[Fiware-i2nd] R: I: [Fiware-wpl] The Backlog is not about describing features that assets being adopted as baseline already implement

[Juanjo Hierro]

On 07/10/11 17:03, Garino Pierangelo wrote:
Hi Thomas,

According what Juanjo said in his mail, the customer can ‘build’ the overall picture by doing the three actions below:

 *   read the FI-WARE Product Vision, in order to understand what is overall expected for the GE
 *   read the documentation available for the baseline assets used for materializing the GE: this should give the reader a clear picture of what is already there
 *   read the backlog, to understand what's going on and is somehow on the roadmap

  You are right.

 *
Maybe this is a different way to provide this kind of information, but it is probably avoiding us (or at least we were told this ;-) to provide very huge and time consuming requirements + specifications documents.
Also for me this is an approach I never used in the past, so I cannot evaluate if it is worth doing it or not: so I rely on who has already some expertise and experience in adopting it.

  I want to point out that the approach we have put in place is not strictly related to Agile.

  In a project where we were developing a product we had started from the scratch and we follow Agile, in its pure terms, the overall picture would be build by just reading:

 *   The product vision, which would give the user an overview of what is expected in the product
 *   The product backlog, which describes those functionalities that will be addressed (from Themes through Epics, corresponding to functionalities that are considered but still too high-level to plan, up to Features and User-Stories corresponding to functionalities enough detailed as to be planned in a release or sprint)

  However, we had to deal with the fact that FI-WARE didn't start from the scratch.   We will rely on a number of assets which will be adopted as baseline for creating the reference implementation of GEs.   How do we deal with the fact that a relevant amount of work has already been done ?  How should/can we document it ?

  Carrying out a "reverse engineering" process targeted to documenting what has already been done, in the form of backlog entries could have been a choice but we definitively discarded this approach for two reasons:

 *   It had been a great effort that would simply delayed us.
 *   It goes a little bit against "Agile" philosophy: backlogs are a) about what has to be developed and b) producing stuff that useful in driving that development.   Of course, as development progress, we will have a history of Epics/Features/User-stories that have been developed and tested but ... Do we need to document the history previous to the FI-WARE Project ?   It definitively doesn't add to much value in driving future development (i.e., point b))
 *   There should be documentation already available and linked to the assets even if they were not developed using Agile: User's/Programmer's Guides, Tutorials, Specifications .... why don't simply use it to document what is our baseline ?


  That's why we have considered the three points (FI-WARE Product Vision, publicly available documentation of the baseline assets and FI-WARE backlog) as the ingredients that allow to compose a complete vision.   It's a matter of pragmatism.   We had to be able to provide UC projects as much information as possible of the GEs (how they will look like, what sort of functionality and APIs they will support, etc) and the sooner possible.   The adopted approach may not be the most "academic" one, but should work and is more lightweight.

  Hope it helps,

-- Juanjo




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