Synopsis
This book is a collection of essays by multiple authors, focusing how to use Agile methods in globally distributed teams.
In particular, "Chapter 4 – Tailoring Agility: Promiscuous Pair Story Authoring and Value Calculation" was contributed by Steve Tendon and illustrates a few of the practices used in the TameFlow Approach when seeking to create Unity of Purpose and build a Community of Trust between stakeholders that have diverging interests.
The chapter describes an initiative of a multi-national software organization involving several business units in eight different countries. The business decided to try an Agile approach after two previous failed attempts with traditional approaches. The case is about implementing agility in requirements gathering, with estimation and planning processes, in a global and international setting. At the outset there was a lot of distrust and conflict between the various country representatives and stakeholders. The Agile approach was inspired by XP and tailored to meet the particular situation.
Two innovations were critical. The first innovation was promiscuous pair story authoring, where user stories were written by two people (similarly to pair programming). The pairing changed very frequently – as often as every 15 minutes – to achieve representation of diverse and often conflicting perspectives and needs.
The second innovation was about the assessment of an economic value (and not the cost) which was attributed to individual User Stories. Continuous recalculation of the financial value of the User Stories allowed to appraise the project’s financial return.
The transitioning to Agility in the broader international context allowed the team members to reach unanimity of decisions making, vision, purpose and execution.