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A talk I gave at the SUGSA July meeting about managing complexity and information rates in agile software development. Some topics such as information rate and user stories are identified as key factors in the success when there is levels of uncertainty and ambiguity present. Also a basic understanding of Cynefin, was presented to help individuals better categorise the problems that are evident in everyday software development environments
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COMPLEXITYCONQUISTADORS
THINGS TO TAKEAWAY
3
The relationship of information and complexity
Cynefin, a model to better understand complexity
What to focus on in your agile process when dealing with complexity
HOW DO YOU DEFINE COMPLEXITY?
A STORY FROM IRAQ
THE CONCEPT OF INFORMATION
HOW I GOT INTERESTED IN ITIf you understand
what you’re doing, you are not learning
anything
What just happened there?
Start up
Start up
Enterprise
Start up
Start up
Enterprise
Start up
The bad lands
Start up
Enterprise
Investigate information from
unexpected sources
Create information that is useful.
Investigate unknowns.Your payoff will be huge
CYNEFIN
Order
Complex Complicated
Chaos SimpleUnOr
der
An Exercise
In your group arrange yourselves by height
Simple
In your groups arrange yourselves by age and
month of birth
Complicated
Arrange yourselves in a shape that
represents your place of origin
Complex
Arrange yourselves as if you are at a
children’s birthday party, with unlimited
sugar
Chaos
Defined outcome Inspection reveals quality of workExploitation A Focus on Efficiency.
ORDER
Multiple possible solutionsNovel conceptsExplorationDiverse individuals and adaptability
UN-ORDERED
USING AN AGILE TYPE PROCESS AS A RESPONSE TO COMPLEXITY
DEALING WITH COMPLEXITY BY ITERATING
Iterations can help with controlling the amount of information*
Oh BTW “we”
hate iterating
THIS IS ITERATING
THIS IS INCREMENTING
Iterating starts before the iteration, it’s a mindset driven by being comfortable
with complexity
USE THE RETROSPECTIVE AS A MODEL BUILDING OPPORTUNITY
You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to
foolRichard Feynman
NARRATE ME YOUR PROBLEM
USER STORIES
The role of narrative is very important
As a: .... I want:.... So that....
It seems people really struggle at writing
stories
2 theories
Why
Our natural inclination is to solve problems
trying to fit the problem in the little
blocks
Remember the Gorilla?
Everything we do is empirical in nature, but we have a
standard user story format.
What the?
So what should a user story look
like?
Without our user story format we would miss this
awesomeness
Cat user stories
?Questions
@pringlewood
CreditsJabe Bloom @cyetrain
Dave Snowdenwww.cogntive-edge.com
Tim hardfordwww.timharford.com