May 17, 2018 — Posted by Al Shalloway
The challenges I most frequently hear at team-level Agile are
- team members don't collaborate
- small stories can't be written
- requirements are unclear
- technical debt is high
Some symptoms of this are sprints spill over to the next &teams use mini-waterfalls in the sprint.
Wouldn't it be great if there were 1 method that would address all 4 of these at once? & could be taught in the same time & less cost as a CSM class? & once understood, would make it easy to understand how Scrum can help teams so ppl won't resist it? Turns out there is - it's ATDD. huh? How? I'll tell you.
1st, understand that ATDD is not about testing. It's about the customer, developer/tester discussing what needs to happen before any code is written & writing it down in such a way that the specification can be tested. What happens is:
- team members collaborate by doing ATDD
- small stories can be written if the Given (situation) When (event) Then (desired behavior) format is used
- requirements are clear & unambiguous because they are specified in a way that is testable
- the testability of code improves- which is highly correlated with high quality code When learning 2 things always start w/the 1 that will help you learn the other
Al Shalloway is the founder and CEO of Net Objectives. With 45 years of experience, Al is an industry thought leader in Lean, Kanban, product portfolio management, Scrum and agile design. He helps companies transition to Lean and Agile methods enterprise-wide as well teaches courses in these areas.