is not available or performing adequately what will be different after the requirement is delivered. If the business can’t communicate to the developer how to make sure they know when they are done – the project will meander. Even with lots of customer involvement during development – it is likely that development will be less focused than it could be.
What does it mean to be testable? I have a client that had its development team develop a “data-warehouse” to provide management reports. The developers spent eight months defining all the data in the business, developed programs and processes to consolidate the data into a central repository, and started building reports against the data. Eight months later the manager’s biggest problem is that they don’t have the information the need to manage the business. How is this possible? The business wanted a data warehouse and they got one. They have been intimately involved in the data gathering process. They have been asking for reports through the system for months.
The problem is that no one stopped to understand how they would test the requirement. How would they know if the business need was met? The business need is met when the manager had the information needed to manage the business. When the requirement is communicated as a granular “how” – and there is no way to verify it has met the need of the business – the business is unlikely to get what they expect.