So let's build a router

From: Jackson (spam_at_spam.com)
Date: 09/20/04 

Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 14:12:47 -0700

This comment is an offshoot of the XP Requirement Analysis thread.

> Laurent Bossavit (laurent@dontspambossavit.com)
>For instance Extreme Programming, to focus on one of these "newer"
>methods, does have quite a bit of planning and outlining built into it,
>especially compared to widespread "code first and tweak until it works"
>approaches. What it doesn't have is a lot of formal examining of the
>"big picture" in solution space. I suspect that these two directions
>were conflated with each other in previous styles of process
>description, and that we may learn, thanks to XP, that processes can
>usefully vary along these two distinct dimensions.

Let's say you are in a startup that is making a router.
You have a small hardware, software, and marketing group.
What do you do now?

You just sit down and start coding?

Do you come up with a product requirements document?
Do you do some sort of analysis?
Do you research your competition?
Do you investigate existing stacks and OSs?
Do you try and size the amount of memory?
Do you come up with a real time budget?
Do you think about the processor?
Do you work with the hardware group? Do you even
have a hardware group until somebody has a story
that says put a packet over an interface?
Do you look at security issues and standards?

Do you actually think about the million things
you need to think about before even having a
real place to start?

I imagine you'll say all this stuff is
done by the customer, so it isn't the
concern of developers.

There are several problems with this answer.

Part of the cursed BFUD process is often
just this kind of creative work. Someone has to do it
and that someone is very often developers along
with marketing (etc) because marketing can't possibly
specify enough detail to create a router, for
example.

Often the developers in the project are domain
experts and are the ones with the most technical
capabilities to figure out what can be built.
Certainly at a high level this is negotiated
with marketing, but many times only the developers
can provide enough detail to provide meaningful
input into any planning game.

And if there isn't enough quality input it may
take a lot of work to figure out what needs to be
done. This work may feedback and change the higher
levels which may flow back down again as potentially
large changes elsewhere. It will be impossible to BFUD
the stories.

It seems stuff is still just getting throw over the
wall with no communication, it's just at the customer
level, not with the analysts or architects. It's BFUD
all over again, just at a different level.

I think a lot of confusion comes from how
restricted the role of the developer has become in
XP. Very often we developers have a lot more input and
responsibility for the entire system. In many industries
it would be rare to get fed enough detail that could be
used in a planning game. Developers often have responsibility
for creating that level of detail as well.

So it may end up looking a little BFUDy, but really
it's just reassociating developers with the part of that
process that XP has dissociated. You can't move complexity
to another group, decrease communication about the product,
and then declare victory. It's not really.

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