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How I jump to my conclusions
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At least one hundred times the last few years, while introducing collegues and clients to our processes, the infamous "Where are the templates?"-question popped up. For some reason lots of people think using a process is mostly filling in the templates. And who is to blame them, as the templates that are offered nowadays contain a lot of process knowledge inside the template. I suppose you all have seen the blue printed guidance (InfoBlue) in RUP templates. At my former company, we extended the RUP process website to include the companies best practices and to tweak the processes to the companies preferred toolset (not being the Rational toolset). We proudly presented the result to the company and asked their opinion. The (by far) number one remark was that they missed a way to quickly get to the templates. In my opinion, as all future users of the process would be given extensive training, the need for this quick access to the templates would quickly be gone. After the course everybody would be able to find the artifacts and accompanying templates themselves and would know when and how to use them. In my opinion, adding the quick access to the templates would do more harm than be helpful, as it would encourage people to jump to the templates and use them without thinking. I considered easy access to templates to be harmful, but was alone in my opinion. At least I thought I was. I'm happy to find out I have at least Joel Spolsky (scroll to the end of his article), Ivar Jacobson and Kurt Bitner on my side. I also found out that the catchy title of my blogpost was not as original as I thought. "Templates considered harmful" is good for 155 hits on Google.
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As part of an IBM Rational training on Requirements Management which I regularly deliver at Info Support, is an exercise aimed at prioritizing a set of requirements. In that exercise, students are asked to prioritize a set of requirements giving a set of requirements attributes (all valued High, Medium or Low): - Customer priority
- Risk
- Effort
- Stability
Arguements for prioritizing given by the students are along the lines of: - All other attributes being equal, requirements with High Customer priority are done first,
- All other attributes being equal, requirements with High Risk are done first,
- All other attributes being equal, requirements with Low Effort are done first,
- All other attributes being equal, requirements with Stability High are done first,
The whole issue to be discussed in the exersise is: what is considered most important? Customer priority, or Risk, or Effort, or Stability?
All student groups score differently for different requirements, so at the end of the exercise we discuss the different outcomes.
I suggest the students to do exactly the same with their stakeholders in their projects and follow the next steps: - During this discussion in the project, first look for commonalities: which requirements are top priority for all stakeholders?
These requirements are set aside one by one, having the effect that one requirement at a time, the agreement between stakeholders on a significant part of the prioritation becomes apparent. - Next pick requirements that were given high priority by some stakeholders, and low by others. For each of these requirements, ask the individual stakeholders to clarify their choice. Very often, when stakeholders look again at their priorities, they find out they made a mistake, acknowledge it and agree on giving this requirement a high priority.
- Sometimes stakeholders have very good reasons to assign a different priority, because they know something the other stakeholders don't know.
It is interesting of cource to bring this knowledge into the discussion. If the reasoning is sound, other stakeholders will most of the time be willing to adjust their priorities. This results in the stakeholders as a team assigning new priorities. - After most of the requirements are assigned their priorities, some are left. As all stakeholders see now how far they have come already in harmony with the other stakeholders, they are already bought in into the until now assigned priorities. This makes it extremely difficult for them to make a real issue on discussing the priorities of the remaining requirements.
The above procedure is extremely interesting for the project lead, as she only has to facilitate this meeting and can leave the arguing for the participating stakeholders. Now that is a much better situation than (as a project lead) coming up with your own suggested prioritation which you have to defend against all other stakeholders! Sometimes life is not as easy as described above. In projects continuously reporting on earned value, project leads might be tempted to try something else. Scott Sehlhorst, a long time blogger whose blog at Tyner Blain I'm following for years now, recently wrote about Plan Your Next Sprint By ROI: Part 1. Basically, in this post Scott devided the Value of requirements by their Cost to give the Return on Investment. Seemingly an other fantastic way to do your planning, but their were some flaws. Luke Hohman stated that "Prioritizing a Product Backlog for ROI is a fool’s errand". The whole discussion between Scott and Luke is very educating, I suggest you all read it and learn from it!
