Making the quality-factor visible

To deliver working increments of software, it's not enough to show all the tests passing. You also want to know that each user story has a production-quality implementation. This is why knowing when you're done on a user story includes a mental check of the design and all the code.

Some teams at Thoughtworks use a single information radiator to convey both the functional completeness of a user story and its implementation quality. Using both dimensions of a whiteboard, the x-axis represents the functional completeness and the y-axis represents the implementation quality. The story cards being developed in an iteration are placed on the whiteboard. A card is moved to the right as it becomes more functionally complete, and moved upwards as its implementation quality improves.

I plan to reconfigure the Current Iteration area of my planning board to be like this.

Reference: Alistair Cockburn on Communicating, Cooperating Teams.

Tags: agile, extreme programming, information radiator, big visible chart

posted by Simon Baker @ permalink
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