Shop For Index Cards
Shop For Index CardsTo get story-driven planning adopted, make clear that it's not about big "requirements documents," but about sitting down with the customer and a bunch of cards and talking.
One way to convert people to something good but new (and thus feared) is to do it confidently yourself and silently demonstrate the benefits. So shop for index cards and then use them yourself. Why is this advice to 'shop' and not to 'use'? Because you might be the most dangerous skeptic. It's hard to try something until you have all the basic tools; it's easy to SourGrapes? if you set up little roadblocks, like not having cards.
Do yourself, and ultimately your organization, a favour and just go to the store and just buy some friggin' cards. You'll be pleasantly surprised.
(Needs to be expanded some.)
Evidence/Examples
I did this recently, but mostly for showing the developers how to use them since we don't have a real XP project yet. We're still learning how much detail to put in/leave out of the story cards. The developers immediately saw the potential for organization, but it will be some time before it becomes widely accepted.
On the other hand, when I actually used them myself, I realized that I had been a closet skeptic. I was indeed pleasantly surprised that index cards had such a high utility:trouble ratio.
Reaction: IndexCards seem like some hippy thing.
Response: Use an Excel spreadsheet.
Discussion
You will probably also need something to organize your index cards. Does anyone have any suggestions for this? I'm using a little cardboard box, but it's not that great.
I think using an Excel spreadsheet defeats the purpose and spirit of the cards. As I understand it, the cards serve the purpose of not requiring tools like Excel and RationalRose to create your objects. All you need is a bunch of index cards. Then the prime advantage seems to be that the cards are easily sorted and re-sorted by priority and risk into piles. Also it easy to get a bunch of people in the room and role-play the interactions and throw cards at someone who is the "Database" object or so. As to how they are stored, I'm not sure I have a good answer. I would wrap mine up with elastics and put them in a desk drawer. -- sg
It's a matter of push and pull. If you can't sell them an igloo, sell them a popsicle.
Actually, we went this route:
See ManagingCards
Am I missing something? Wouldn't a Wiki be a much better way to represent a set of CrcCards than a spreadsheet would? Actually, I just started doing this, and it seems like it should work really well! -- MikeSmith
It's funny you should say that. The original concept of WikiWiki was to store Ward's CrcCards in HyperCard. It grew out of that.
I learned something about right-brain/left-brain stuff doing exercises like this. What I learned about myself (your mileage may vary) is that index cards -- along with notebook pages, whiteboards, chart paper, and so on -- let me draw, sketch, circle text, scrawl things big and small, and all kinds of similar right-brain things. Spreadsheets, word processors, and even wiki's force me to do left-brain things - type, spell, choose words, set fonts, etc. Even the simplest graphical gesture (like draw a THICK BLACK CIRCLE around an important word) becomes a major exercise in hoop-jumping on all these kinds of tools.
As a result, the natural communication and integration between my right-brain stuff and my left-brain stuff was breaking down. I was astonished to observe, in myself, how quickly my productivity jumped back up when I went back to using the right-brain oriented media. Maybe someday our computer-based tools will support this, but they aren't there in February of 2004.
I encourage folks to actually try using index cards. The spreadsheets & word processors may prove quite helpful in organizing and using the resulting material. It might be fun to play games with things like scanning & digitizing the card images, using databases to query them, and all that stuff. Having said all that, though, at the end of the day ...
EditText of this page
(last edited April 28, 2005)
or FindPage with title or text search