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People often ask me why you would need a modeling tool to do the requirements job. They often argue that requirements is mostly text, so using a wordprocessor would do the job. And indeed, when you look at a RUP Vision document, or examine RUP Use Case specifications, 98% of the content is text. Requirements are often written in the form of "The System shall ...", and writing those statements certainly has a place when you need formal requirements, but they are difficult to express user requirements effectively. Sometimes some pictures are added, but pictures can easily be constructed using a drawing tool like Powerpoint or Visio. The pictures you see in requirements documents indeed most of the time look rather simple, but in my humble opinion simple pictures are the most difficult ones to come to. Often they are a sign that the analyst really understood the domain and found a way to organize the requirements in simple pictures to make them understandable. Sometimes I see intrigueing pictures made by collegue analist who made it their personal goal to include as much includes and extends in their Use-Case diagrams as they could possibly think of. Personally, I don't like those diagrams, as they are difficult to explain and often obscure the true requirements of the system.to be built. In Why Do We Model Software Requirements? at Requirements Defined, three reasons for modeling are listed: - Requirements Models Allow Us to Organize Our Data in Multiple Ways.
- Models Help Us to See Things That Might Be Missing.
- Models Create a Visual Representation of What’s Expected.
Models are not just fancy drawings, they are an effective and powerful tool. Especially when you create models in collaborative workshops together with your business stakeholders, models are a quick way to articulate requirements, reveal missing and conflicting requirements and pinpoint the real needs of your stakeholders. A nice example of such a model is the context diagram from Ellen Gottesdiener's article. Another good example is a Use-Case model created in a Use-Case modeling workshop. A good introduction to this technique can be found in chapter 5 of Use Case Modeling book by Kurt Bittner and Ian Spence. The nice thing about using a modeling tool, is that it allows you to look at the requirements from different viewpoints. You can reorganize and restructure the model created with your stakeholders, adding detail where necessary, while keeping the relation with the original model. While looking at the requirements from different viewpoints, missing things are easily identified, resulting in better requirements.
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After two years and three months I'm happy to announce that I'm back at Info Support again. In those two years I did some interesting work at Getronics on their Getronics Delivery Process (a RUP based Software Factory), worked on several project for the Dutch Taxservice, participated in several CMMI appraisals and was given the opportunity to take a close look at Getronics Indian development partner Mindtree. My one week visit to their office at Bangalore was a real eye-opener for me and was the beginning of several close personal relationships. When I left Info Support some two years ago, the option to return was explicitly kept open and I'm glad to be back as a member of the Info Support Professional Development Center. My first two weeks are interesting from the start. I participated as a scribe in a SCAMPI-C CMMI level 3 Assesment supporting the Lead Appraiser Simon Porro from SPI Partners. Next job is working together with Ivar Jacobson International on process improvement using EssUp. I wil pick up blogging and jumping to conclusions right now. Hope to see you all back at this blog. Harry Nieboer
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I moved my new blog to http://hij2mc.wordpress.com/.
(hij2mc = how I jump to my conclusions, I continue the name of the blog)
I used Blogger some time but changed to Wordpress as it offers better ways to organize your content.
The RSS Feed for my blog is:
https://hij2mc.wordpress.com/feed
On some readers, like RSS Bandit, you have to uncheck the option "autodiscover and verify the feed" when you add a description.
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This night I set up a new weblog, How I jump to my conclusions with Blogger at Blogspot.com, since I'm switching from my current employer Infosupport to Getronics PinkRoccade. Unfortunately, Getronics apparently does not (yet?) have a company blogsite.
I really enjoyed blogging at Infosupport and heard that my (mostly) non-technical posts were a nice supplement to the more technical posts of my Infosupport collegues.
My collegue Richard Zaat will be posting soon (I arranged for his blog to be created) and I hope he will become a worthy continuator.
As you can see on my new weblog, I kept the pay-off about “jumping to conclusions.“
I migrated an old post on UML2 tools (by hand, to see how that works) and posted a new one on the full feedback effects.
Hints on migrating posts are welcome!
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This item (an invitation for a presentation) is in Dutch
Dinsdag 9 mei a.s. vindt de 22e lezingenavond van NINJA
plaats. De sprekers van die avond zijn Merijn Vogel en Miek Gieben.
(zie ook overzicht eerdere lezingen)
Het verhaal van Merijn Vogel heeft als titel
"De geur van anonimiteit, Tor, the onion router network“
Het is een feit dat onze vrijheid op internet steeds meer wordt
beperkt. Het surfgedrag wordt bijgehouden, google bewaart de
zoekqueries, en meer instanties proberen de gebruikers in de
gaten te houden. Tor poogt om de anonimiteit van de
internetgebruikers te vergroten. In zijn lezing zal Merijn
op de geschiedenis, opzet en gebruik (bv. in je browser) van
Tor ingaan.
