Part 1: Collectively clarify what happens on projects now (on projects that do not use stories)

It was a highly interactive session and i first asked attendees to collectively draw on a whiteboard the project process as they saw it, with all of the project’s actors, products and interactions.

What was drawn resembled a kind of mashup of a UML activity diagram with swim lanes & a gantt chart. It showed what the individual actors in the process did and when, and who fed into who in the process.

Part 2: Clarify what documents are written and the associated risks and costs

When the whiteboard was complete, I asked the attendees to consider a number of things:

1. At what points during the process are documents produced and by who?
2. Of those documents produced, which are directly focused on the business and user requirements?
3. Of the many producers of those documents, which of these producers had their focus on the business and user requirements?
4. Of the many documents produced, which were open to interpretation and translation?
5. What are the perceived risks of having so many documents and periods of documentation translation?

When this work was complete, a few points became clear to the group:

1. The project team, as defined on the whiteboard, was greatly separated into areas of expertise and each was concerned about their area of expertise
2. Interactions between actors were mostly through written documents
3. Few actors following this project process retained a direct focus on the business and end user requirements
4. A lot of documentation was being written and much of it was being duplicated, at times to protect actors within the process
5. Vast amounts of document interpretation and translation was going on to produce each document

Part 3: Consider stories

After this part of the session was complete, i gave some examples of the wonderfully simple story DSL and then suggested that many of these documents could be replaced by stories and scenarios:

1. I explained that stories can be used to clarify both high-level requirements and detailed solution definitions. I described how stories can be expanded through the use of scenarios.
2. I described how everyone on the project, including the client, can understand the wonderfully simple DSL and contribute to the bank of stories.
3. I then came in with the ace Stories can be used to drive automated browser tests! Man, they fell off their seats at the point!

It was an awesome session. A lot was discussed and understood.

What is a DSL?

It got me all excited so i’ve started (slowly, i’ll admit) to write my own DSL in Ruby. I’ll post how i get on.