{"id":6087,"date":"2017-02-09T12:31:15","date_gmt":"2017-02-09T14:31:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.plataformatec.com.br\/?p=6087"},"modified":"2017-02-09T12:31:32","modified_gmt":"2017-02-09T14:31:32","slug":"bringing-continuous-improvements-into-your-agile-process-the-reality-check-ceremony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.plataformatec.com.br\/2017\/02\/bringing-continuous-improvements-into-your-agile-process-the-reality-check-ceremony\/","title":{"rendered":"Bringing continuous improvements into your agile process: The Reality Check Ceremony"},"content":{"rendered":"

You’ll start a new product. Awesome! You gather a great development team to kickstart the product, aka to build an MVP. Since you’ve had the idea of the product, it is natural that you’ll be the CEO of that new startup and, therefore, will make the business decisions regarding your product (launch date, market segmentation, etc.).<\/p>\n

You decide on a great marketing and business strategy. Then, you decide on the release dates according to some potential competitors’ plans. Everything seems to be well planned!<\/p>\n

The first thing you do in the development part is to begin the inception phase with the team. You tell them what you want to build, they challenge your ideas, you change some things according to their inputs, and everyone reach a consensus on what the product should look like in each milestone, and how they should start coding it. Awesome!<\/p>\n

With that in place, you decide to leave the team alone and not micromanage them. Good choice! You focus on the business strategy, while the team is working on their backlog. You glance at how their backlog looks and how it is being consumed… But since you don’t have their context anymore, that doesn’t say much.<\/p>\n

One month later, you are 2 days away from the first release. Your team comes to you and say that they have way too much stuff to do and they definitely won\u2019t be able to finish everything by then… What?!<\/p>\n

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Ok, so that is a common thing in teams… The business and technical plans seldom touch bases throughout the development process. Generally they start at the same point, but diverge fast.<\/p>\n

What we use at Plataformatec is a ceremony to align the business and technical plans, and we call it Reality Check. We run it on demand, every time the development team feels they have too much work to do in a short time. That feeling is usually noticed during daily meetings and\/or retrospectives. And we try to hold the ceremony as soon as possible to avoid scenes like the above-mentioned.<\/p>\n

The ceremony<\/h2>\n

The participants of this ceremony should be the development team and the people that decide the business plan. It could be the CEO itself, it could be a Product Owner that works as a proxy for the business people, or any other person that could influence the business side.<\/p>\n

Before the ceremony, the facilitator sticks to a board, using post-its, all stories left to reach a defined milestone (it could be a new release or any other fixed dates). And they should be ordered according to the former priority decision.<\/p>\n

After the ceremony gets started, the development team goes over each one of the cards explaining, in high-level, what they are about and eventual difficulties on their development. The idea here is to put everyone on the same page about the project, and inform all the present stakeholders of the progress.<\/p>\n

After the explanation and debate on each of the cards, the facilitator gives to each member a paper in which they’ll write how comfortable they are with finishing the work until the deadline. Usually we use a 1-to-5 rating to facilitate the vote, where 5 is totally comfortable and 1 is not comfortable. Other times we found it more useful to use 1 to 4 to avoid people that tend to choose median numbers, like 3 in the 1-to-5 range.<\/p>\n

With the numbers shown at the same time, to not create bias, we let the people that showed the highest and lowest numbers talk to check why they chose differently. After that, we check again how are their perceptions on the feasibility of finishing the work. If most people are still uncomfortable with the deadline, the business side needs to intervene and reprioritize the backlog according to what is more valuable to the product, and\/or readjust the deadline accordingly.<\/p>\n

Here is another approach that we follow:<\/p>\n