Process Miniature

One of the ProjectManagementPatterns.

Thumbnail: Run the entire process in a very short time period (a few minutes to a few weeks). Result: Participants get Booch's famed GestaltRoundTrip

Examples: ExtremeHour, ExtremeTeaching, CodeSprint (Please comment if you have other examples)

-- AlistairCockburn

I was TA for a undergraduate group project/project management course. I noticed that many students were complaining that they were having to deal with the concepts in the group project before they were being covered in the lectures. Inspired by ExtremeHour, I suggested that the professor do something like ProjectLifeCycleInOneHour? (actually one lecture which is 75 minutes) next year before the course starts. He liked the idea... Unfortunately, I won't be around to see how it works out. -- JasonYip

The general term for what you're calling a ProcessMiniature is a Simulation. The best educators in the world use EducationalSimulations? & EducationalGames. ExtremeHour will have a sibling soon as I'm hard at work on an XP sim. -- JoshuaKerievsky

Another way to go is to have short iterations. At most, the three week glacial epochs that XP preaches. Then, you go through the whole process rather quickly. However, at the end you must then apply some double loop learning or TripleLoopLearning and reflect honestly on what went wrong, what went right, what could be improved, what could be enhanced. Tweak a little bit (or a lot) and go through the next iteration. Consider each iteration a new experience! In fact, it might be valuable to force yourselves to try out new things frequently to avoid process rut. You might accidentally end up with a dusty ThreeRingBinder otherwise. -- SunirShah

A process miniature is not just a simulation in an interesting sense of the word "Simulation". A simulation exists to run a person through many variations of situations so they can deal with varying conditions on the fly. A simulation may be time-matched or not. A process miniature is not time-matched. It draws on some native human capacity to build temporal connections - we are interested in generating those temporal connections, it is what GradyBooch long ago called a GestaltRoundTrip.

In the absence of a ProcessMiniature, those connections get built in the standard (haha) 3-month incremental deliveries. But that means you have to wait 3 months. How about doing a full increment in 1 week, or 1 hour (see ExtremeHour)? That builds the temporal connections around the process in a shorter time frame so the person has the GestaltRoundTrip in that short time frame.

I did a version of this, ExtremeHourWithActualProgramming, with a client in South Africa.

-- AlistairCockburn

Mark Cranshaw and John Flacket use the ProcessMiniature in teaching Java (see http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/cranshaw/papers/process_miniatures_jicc2006.pdf).