Retrospectives: You live, you learn

January 23, 2008 by cspag

I recently came across a quote from one of my favorite authors, Pearl S. Buck. She said:

“One faces the future with one's past.”

Short, sweet and to the point. The quote really struck a chord with me because our development team recently learned this lesson the agile way. Last Friday, we completed the second iteration of an enterprise GIS development project and conducted a sprint review with our client. To our dismay, we seemed to have been off the mark in terms of what the client was expecting. The client seemed disappointed and our team was as well.

After the review, we conducted a team retrospective and the main topic was "Why did we miss the mark so badly?". It was the right question to ask and sparked a very open discussion. We discovered that we had not adequately uncovered the business cases behind the user stories, that we had a communications gap with our client, and that we didn't do a thorough review of the client's existing application. We then asked the question "What do we do to fix this?". We decided that at the following sprint planning session, we would discuss the user stories with our client again. We decided to hit the problem head on and increase our communications with the client and thoroughly review the existing application.

On Tuesday, we held our scheduled sprint planning session with the client. We gave our apologies for our missteps, emphasized the value of agile for helping catch this issue quickly and initiated a great, open, and collaborative planning session. To our pleasure, the client had identified the same set of issues as our development team had and came prepared to give a demo of the existing application. They were also very patient answering the questions our developers had about the user stories. In the end, everyone walked away from the sprint planning meeting feeling that we were back on track.

We also walked away with the feeling that our agile practices had done their job. They helped us raise any dysfunction to a visible level very quickly, and also allowed us to resolve those issues very quickly. If we had been developing in a traditional waterfall fashion, we could have been 6 months into development along the wrong track before anyone realized there was a problem...and by then it would have been too late. We would have had angry clients, a discouraged development team, and a failing project. Instead, we face our future with the full understanding of our past mistakes, a satisfied client, and a motivated development team. You live, you learn...

Permalink