[clue-talk] L

[Jeff Cann]

Jed S. Baer wrote:
> Ooooh, synchronicity!
>
> Anyone familiar with the "Gilb" approach: http://www.gilb.com/
>   

Jed,

Cool links with spot-on analysis.  Requirements gathering is painful for 
large projects.  Unfortunately, I am seeing a resurgence toward this 
style [vs  XP] as a number of off-shore firms want to offer fixed-bid 
contracts so anything missed / assumed / not written down during the 
inception and analysis phases gets sent into change control processes - 
meaning the contractor has to agree to the change [and eat profit].

One project in particular is going rather well because of the 
requirements analysis.  Any use cases not identified are out of the 
project per contract.  In one sense, it's liberating because we know 
what is supposed to be in the first release.  It's also liberating 
because the change control process is preventing product managers from 
throwing in things at the last moment and this often derails the project 
just as much as if requirements were missed.

I've always held the contention that the reason IT requirements are so 
hard to pin down and frequently change is because software is so 
intangible, compared to building a sofa or car.  If you build a 
prototype sofa, the product guys can sit on it before you ship it to the 
factory for production.  Sadly, it doesn't seem to work exactly the same 
way in IT. 

But, I can say that the most successful projects I have worked on have 
an actual working prototype as the first deliverable.  This is often a 
separate contract.  We show it to the business types and *then* write a 
second contract to build out the first release.  Not XP by any means, 
but my company doesn't like the word 'extreme' unless it's used in the 
sentence like, 'We are extremely happy with our annual return.' :)

I'll check out the glib.com items.  For some XP projects, we use eXtreme 
Planner - not open source, but runs on open source infrastructure 
[MySQL, tomcat].

Also, I didn't go into it the other night as it was slightly off-topic.  
My 'Project Management Professional' PMP certification is from the 
Project Management Institute [http://www.pmi.org/].  They have an active 
Mile High Chapter at http://www.pmimilehi.org/.  The Mile High chapter 
has a lot of training sessions and some other interesting 
opportunities.  Anyone can join either PMI and/or PMI Mile High without 
being a PMP.

Jeff