Cat Juggling

(With a nod to SteveMartin?'s classic "The Jerk"...)

CJ is when you interrupt iterations to push in new UserStories

Subject: Re: Cat Juggling - Managing Priorities

Scrum REQUIRES TimeBoxing. ExtremeProgramming doesn't. In Scrum, when the customers show up mid-iteration with a change request, they are told it will be put on the list for prioritization at the start of the next iteration; requirements are locked during an iteration. Greco-Roman (a.k.a. Classical) XP doesn't permit that response. XP presupposed well-behaved customers.

In hostile situations, time-boxing is a critical success factor. If your team is cat-juggling, change to time-boxing. If priorities are really jittery, shorten the time box to 1 week or 2 weeks, short enough that the Requirements Demanders can be told, "We'll be happy to start that next week." That is a short enough time even for Wall Street companies.

Be aware, working to a 1-week iteration may change your design habits.

-- AlistairCockburn

It turns out that XP does specify fixed-length iterations, and always has. -- RonJeffries

I posit that emergency stories are a team thing, comma, after the team gels and shows normal progress with canonic iterations. -- PhlIp

You dreamed it up because you're rather high on the skills acquisition list. Rules like "you don't make changes during iterations" are for people (and organizations) that are at the novice and advanced beginner levels (using the DreyfusModel) When you get to the competent and proficient levels, you can make rational tradeoffs on things like that since you know the context in some detail. At the expert level, you probably dispense with FixedLengthIterations altogether. -- JohnRoth

John was just kidding about that last sentence. If you are such an expert, you could write a program that writes the program and be done with it.

BarbaraMoo "used to say that managing a software group was like herding a pride of cats" -- StanleyLippman? (from InsideTheCeePlusPlusObjectModel?)

If you, instead, juggle them, I advise you to wear gloves, a faceplate, etc...

<you honor me by posting that here, Phlip -- Alistair>

I honor aarachide for suffering enough to pick such a great thread name (on the XpMailingList). But you had a good "snapshot" of the CJ concept.

CategoryAntiPattern