Agile Software Development
Автор: Alistair Cockburn /
CHAPTER 3. Communicating, Cooperating Teams Jumping Communication Gaps
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Часть 4
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Recalling these differences will serve us well when we consider methodologies for different projects, in the next chapters. Sticking Thoughts onto the Wall
On one project, the business analysts were frustrated because their work was growing more and more interdependent. They had, at that time, no way to hold their thoughts in clear view, and still, while planning their joint work.
We held a discussion about cooperative games, game markers, and stickiness. The people saw that creating a large, persistent and revisable display of their mental territory would help them do their work. One of them immediately posted a picture of the domain on the corridor wall as an staring picture. They worked on it over the weeks, experimenting with representations of their concerns that would allow them to view their mutual interdependence.
There is an interesting and relevant aside to mention about this group, having to do with expectations and citizenship. For reasons I won't go into, this team of business analysts thought they were supposed to work in the XP style, and that XP prohibited them from writing things down. Notice four things about their situation:
1. They misunderstood XP. It does not forbid people to write things down.
2. Their citizenship was so strong that rather than be poor citizens and write down their thoughts on the domain model, they chose to be good citizens and not write down their business model at all!
3. Actually, they knew that the project wouldn't succeed if they really wrote nothing down. So they each clandestinely wrote pseudo- use cases and other notes, which they passed to the programmers. They still did not create a domain model for themselves.
4. By writing down those notes, they subverted their own (mistaken) interpretation of the official process. I find this situation particularly interesting, because they were at war with themselves about whether to be good citizens and follow the process (at the expense of the project), or to be good citizens and protect the project (by violating the process).
What was significant in the end was that they posted an information radiator on the corridor wall, on which they scribbled individually and as a group, to give their thoughts and decisions some stickiness.
Jumping Gaps across Time
Finally, let us look at communicating across time, as another twist lies in store for us here.
We might expect, after the preceding discusion, that to preserve information across time, we would definitely drop reliance on face-to-face communication, and prefer paper, audiotape and videotape.
However, on long-running projects, it turns out to be critically important that the chief architect stays around! This person's contribution is to keep memories of key ideas alive across changing development teams. Once again, people are used as the archival medium!
Individual people transfer information effectively across both time and space. As an IBM Fellow put it
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