All process is a tradeoff. The tradeoff is additional
work that results in additional visibility into the
project. If having notecards works for you, then fine.
However, in my encounters consulting I need a little
more visibility and accountability than notecards. For
example, before we had formal signoff and versioned
requirements, the client would attempt to sneak things
in they forgot (by editing the requirements and saying,
oh you had an old version). That's fine, except that we
were not given schedule time if we forgot it. If they
forgot it, then we got schedule time. The visibility
(everyone can see the status of the requirements) and
accountability (who said what was ok, and when it was
done by whom) has turned the project from going nowhere
to being very nearly complete.
Thanks for the feedback, Darrell, Jeff.
Much appreciated.
Hi,
I am TargetProcess lead and I will share some ideas
here.
By the way, Darrell have posted great thoughts.
This is one of the many reasons to create tools for XP
support.
Yes, I think that whiteboards are great, CRC are cool
and comfortable to work with, stand-up meetings are very
good indeed and so on. I believe that developers should
use CRC cards instead any other tools if that possible.
But there are some reasons to use tool like
Targetprocess:
1. Project tracking support. Burn Down on the wall is a
great thing, but you have to create it manually and
share information with project stakeholders.
2. Remote teams support. Sure, true XP can't be adopted
by remote teams, but even some practices may improve
team efficiency.
3. Customers interaction. While XP require onsite
customer, it is not always possible (in fact, I never
have onsite customer. That's a reality...)
4. Project practices integration. This is the main point
of mine. TargetProcess in it current state could not
bring much power to the team. Planning and Tracking are
about to nothing, since there are plenty much tools
exactly like TP. However, in the near future we are
going to provide integrated solution, that will
integrate different practiced such as bugtracking,
acceptance tests and so on in an agile manner e.g.
simply, effective, adoptable. This is the main goal of
the TargetProcess project.
We've just started :)
Michael. Thanks for elaborating. I can see some value in
the things mentioned here, but in your own words, right
now the tool is not as helpful as it could be in the
future. I look forward to seeing how it comes along...,