All process is a tradeoff. The tradeoff is additional work that results in additional visibility into the project. If having notecards works for you, then fine. However, in my encounters consulting I need a little more visibility and accountability than notecards. For example, before we had formal signoff and versioned requirements, the client would attempt to sneak things in they forgot (by editing the requirements and saying, oh you had an old version). That's fine, except that we were not given schedule time if we forgot it. If they forgot it, then we got schedule time. The visibility (everyone can see the status of the requirements) and accountability (who said what was ok, and when it was done by whom) has turned the project from going nowhere to being very nearly complete.
Thanks for the feedback, Darrell, Jeff.
Much appreciated.
Hi,
I am TargetProcess lead and I will share some ideas here.
By the way, Darrell have posted great thoughts.
This is one of the many reasons to create tools for XP support.
Yes, I think that whiteboards are great, CRC are cool and comfortable to work with, stand-up meetings are very good indeed and so on. I believe that developers should use CRC cards instead any other tools if that possible. But there are some reasons to use tool like Targetprocess:
1. Project tracking support. Burn Down on the wall is a great thing, but you have to create it manually and share information with project stakeholders.
2. Remote teams support. Sure, true XP can't be adopted by remote teams, but even some practices may improve team efficiency.
3. Customers interaction. While XP require onsite customer, it is not always possible (in fact, I never have onsite customer. That's a reality...)
4. Project practices integration. This is the main point of mine. TargetProcess in it current state could not bring much power to the team. Planning and Tracking are about to nothing, since there are plenty much tools exactly like TP. However, in the near future we are going to provide integrated solution, that will integrate different practiced such as bugtracking, acceptance tests and so on in an agile manner e.g. simply, effective, adoptable. This is the main goal of the TargetProcess project.
We've just started :)
Michael. Thanks for elaborating. I can see some value in the things mentioned here, but in your own words, right now the tool is not as helpful as it could be in the future. I look forward to seeing how it comes along...,