Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick

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Thu, 30 Jun 2005

Hard Deadlines

A month ago, I made a consulting trip. I recommended that the client do the usual Agile thing: have shippable code with new features every few weeks, break each of those releases into stories with user-visible results, make the stories more granular than seems possible, make tasks within a story short with sharp end-points, etc.

Yesterday, I asked how it was going. I got this in reply (reprinted with permission):

I was actually really fortunate. Shortly after you were here, my wife's pregnancy came to full term. As such, I had to think of life in terms of 2-3 hour slices in case she called to tell me she was in labor. That made it much easier to have the discipline to break a project into smaller chunks.

So here's my new Agile training regimen:

• The team must be composed of people who plan on having a child soon.

• All pregnancies must commence roughly seven months before the project is to start. Remember: on Agile teams, it's not someone's job, it's everyone's job.

• I do not require the use of drugs to keep the mother-to-be on the edge of labor until I judge that she or her partner (whichever is the programmer) really gets the idea of short tasks. As a liberal, I don't believe family life should be subordinated to the needs of the corporation.

It's odd, with innovative ideas like this, that I don't get more business.

## Posted at 09:16 in category /agile [permalink] [top]