Hands-On Software Engineering with Golang

Elephant carpaccio – how to iterate even faster!

This peculiarly-named technique owes its existence to an exercise invented by Dr. Alistair Cockburn. The purpose of this exercise is to help people (engineers and non-engineers alike) to practice and learn how they can split complex story cards (the elephant) into very thin vertical slices that teams can oftentimes tackle in parallel.

It may strike you as odd but the slice size that I have found most helpful in projects that I have been involved with in the past is nothing more than a single day's worth of work. The rationale of the one-day split is to ship (behind a feature flag) small parts of the total work every single day, an approach that is congruent with the ship fast motto advocated ...