Monday, January 6, 2014

Agile National Standards

I'm working with some colleagues to develop a way to apply Agile methods to standards development for regional and national (and I eventually hope to apply this to International) programs.  It's an interesting process to consider.  We don't have code to test, only interoperability specifications which makes it harder. However, it seems that many of the same principles could apply.

Use Cases and transactions become epic stories and user stories.  Parts of the specification instead of the code become the items in the backlog to create and work through with the customer. Many of the same things apply, and there's even some testing to introduce into the matter (e.g., certification/conformance testing to the specifications).  As a side project, I'm thinking we should write a paper about our experiences once we see how this turns out.  It should be interesting.  I'd love to hear your thoughts about this.

   Keith

3 comments:

  1. I think it is a GREAT idea. My full comments are at https://plus.google.com/+TimothyWCook/posts/MjrYuxhYuQk

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  2. I think success will depend your Definition of Ready http://guide.agilealliance.org/guide/definition-of-ready.html and Definition of Done http://guide.agilealliance.org/guide/definition-of-done.html for your User Stories.
    Ideally they need to be generic across the entire project

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  3. For a jaundiced view of Agile methods, see The real reason most software fails by Thomas Beale. I don't endorse it, but some consideration of how his arguments can be evaded in this context might be worthwhile.

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