I’ve discovered it’s hard to reflect and write on something that’s going on while doing that thing at the same time. I’m working on a big project to build a digital media warehouse covering decades of material. It’s a fascinating project with lots of talented people working to scale Agile and deliver incrementally production tools with demonstrateable advantages to the way new programmes are edited.
My job, as a technical analyst, is to quality control the stories arriving from the requirements team. The ‘stories’ themselves are held as issues in Jira. This illustrates the level at which the stories are broken down, as they are meant to be groomed to fit a single iteration, where an iteration is only one week. So, the stories are low level, and don’t represent business value in themselves. The stories are decomposed from higher user stories, but the link to the complete user stories has not been maintained. My job is to try and make sense of the existing backlog and try to map iteration stories onto the parent story. The other thing I’m tasked with, the over-riding priority, is to get enough stories into the sprint planning meeting to ensure the programmers are fully occupied; the aim being to have visibility over a four week period of upcoming work.
This is a challenging task, and why I’ve been too pre-occupied to write. I know that is no excuse, if somebody writes on a blog, they need to keep it up, or people will lose interest. This is a different style of blog then, a kind of ‘considered’ blog where I need more time to write anything I really want to say. So it’s a ‘clog. That’s it – I’ve become a clogger! After all people in clogs can’t run very fast (I don’t think…)
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