Showing posts with label Organization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Organization. Show all posts

Friday, October 9, 2009

Writing User Stories

As the first task doing XP we've started writing user stories for our project. We've decided to use the “As a , I want so that ” story template after reading this post by Mike Cohn. We consider the so-that clause required though, since we think it ads a alot of value to think about why we do things - we have allready removed one of the features we had planned after challenging it with that question.

Yes, we have planned features. Actually the entire project is planned up front, which is another challenge for this project. It was preceded by a pre-study and the picture about what should be done is pretty clear to us allready. Our interaction designer and our project manager have spent alot of time with the customer to get this picture, which we know is not very XP-like. The good thing is that these two internal persons have so good understanding about the product that they can act as the on-site customer that we can't have for real.

Cannonball into XP

A few weeks ago we were finally granted to use eXtreme Programming on a new project. It's a web application with a fair amount of business functionality. We have decided for the Cannonball-approach as Kent Beck refers to in his paper “Getting Started with XP”.

We both have some initial understanding about XP and have been anxious to try it out, but haven’t had support until now. We have experience from some of the practices, but not all, and have spent the first few weeks reading up on more details, like Extreme Programming Explained (Kent Beck) and Scrum and XP from the trenches (Henrik Kniberg).

Currently we use continuous integration on all projects already, and as senior developers we have plenty of experience with refactoring. We have used the Scrum process, and thereby Stories and Iterations amongst other things. Tommy have also been experimenting with TDD for a couple of years.

As for our concerns, none of us have done much pair programming or automated acceptance tests before. Another issue is our organization at Creuna which does not map directly to XP. Being consultants having an on site customer can be difficult for example.

Commenting this post we would love to get your input on how you started with XP. Also, during this project, don't hesitate to give us comments how you would solve similar problems.