Get Ready to Poker

This is part 1 of 4 of a post on how to iterate with RUP. The introduction to this post can be found at ScrumUP Fairytale - Part 4.

The term “Ready to Poker” means that the team is ready to estimate a story from the Product Backlog in such detail that they can accurately forecast if its implementation will fit in the upcoming Sprint. Stories to be prepared by the team so they can be pokered are the ones at the top of the Product Backlog (and sometimes explicitly planned in the Sprint Backlog). The best way to get a story Ready to Poker is for the team to be actively involved in preparing this story for implementation. Team members playing the role of Analyst, Developer and Tester work together with Subject Matter Experts, who represent the business. Starting point for these activities is the short description of a Use Case from the Use Case Model, describing what the user wants to do with the system and why. The activities involve detailing requirements so the team knows what the user wants, preparing test cases so the team knows how the solution will be accepted and do some designing so the team knows how to get to a solution. In Figure 35 through Figure 38 we build up a workflow explaining a RUP based process you can follow to get Ready to Poker. A key to the symbols used in this workflow can be found in here.

The Analyst has several sessions or workshops with the relevant Subject Matter Experts. His starting point is the brief Use Case description in the Use Case Model, together with relevant user interface and navigation guidelines found in the Navigation Map. We briefly introduced these work products in the blog post Gather Requirements the Agile Way and treat them more fully in an upcomming blog post No Magic. Assume for this moment that they, as the phrasing is, ‘magically appear’.

Figure 35: Preparation Workflow – scenarios

Gather Requirements the Agile Way

In the post Self-organize using Scrum we saw that Scrum supposes that the Product Owner can fill the Product Backlog with stories, ordered by the desired sequence of implementation. Furthermore Scrum supposes that the team estimates these stories and comes up with a Definition of Done that will ensure a common understanding of the desired quality constraints. It doesn’t say where the information comes from that is needed to do these things. Speaking with Jeff Sutherland (one of the founders of Scrum) – “this stuff magically appears”. In this section we will look at the way Agile requirements practices can help in this regard.

Introducing RUP

In the late 80s and early 90s Ivar Jacobson, James Rumbaugh and Grady Booch, also called the three amigos, were each working on combining object oriented modeling and iterative development. The Rational Software Corporation, a software vendor specialized in tooling to support software development, brought them together. Their mission was to unify their methods.

A Short History

Software development started with the arrival of the first computers in the 1960’s. Programming started to be hard-wired (fixed programming) or soft-wired (reprogramming was possible by changing the position of plugs). Later, programs could be fed to the computer. First in binary code, then assembler languages were developed (second generation) which were more readable to programmers. The next step in programming was the introduction of procedural languages (third generation) like Cobol and Basic. Although these languages were even closer to the human language and hide a lot of low level procedures and direct addressing of memory from the programmer, they were still modeled close to how a computer works, performing a number of tasks in the right order to get to the right result. But since computers were mainly concerned with heavy data processing and number crunching in those days, procedural languages worked fine.