The Async-First Playbook: Remote Collaboration Techniques for Agile Software Teams

19

Communicate Tech and Functional Design

Software development is a costly business. That’s why we obsess over ways to reduce risk and cognitive load. Some examples are smaller requirements through user stories, pair programming, simple design, and unit testing. While it helps to break a problem into small, constituent parts, it’s important to understand the big picture of where these small pieces fit.

A lack of shared understanding at the delivery stage can be chaotic, and the chaos increases exponentially with team size. In Chapter 10, we referred to the parable of blind people and the elephant. It’s a metaphor for how different people with incomplete information can perceive the same thing differently.

The closer a piece of work is to development, ...