CFMP - RE POST AND UPDATE -19/07/2014 FMP - FACEBOOK FORUM PAGE -19/07/2014 Rae Knight 7 hrs · ago No FMP, I am not finding your weekly blog posts useful and informative. Your weekly update will now be fortnightly because your team work in two week sprints - what does that even mean?You have some projects which will be coming to fruition in the next weeks and months - are you kidding? Its been about 4 months now since your new platform was inflicted upon us and things are still going to take months? Your detailed response to an excellent post on the 17th July has (at the time of posting) not received a single like - maybe other people are as fed up as I am of all the same rubbish that youve been spouting for the last few months. I may look in on your site next year and see if it is fixed but until then I think I have had enough. Elizabeth Vinci, Jools Foy, Janet Barnett and 7 others like this. Bill Smith Heres an analogy of Agile development and sprints, which you might find amusing. A Sprint is a development cycle associated with the Agile software development methodology....... The choice of using Agile or (the alternative) Waterfall method depends upon whether you know what the end result is going to be. If you dont, agile is appropriate because it enables the system to evolve based on input from the customer. But, in the case of FMP, they largely know what they are trying to achieve. They know that there needs to be a search facility(ies) and that the system needs to provide all the features of the existing old system. etc. If you built a house using Agile. Then, the first requirement would be that the house needs walls and a roof, and perhaps must have red walls. The customer might define what size it should be. So, the house gets built, and the walls plastered. The plaster dries and the walls get painted. The test team come along and check that it meets the requirements.... Great, all good. Then, the next iteration (sprint) would say, ok, thats great - but, our customer has now said it needs electricity. So, the builders start running cables along the red painted walls and ceilings. The test team check that the lights and power sockets all work properly. They dont notice that the load of scrapes and scratches on the wall from when the cables were run. The third iteration gets planned...... The customer says, brilliant, its still dark inside though. Can you install some windows. I want 10. So, the builders come along and decide where they think the windows should go. Because 10 people are each going to install one window, each person decides what they think the size of each window should be (because they dont traditionally speak to each other). So, the windows get installed in fairly random places in the house all of different sizes. The red walls get further scratched and start to look a mess. The customer is happy with the new window functionality, but some of them are too big. The customer also notices that some of the red paint has been damaged, so raises a bug (but only notices the damage in one room). The fourth iteration focuses on sorting out the wrong sized windows and fixing the damage to the paint that the customer noticed. So, some of the larger windows get removed, replaced with correct, smaller sized windows. In order to do that, more bricks need to be purchased, to fill in the gaps, but they are out of stock. So, rather than hold things up, they use a different colour brick instead, that is in stock. It all looks a big ugly. The testers come along and it meets the requirements. Now has the correct sized windows and the scratched paint work that the customer noticed has been touched up. The customer seems happy, things are progressing nicely. But, the customer says theres no water, or gas. and it needs a garden. So, the planners decide that the biggest priority is the garden, because its the most visible piece of work in this iteration, followed by the lower priority adding gas and water (they are boring pieces of work, not half as exciting as the nice new garden). So, the garden gets landscaped (looks lovely) and is tested successfully. Then, the water board come along and dig up part of the garden to run the pipework. Theres no time to dig under the house to run the pipes in, so they run them up the outside wall of the house and in just above the first couple of rows of bricks. Some of the plaster inside falls off the wall. The pipework looks ugly on the inside of the walls. Similarly, the electricity gets installed in the same shoddy manner. The test team come along, and check the new functionality. Yes, the garden is there, and the house now has electricity and water. Great. The customer comes along and notices some other scrapes to the paintwork but misses the broken plaster, wrong bricks and a load of other problems. But, is generally happy. The house has walls, roof, paint, windows, and the utilities. Cool, the house is theoretically habitable. So, the sales team are now pushing to sell the house so they can recoup some of the cost. But, they realise theres still a few bits and pieces to do, that will get done following feedback from the purchaser. But, there wont be many observations because it looks quite good really. But, they do expect a short snagging list. So, the house is put up for sale. Everybody gets a pat on the back. 500 people view the house with the intention of buying (or in FMPs case, theyve already sold it 500 times). Each person starts providing bug reports for different bits of damaged paintwork. They also report that functionality is missing, e.g. now theyve removed the ladders, scaffolding and portaloo, its apparent they need a staircase and a toilet. A few complain that the the cold weather has frozen the water in the pipes because they are above ground level. Others complain after they fall down the trenches in the garden after the pipes were installed. Others say that the brick work is inconsistent, etc. Whilst all of these problems are (very slowly) being addressed, theres another team inside randomly adding new items, like hanging pictures on the wall. But of course, in FMPs case they are a different team to those continuing to refine the house. The spring comes and the frozen pipes thaw, and the pipes burst. The paintwork is ruined, just after theyve done some more touching up to the paintwork following customer reports. Some of the pictures fall off the wall when the wrong colour bricks get replaced. Nobody notices that until the customer tries to look at them. And Im sure you get the idea. Alternatively, they could have taken a proper look at existing OLD houses and understand the requirements properly. Then, planned things properly. The development team would come along and understand exactly what is required now, and be mindful of what the other later requirements are that need to be introduced. The pipework and electrics would have been installed at the appropriate times, and the last things would have been the painting. During the development some testing would have taken place and the minor misunderstandings corrected with little impact on other things. At the end, everything would have been tested properly. The customer would then have been happy moving in. Agile does lend itself very well to systems where the end result is not fully known, and it does allow more flexibility in getting software out of the door when needed, when its deemed to be complete enough. But, its more likely to be incomplete and full of problems. Many of these problems can be mitigated properly IF sufficient analysis is done up front, proper controls are put in place within a project, and sufficient time is allowed during (or as part of sprints/iterations) to re-engineer problem areas properly as things evolve. But, from FMPs perspective, it looks like theyve not spent enough time regression testing the application or putting in place the necessary automated tests to regression test functionality. 4 hrs ago Rae Knight - Brilliant post Bill! 3 hrs ago
Posted on: Sat, 19 Jul 2014 20:25:53 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015