Substandard Project Specification = Garbage In, Garbage Out
Adopting agile methodologies doesn’t guarantee success of each and every project. Sometimes you can have absolutely great team, skilled and well motivated people, flawless development process and yet project can be a total disaster.
How can that be? Prerequisite for all projects is a product backlog (requirements specification). If user stories (requirements) are vague and scope is blurry then probably this is classic garbage in, garbage out scenario. In such scenario a single team with no external dependencies and good cooperation with a client has a slim chance to succeed. But in projects, with number of different teams involved, there is absolutely no way to produce something else then garbage.
How to avoid garbage in, garbage out scenario? Before giving a green light for a project ask yourself a few questions:
- Are requirements documented? – you don’t need each and every small detail, but high-level user stories are a must.
- Are requirements clear and explicit? – requirements should be put in simple words without any ‘marketing talk’ but also without technical details.
- Is scope for your team well defined? – this is about clear responsibility boundaries. You want to know what your team is supposed to do; also you want to know which team should help you with your external dependencies.
- Do you understand goals for a project? – what is a business justification for this project? What client wants to achieve?
- Do you understand the most fundamental user stories (use cases) of a system? – do you understand how system should work? How complex the features are? How many internal/external systems will be involved in building each feature? For each feature – what are the responsibilities for your team?
- Do you have access to the product owner/client/stakeholders to be able to ask questions? – For sure you will have some questions, you will find some edge cases therefore you want to have access to someone who can make some decisions and conclusively answer questions.
If answer to at least one of the above questions is ‘no’ then you have to be careful because quality of project’s specification is substandard. Of course you still may want to take a chance but be aware – it’s a risky game.