Agile Attitudes- Communication
Ron Morsicato
morsicato at comcast.net
Thu Jun 24 19:54:30 EDT 2004
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Agile Attitudes
Volume 1, Issue 5 June 24, 2004
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Nancy V. and Ron Morsicato will be speaking at the XP Agile Universe
Conference, and Embedded Systems Conference. See below for details.
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Communication
by Ron Morsicato and Nancy V.
"No matter what you have to say...people gonna listen in their
own way" - Mose Allison
Probably the most difficult agile principle to adhere to is
communication. Communication is a 2-way street. Feedback is just
as important as what you send out - probably more so. Just as we
agile practitioners value test results over analysis, we value
feedback and listening as the chief way to know we are communicating
accurately with others. Because people will interpret things in
their own way, we must do more than simply write it once.
Recognizing this, agile software developers use a number of
communication artifacts to ensure that communication is effective
and accurate. Communication artifacts are facilitators in improving
the communication between people. They open up a channel for
communication that you might not otherwise have simply due to
personality, language, distance, etc.
The most ubiquitous communication artifact is formal documentation.
Such documentation has a place, a very important place for a very good
reason - it's persistent. Unfortunately, it lacks two other character-
istics that are important to agile developers: it is not readily
changeable, and there is no feedback between its author and a
particular reader. If you adopt a waterfall approach, you need to
capture the prior stage in a persistent medium that can be referred to.
Formal documents become the glue between stages because you need
persistence. In agile development, you begin an iteration with
requirements selection and end with, in a period of a few weeks or even
days, deployable code. You can take advantage of the fact that
persistence is not necessary over a short period of time and can adopt
communication artifacts that are changeable and provide feedback.
Agile practitioners are pragmatic. They choose communication
artifacts that have a given usefulness at a particular time, and
abandon the artifact when the artifact no longer serves its purpose.
In an agile environment you'll find many communication artifacts -
progress charts, test results, UML diagrams, checklists, and so on.
They appear on the most convenient media: whiteboards, sticky notes
(large and small), photocopies of notebook pages and, of course,
computer generated printouts. There are formal documents too, when
persistence is called for, as when a project is terminated and
information needs to be provided for future activity, like
maintenance or continued development by another team.
The value of communication is more than a record of decisions.
It is a mechanism for making software better, more fit for use as
it matures.
To agile developers, there is no better way to communicate than to
jointly observe the results of tests!
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Public Appearances
Nancy Van Schooenderwoert is currently presenting a paper "Taming
the Embedded Tiger: Agile Test Techniques for Embedded Software"
at the Agile Development Conference in Salt Lake City, June
22 - 26, 2004. See
http://www.agiledevelopmentconference.com/schedule/expreports.html
Ron Morsicato and Nancy V. will speak at XP/Agile Universe Conference
in Calgary, Alberta, Canada; August 15 - 18, 2004
Agile Methods for Safety-Critical Software Development. See
http://www.agileuniverse.com/schedule/index
Nancy Van Schooenderwoert will present on "Embedded Extreme Programming
Experience Report and Clinic" in Boston, September 13 - 16, 2004
See http://www.esconline.com/boston/
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