{"id":1875,"date":"2018-03-05T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-03-04T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wwwneu.strehle.de\/tim\/weblog\/archives\/2018\/03\/05\/1634-2\/"},"modified":"2018-03-05T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2018-03-04T23:00:00","slug":"1634-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/weblog\/archives\/2018\/03\/05\/1634-2\/","title":{"rendered":"For better software, keep talking"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In my experience, things diverge quickly in software development when people stop talking to each other. It\u2019s costly if we notice too late that priorities or needs have changed, schedules slipped, or features evolved in the wrong direction.<\/p>\n<p>Developers, users, managers (product, project, or people managers): <strong>Keep talking \u2013 all of the time<\/strong> \u2013 to each other about priorities, requirements, possible solutions, schedules. (Yes, I\u2019m convinced that every developer needs to talk to users directly.)<\/p>\n<p>Even after you\u2019re \u201cdone\u201d, keep talking about whether the software is actually helpful (\u201cdelivers value\u201d) and what to improve next.<\/p>\n<p>Developers, keep talking to your colleagues in \u201cops\u201d and customer support to learn how the software is behaving in real life.<\/p>\n<p>Keep talking to other developers and your boss \u2013 share what you\u2019re working on, what you\u2019ve learned, whether you\u2019re stuck, ask for their feedback and ideas.<\/p>\n<p>This was one of the main points of the <strong>agile movement<\/strong>: In \u201cwaterfall development\u201d, there\u2019s no communication between developers and users about changing requirements or intermediate results. It\u2019s why the <a href=\"http:\/\/agilemanifesto.org\">Agile Manifesto<\/a> talks about \u201cinteractions\u201d, \u201ccollaboration\u201d and \u201cface-to-face conversation\u201d, and states that \u201cbusiness people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.\u201d To keep talking is the purpose of Scrum ceremonies (daily scrum, review, retrospective).<\/p>\n<p>If your (agile) process gets people talking, great. Whatever stops people from communicating \u2013 \u201cthat\u2019s the product owner\u2019s job, not mine\u201d, \u201cthis doesn\u2019t belong in the &#8218;daily&#8217;\u201d, \u201cjust look it up in Jira\u201d \u2013 might be a sign that things could be better.<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019re in this together \u2013 it\u2019s called a \u201ccompany\u201d, after all. Nobody has all of the information, and every perspective matters, so we need to work things out together. Again and again. Keep talking!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In my experience, things diverge quickly in software development when people stop talking to each other. It\u2019s costly if we notice too late that priorities or needs have changed, schedules slipped, or features evolved in the wrong direction. Developers, users, managers (product, project, or people managers): Keep talking \u2013 all of the time \u2013 to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weblog"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1875\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}