The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition

Blind Spot Discovery

AUDIENCE

Testers, Whole Team

We discover the gaps in our thinking.

Fluent Delivering teams are very good at building quality into their code, as you saw in the previous practice. But nobody’s perfect, and teams have blind spots. Blind spot discovery is a way of finding those gaps.

To find blind spots, look at the assumptions your team makes, and consider the pressures and constraints team members are under. Imagine what risks the team might be facing and what team members might falsely believe to be true. Make a hypothesis about the blind spots that could occur as a result and investigate to see if your guess is right. Testers tend to be particularly good at this.

When you find a blind spot, don’t just fix the problem you found. Fix the gap. Think about how your approach to development allowed the bug to occur, then change your approach to prevent that category of bugs from happening again, as described in “Prevent systemic errors”.

Validated Learning

When people think about bugs, they often think about logic errors, UI errors, or production outages. But the blind spot I see most often is more fundamental, and more subtle.

More than anything else, teams build the wrong thing. To use Lean Startup terminology, they lack product-market fit. I think this happens because so many teams think of their job as building the product they were told to build. They act as obedient order-takers: a software factory designed to ingest stories in one end and plop software ...