Beautiful Teams

Getting Started

Early on, we had the option to grow the team, but we decided to wait a month until we had an iteration under our belt. This way, we started the learning process, building our experience. In an iteration or two, we could coach the new people with a lot less guesswork.

Johnny, now our customer, Alan, and I wrote all our use cases on note cards. We wanted them to be easy to manipulate, just like Kent and Ron taught me at Immersion. At Immersion, I learned about user stories. To me, it seemed that a user story and the name of a use case were virtually equivalent. We considered changing our practice from use cases to user stories, but Johnny warned me, "If we decide to use user stories, we are going to have to write a justification to deviate from our standard process." Johnny also was concerned about the informality of user stories, and added, "Besides, I think that a user story is too light on detail. We would never get that approved."

We decided to continue using use cases; after all, it was an accepted BBS practice. We figured that we were going to push the envelope in many other areas, and uses cases seemed to be the right vehicle for us. We decided to pick our battles carefully and save our "get out of jail free" card for when we really needed it.

Just before we were to begin our first iteration, Johnny and I worked out the detailed steps for the core use cases. The core use cases had the highest value and the most architectural impact. We were ready to start iterating. ...