For the most part it was a pretty normal sprint, the team read and refined the stories, asked questions and clarified the requirements. One of the stories referred to a text editor where text would be cut and pasted. There were questions about formatting and content and the PO was sure that maintaining formatting was not required and that the text would be standard text.
The team worked through the story and completed all acceptance criteria and everyone was happy, except one of the development team who felt an urge to work closely with the users and get actual examples of the text they used and how they worked. It turned out that one of the source documents was non-standard in the sense that the text editor selected was not able to cope with the source data, when pasted critical characters were lost. We investigated further, and it also turned out that formatting and layout were also very important to the users in some situations, something not fully understood at analysis.
The team, the PO and the BA worked together, they all got involved and came up with a solution, and we have written a new story to be included in the next sprint, which means a slight delay in functionality being released to the users but as an observer to this incident I was very proud of how agile the team behaved and how smoothly we adjusted to what was in effect a significant blow to the initial design.
That may not sound a big-deal but if you consider that had we not challenged the requirements, had we not had open and effective communication with the Product Owner and the users, had we implemented requirements as written we would have been able to sign-off the work and likely get all the way to release and delivery to the users – weeks if not months later before this problem was identified, by which time the cost to resolve would have been considerable and the disruption to all would have been significant.
This is a great example of where agile can be a great tool. A situation where the team made customer collaboration a priority over contract negotiation, and responded to a change rather than adhering to a plan. Sometimes I worry that the benefits of agile get lost, but on days like today I feel like agile really has made a difference. I feel immensely pleased with the team.
John Yorke 