Root cause analysis is one of my favorite XP practices. Because it's so simple and so powerful at the same time. That said I very rarely use it. Or do I? It turned out that I might use it without knowing it, as the below described quick series of questions and conclusions sure do look like a root cause analysis after all.
We had the iteration demo yesterday morning and the very first story simply was not working. At all. We thought it was but it wasn't. We took our loss of 2 story points in stride and moved on with the demo, then with the retro and then the planning, then the team started to work on the tasks. In the evening when I got out of a long meeting the red bug-card was still on the board with a red magnet on it while many new tasks were already completed, one full story even. I knew something was fundamentally wrong I just didn't know what.
As luck would have it, ten minutes later I called my mentor/business partner and told him how much we need to work on those values were just discussing in that long meeting
because in our earlier projects people had to be stopped from debugging code during the demo.
So then we started to discuss how did we get here.
Why did nobody care this time?
The level of engagement/involvement of team members is very, very low.
(Why?)
The project scope is changing every week. Stories, epics get dropped, new ones spring to life. It's unclear what percentage of the project we have completed, and what is still to go.
(Why?)
The release plan became a living document in the extreme: due to unexpectedly low velocity and ever changing requirements and underestimated stories, the scope was negotiated and re-negotiated over and over in the name of agility.
(Why)
Changing scope, estimating new stories on the fly seemed like the obvious solution when the estimates turned out be way off.
(Why)
Not the whole team was involved in the release planning. This is also the reason of their lack of engagement.
The 'why's are in parenthesis because we didn't actually ask them. We were just discussing the important aspects of the past couple of months.
How we are planning to turn all this around is the subject of the upcoming posts.
Read full post...
