Getting People to Do the Right Thing
Every aspect of product development can be done better or worse. That includes being a team player, writing code, communicating requirements, testing functionality...you name it. But how do you ensure that people do the best thing? And, can you even do that? That is, can you somehow force good practice? And what can you expect to happen by doing so?
Let’s examine the thorny topic of forcing desirable behavior on people...
What doesn’t seem to work
About half the companies I visit have a rule: Everything in a team’s iteration must be a user story. Furthermore, its heading must be expressed in this template:
“As a someone (e.g. Sales Manager) I would like to be able to something (e.g. see weekly data on product returns) so that I can do something (e.g., educate engineering to better prioritize fixes).”
The idea is well-intended: cover the who, what and why. This approach has helped produce some good stories; other times, people write bizarre, confusing or unhelpful titles. Examples include “As a Scrum team I want a build so that I can deploy” and “As a team member I want to have this story as a placeholder for abnormal conditions found during testing of X.”
A 2008 article titled “Object Calisthenics” offered a method for improving developers’ OOP (object-oriented programming) skills
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A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done. - Fred Allen |