The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition

Team Room

AUDIENCE

Whole Team, Coaches

We collaborate rapidly and effectively.

THE REST OF THE STORY

You’re a programmer working on a story for your team, and you need a clarification on one of the requirements. You fire off an email to your domain expert, Lynn, then take a break to stretch your legs and get some coffee.

When you get back, Lynn still hasn’t responded, so you check out a few developer blogs you’ve been meaning to read. Half an hour later, your inbox chimes. Lynn’s responded.

Oops—it looks like Lynn misunderstood your message and answered the wrong question. You send another query, but you really can’t afford to wait any longer. You take your best guess at the answer and get back to work.

A day later, after exchanging a few more emails, you’ve hashed out the correct answer with Lynn. It wasn’t exactly what you thought, but you were pretty close. You go back and fix your code. While you’re in there, you realize there’s an edge case that nobody’s handled yet.

You could bug Lynn for the answer, but this is a very obscure case. It’s probably never going to happen in the field. Besides, Lynn’s very busy, and you promised you’d have this story done yesterday. (In fact, you were done yesterday, except for all these nitpicky little details.) You put in the most likely answer and move on, never realizing your guess was wrong.

When people can’t communicate directly, the effectiveness of their communication decreases, as “FACE-TO-FACE CONVERSATION” discusses. Misunderstandings ...