Good News

Great news, in fact, from the other team. At the end of this sprint cycle they'll be feature complete (we're not yet a "pure" scrum shop). That puts them a full three months ahead of schedule, giving the test group a full four months to test.

Never before have they finished with more than a month for QC. Why? Well, the business group approving the features just finished their work three weeks ago. Traditionally, that would mean another month to write a functional spec, then they could start coding. That would place them starting at a point which will be later than completion under the new model. How did they do this? They took a leap of faith and identified all the features with a 80-90% certainty of being approved and began working on them.

The moral of the story is to flush your functional spec and use a backlog for development task management. If you need a functional spec, have someone write it at the end, after development has made what will be in the product.

So if you still work under the tyranny of the Functional Spec, print this short story out, walk into your boss' office, throw it down on his/her desk, and say: YO! It's called parallelism, biyatch! Look it up under computer science.