Miek Gieben (NLnet Labs) zal een verhaal vertellen over de transitie
van DNS (Domain Name System) naar DNSSEC (DNS Security Extensions).
Hij zal hierbij eerst ingaan op een stukje geschiedenis om daarna
de nieuwe inzichten met DNSSEC te behandelen.
Zoals gebruikelijk begint de avond om 20u00 in de benedenzaal van cafe De Fiets,
Grotestraat 8, 6511 VD Nijmegen.
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On a close-up view, you can see on the left face, an angry man and on the right face, a woman with a neutral facial emotion.
But further back (walk some 5 meters back from your computer monitor), the faces change expression and even genders! If you squint, blink, or defocus, an angry man should substitute for the face of the woman and the left angry face should not be angry anymore.
(Tip from Marike)
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In The Deadline, Tom DeMarco tells stories to pass on wisdom, like this one:
Four essentials of good management:
· Get the right people.
· Match them to the right jobs.
· Keep them motivated
· Help their teams to jell and stay jelled
(All the rest is Administrivia)
(for Dutch readers: to jell = vorm geven, vorm krijgen)
Excerpts from The Deadline can be found on the weblog of Wayne Allen
The preface and chapter one and an interview with Tom DeMarco are on-line at www.systemssguild.com/Site/TDM/Deadline.pdf. Take a look.
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Who wants to know what Harry Nieboer, Senior Systems Analist, Member of the Professional Development Center at Info Support, Teacher and Weblogger does on a day-to-day basis?
Richard Zaat does!
Richard has been appointed as my follow up at InfoSupport, and currently I'm transferring all kinds of knowledge to him. We found it is difficult to transfer almost 20 years of experience.
So we talk about the questions I get during courses, the questions I answer on forums, how I deal with different kinds of students (including wanna-be-guru's, talkers and sleepers), the problems I encountered in introducing RUP and what I would change in RUP.
Tough questions though. Time for some Donts, Dos and Maybes links:
What I Learned About Project Development
What I've learned from failure
Richard will run his own blog here soon at blogs.infosupport.com/richardz
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Last two months I did not post as much as you would expect me to. I had two reasons for that.
First reason is that my 77 year old mother broke her hip again. She had to go to the hospital and since it is the second time in two years she broke the same hip and operating it not without danger at that age, the doctors decided on a conservative way of dealing with it: let my mother use it as less as possible and see if it gets healed in three months. So now my mother moved from the hospital to the "Zonnehuis" for controlled revalidation. Since both the hospital as the Zonnehuis are three quarters away from where I'm living in Nijmegen, Holland, visiting my mother takes a lot of time.
Second reason is that, after almost twelf years working at InfoSupport, I decided to leave the company, put my resume on Monsterboard and talked to several interested companies. I had the most interesting conversations with Alain and Nico at Getronics, so I decided that Getronics would be the place to be for the next twelf years. As you can imagine, looking outside of InfoSupport also took a lot of my time. I planned on making the move half of June, so by that time I need another place for my blog. As Getronics currently does not have her own blogsite, any suggestions are welcome.
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Recently he added some more presentation tips, including the wishy-washy one:
I liked his tip on dealing with people who start side-conversations during your talk (just read the post!) and agreed on several other tips, including the one on using presentation aids people can hold and feel.
On a presentation for a larger audience I handed out red and green paper cards that people could use to vote in favor or against suggested solutions. It really became an interactive presentation.
By the way, I kind of felt what Marcus meant with "wishy-washy" even though I'm totally unable to give it a decent Dutch translation.
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INXS Song Lyrics
Wishy Washy
(From the album "INXS")
I got a place with a view
You can see the cars
As they travel down the freeway
To clubs and bars
There's a woman downstairs
With matt-grey hair
And she smiles when she tells me
There's no room for me here
They've got it in the city
They've got it in the country
But here in the suburbs
It's all so wishy-washy
It's all so wishy-washy
I got another place
This time with a fireplace
And a woman can come around
Write poetry and feel safe
I said it's good for me now
But I'm not being fed
I said it's good for me now
But I'm not being fed
You can even download it as a ringtone ...
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A nice, LEGO-illustrated story on how following the right course saved Dobby's life.
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