Agile lessons learned #11 : Harry the crap collector

Vince came back home today only to be greeted by firetrucks and the local fire marshal. He was quickly relieved to learn that his brand new condo was not on fire. Unfortunately, for his neighbor Harry, the fire marshal was there expelling him from his own home until he got his mess together.

When Vince found Harry he was in a terrible state of mind. You see, 78 years old Harry had been collecting all the newspapers he could get his hands on ever since his wife had died at 52. 26 years of newspaper stacked up against the walls was too much and a suspicious neighbor made a phone call to the local fire department before Harry would turn his home into the biggest BBQ the city had ever seen. Harry had just lost his entire collection.

All this turmoil shook up Vince inside. When he came back to work Monday, he started thinking about all the mess that was accumulating in his own project.

He made the following list of all that was accumulating around him :
- The backlog had tons of duplicate bugs
- A ton of stories were planned for but not estimated
- The main domain classes of the application were starting to have more responsibilities than the companies C.E.O.
- Some of the controllers were getting bloated
- The code produced by the interns had not been peer reviewed for weeks
- The users documentation was dated by two revisions

….

Vince then went to see his Product Owner and told him about the issue. He was dumbfounded to learn this at first, but after a long discussion, he brought the team together, talked about what was most urgent and how much dealing with each issue would cost.

He then added the elements with the best return on the investment at the top of the backlog and chipped in where he could to help the team address these issues. Within a few months, the situation was very promising and the team was now bringing up issues all the time without the need for them to accumulate.

A year later, most of his fellow Product Owners and their teams were engulfed in crap that had accumulated sprint after sprint. Always planning to fix it later,they never ever did.

Meanwhile this team just glided through the problems at a steady pace and it seemed nothing could stop them in their tracks. For the team members, the project just felt like a train anybody would love to embark on. Their biggest pride, was that it was their own.

-Nicholas Lemay