This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Keith Ray. Original Post: Mindful Effectiveness Feed Title: MemoRanda Feed URL: http://homepage.mac.com/1/homepage404ErrorPage.html Feed Description: Keith Ray's notes to be remembered on agile software development, project management, oo programming, and other topics. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Keith Ray Latest Posts From MemoRanda

Dale Emery writes:

Three questions lie at the heart of effectiveness. The better you can answer these three key questions and act on the answers, the more effective you will be:

1. What results do I want?
2. How can I create the results I want? [What to do...?]
3. What results am I creating?

In my coaching and consulting practice, I've notice that people often focus predominantly on question 2 [...]

It's only when focusing on action doesn't work that people become stuck. And in those cases, focusing on what to do often leaves people even more stuck. [...]

[...] if people are persisting in a course of action that isn't working, it's likely that either they are not staying mindful of what they want or they are not seeing clearly the results they're creating.

Dale wrote a message similar to this essay on the XP mailing list. The answer of "question #2" (what action do I take?) for the person who started the message-thread was "use a bug-base" (or perhaps he was asking "should I use a bug-base?").

In many XP projects, the number of bugs is so small that a bug-base is unnecessary. Any bugs that arise are normally fixed in the same iteration in which they are found, unless the bug can be considered a feature (or story) all by itself, in which case it can be tracked using the same method as tracking stories: index cards or simple software.

There is some concern that having a bug-base available may encourage treating bugs as something not to fix during an iteration, with the result that more bugs accumulate and the code-base gets progressively less stable over time.

By keeping in mind question 1 ("What results do I want?" Answer: Software that meets the requirements -- that is, doesn't have bugs [bugs are failures to meet requirements.]) and question 3 ("What results am I creating?"), a team can discern whether having a bug-base has "legitimize" leaving bugs unfixed, and if so, adjust their answers to question 2.

As Dale wrote in the mailing list:

Make explicit the intentions and assumptions behind our decisions. Then as we put the decisiosn into action, actively gather feedback about how well our assumptions match the world and how well we're achieving our intentions.