Support from the top

Good lunch with THUD today. RG and I (the two leads on the most important products) cornered him for a lunch. Out to fancy Italian. He must have been sweating bullets thinking we were going to quit or ask for big raises. Explained the process answered scenariors, talked about how it fixed certain concerns. I took the tack of showing how it is similar to what we're currently doing to reduce the perceived risk. Then we explained our increased throughput realized by better resource utilization.

Pushback came regarding documentation requirements (which we don't currently satisfy well) and big up-front analysis and design. The first one was easy. The process can be reflected on and adjusted for new best practices at the transition of each iteration (sprint). Technical doc requirements may be managed as an acceptance test to each feature or a separate backlog item. Up-front analysis is a little touche. That balance between good design up-front and too much design must be struck. The short term sale was to point out how big up-front analysis rarely catches all items and situations, yet also concede its necessity and give scenarios for doing it (sprint zero or 1, as a backlog item). It became a good segue into the XP practice of constant refactoring.

At the end of the day we had extracted a commitment from him to work within the process so long as we meet certain document and quality requirements. I fully expect to need to shoo him away from mid-cycle changes to our sprint backlog. Overall, the strategy of building support and consensus at the bottom, then presenting a unified front with an out containing a political win for THUD proved to be an excellent strategy. All that's left now is to deliver product with it.