One sticking point for me with learning and propagating Inspect and Adapt Empirical Techniques is the role of Dependencies and a Holistic Vision. I think a pitfall might be to deny Cause and Effect. Meaning – I didn’t give Alice the specs for the “Thank You” page so she makes it up when she’s coding it. The end result makes sense to her, but the design wasn’t reviewed in advance so it makes no sense to anyone else.
For example, I’ve seen a PeopleSoft implementation that had no UX help in which you use “OK” to stay on a page you are editing and “Cancel” to go to the next page. This sounds like it might make sense on paper, right? But everyone I know every time clicks “OK” to leave the page. This is because the logic in the user’s mind is “OK, I’m OK with abandoning my edits” or “Cancel, I don’t want to abandon my edits.” From a build point of view this is a small-small feature, but from a user point of view this is a big-big annoyance.
I’ve observed Agile folks having an absolute allergy to anything that has the slightest scent of Waterfall (which means steps and hand-offs), but I just can’t figure out how there could ever not ever be hand-offs. There’s gonna be a time in which I have to do something on my own and give it to someone else.
Now, understand, I get this is not totally at the heart of Agile, at least not from what I’ve learned from Dr. Jeff Sutherland. His classes, or at least the one I took in New York City, really emphasize the team, so much so that he even changes the questions we ask/answer in Scrum to be about the team. More to explore on this point, but for now, just wanted to get the thread on paper, so to speak, for future weaving.
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