This is a made-up and (hopefully) fun version of a conversation between God who is new to Agile and his Team– to illustrate a few agile principles. Enjoy!

1. If God Had an Agile Team When Creating a Human BeingAgile Product Management for Recovering Waterfallers Dmitry Grenader dgrenader@yahoo.comDecember, 2009

2. Warning / Disclaimer This is a made-up and (hopefully) fun version of a conversation between God who is new to Agile and his Team– to illustrate a few agile principles A few of my colleagues found it funny, so I decided to post… Do not judge too harshly

3. God (to his team) Build an ear, so a human being can hear And make it look like this And attach it to the head

4. Team (to God) NO! NO! NO! You gave us a spec, and defined problem and the solution. Over-specification. Give us instead aSTORY!

5. God I see User Story 1: Human being wants to have an ear so s/he can hear Details: picture of the outer ear and inner ear Acceptance Criteria: ear like the one in the pic, and ability to hear

6. Team Better. Thanks, God. But this is what we call an EPIC! Ear is complex and multifaceted. How would your human being use it? At a party or a business meeting or at home? And how often? Does it need to work all the time? Is it synchronous or asynchronous? Also, you OVERSPECIFIED it. Why don’t you just define what ability you want the human being to have We cannot estimate, and if you want level of effort, you need to do more discovery, and detail and breakdown your epic. Plus – you have a deadline (6 days), and we may not be able to do do it all by then, so we will need to layer it

7. God Ah… OK! I think I am getting it. Let me create another story: User Story 1*: Human being wants the ability to process information that comes as sound

8. Team We are finally getting somewhere. We can understand this and we can start visualizing solutions How is this? We build a recording thingy that human being carries around At night when they come home, they plug in the recording device into a voice-recognition unit that converts it to printed text, and human being can read it Assumption: human being has eyes and can read Would this be acceptable as a solution?

9. God No! That is insane! I will send you to Hades eternally! They need to hear, you fools – like, you know right away – so they can respond immediately if needed (in case they hear a roar of a saber-toothed tiger) So waiting until the end of the day makes humans ineffective at life They need to hear in “real time”

10. Team God!!! You never told us about the real-time aspect of this need. We need to include it in the details and the acceptance criteria, as it clearly guides the solution in a particular direction and will impact the complexity We are now ready to estimate, we think it is 8 points, and broken to tasks looks like this Dev: 30 hours QA: 20 hours User Exp: 4 hours

11. God With User Experience hours so low… can I just understand what you have in mind… What will this ear look like?

12. Team Well with the aggressive deadline we want to layer functionality and focus on the functional aspects (so they can hear!), not on the nice to have look’n’feel So we were thinking of a Hole in the Head Then in future iterations we can do some usability, and change the look. Gold-plating is not what we should be doing with a new organ like this! Don’t you have other organs you want us to build for this human?

13. God …. You are right. There are more organs. But a hole in the head, guys… Is that all we can do?

14. Team Come on, God. Be agile! You are not even sure a human being will need an ear, admit it? How many prototypes have you built in this garden of Eden of yours? Just two, eh? Let’s start with a nice functional hole in the head, do some research in the field, and then in future iterations we will make it better Besides you might find humans do not even want ears!

15. God Amen