Agile Development: Pipelining

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, February 15, 2008 @ 3:02 pm

Sometimes you can roll into an iteration or sprint with a handful of high-level user stories and refine as you go. But if you have a very complex system with lots of interdependencies, or are trying to incorporate a high level of user experience design, or your domain experts aren't readily available to you on a daily basis, then your requirements have to be a little more refined up front.

The answer isn't to go to a waterfall process and bang everything out months in advance. The answer, rather, is to pipeline requirements and development. In practice, the functional team -- made up of Business Analysts and Interaction Designers -- focuses on the requirements for sprint n+1 during sprint n, while the development team focuses on developing the features for sprint n. You can, and should, extend this further: the QA testing team should work on building the automated tests for the features developed during sprint n-1 in sprint n. Anther way of saying this is that the development team is looking at now, the function team is looking one sprint ahead, and the testing team is looking one sprint behind.

While the feedback isn't as tight as if you were to do all of this in one sprint, it's still pretty far away from waterfall. One thing worth pointing out is that this doesn't mean that you do no testing or requirements gathering for sprint n in sprint n, just that the bulk of it happens in the sprint preceding and following the current one. Also, the development team will be involved in the requirements gathering somewhat, but they won't be forced to context switch between what they are working on now and what they will be working on in the next sprint. And they'll definitely get to ask all of their questions in the next sprint planning meeting.

Anyhow, if you find yourself wrestling with trying to jam requirements, development and testing all into one sprint, give pipelining a try.

Technorati Tags: agile, sprint, pipelining

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