The Answer to Your Process Question? It Depends!

In my role as an agile coach, presenter and facilitator, people ask me process questions about agile methods every day. After all, I am an agile “expert.” This is what people expect me to know.

“Should we assign story points to a spike?” goes one such typical question.

“It depends…” begins the answer that I always want to give. Of course, if I start out every response with “it depends,” it will get annoying. What I mean is, the answer to the question depends on who you ask, and more importantly, what you’re trying to accomplish with this decision. I want to facilitate the questioner through the thinking, so they can answer their own question, armed with the conventional wisdom.

Here is a simple technique to try.

Step One – Answer the Question

Respect the question and present the generally-accepted consensus answer, if there is one. If there is no consensus, I cite both sides of the argument. “Well, that’s an interesting question. One the one hand, reason ABC says you should assign points. On the other hand, reason XYZ says you shouldn’t….” Teasing both sides cues up a meaningful discussion.

Step Two – Probe

I’m trying to set up a teachable moment here, and I use questioning to get there. The lesson is that you should follow or not follow certain rules based on how that rule will serve your team. There are a number of questions that can lead you there - What do you do now? What doesn’t work about how you do it now? What is the problem? Why are you even talking about this?

I like to try a few of these questions to get to the underlying issue. Then explore the issue, trying to facilitate the person’s (or team’s) understanding. Whatever decision is made should help the team to be better, and whatever happens should be retrospected along the way. E.g., you might start assigning story points to a spike, and it doesn’t fix the problem, or it causes some unintended consequence that needs to be addressed.

Step Three – Revisit the Question

My questioning leads the asker of the question to a better framing of the issue. Now, I can be the asker. “So, based on all of that, what do you think you should do?” There are countless directions this could go, but this type of examination is better than just taking the answer out of a book or out of the mouth of a so-called expert.

+++

While many cast me as an agile “expert,” my ultimate value is in helping people (individuals and groups) discover best answers to their own questions. Ultimately, I want to move them to a process where they examine the impetus for the question.

So…

Q: Should you assign story points to a Spike?

A: It depends. If it helps you to work better, then you should.