Value Stream Mapping | The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig chats with Ryan McKergow, a Business Analyst and Agile Consultant at Elabor8, at the YOW! West conference in Perth about being an Agile BA:

Business Analysts work with business people to understand the problem they want to solve and then work with developers to take those expectations and help them build the system
Writing stories and requirements is the boring part of the job – the exciting part is getting different people problem solving together
Paul Rayner’s YOW! West “EventStorming” keynote and Craig’s brainwave around Value Stream Mapping
Ryan’s talk “Don’t Be A Zombie Reading Your Stories…” at YOW! West
Story Kickoff – having a conversation at the start of a story (one of the three C’s), get the whole team in front of a whiteboard and drawing it out
Reduce the amount of time between analysis and development as much as possible, try not to have a lead time of more than one sprint ahead where possible
The further ahead you complete analysis, the more likelihood you will introduce waste and rework
Showcases and review sessions are a good engagement piece to replace traditional signoffs and to build trust
Document conversations as acceptance criteria within stories, but the tool or document does not replace conversations
Best way to learn new approaches is to give it a go
Eventstorming, customer journey mapping and design thinking are good tools

TheAgileRevolution-128 (25 minutes)

Craig chats with Paul Rayner, a BDD and DDD expert who helps people bridge the gap of collaborative design between developers and business representatives, at YOW! West in Perth, and two old friends talk about the following:

* Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tool workshop (2011 in Salt Lake City)
* “Domain Driven Design” (Eric Evans) and “Working Effectively with Legacy Code” (Michael Feathers)
* The heart of DDD is about developing a rich model to allow you to deal with complex business domains
* Domain Driven Design Europe conference
* Design done well should pay off immediately, as well as in the medium to long term as well
* There are lot of overlaps between DDD and BDD, particularly the use of an ubiquitous language, BDD is a test first way to drive out your domain model
* YOW! West Keynote “EventStorming”
* Given When Then has a close relationship to modelling your domain events – a good model is one you can make assertions against
* “User Story Mapping” (Jeff Patton) is an example of how the community has started to build useful collaborative tools
* Example Mapping (Matt Wynne) visualises the perspectives of the Three Amigos and puts the focus on our understandings and our ignorances and provides a technique for the conversation
* Deliberate Discovery (Dan North and Liz Keogh) – where is our ignorance
* “Introducing EventStorming” (Alberto Brandolini) is a way of mapping out the domain or the business process using coloured sticky notes – what are the important events to support the behaviour required in our system
* You get a lot better result when you start at the end and work backwards to find insights
* Can use EventStorming to support lean processes such as value stream mapping (Craig’s lightbulb moment)
* “Coaching Agile Teams” (Lyssa Adkins) and how to make yourself a better coach
* Resistance as a Resource (Dale Emery) – helps to have a champion that you can support
* DDD continues to grow and evolve – the popularity of EventSourcing and CQRS have helped this