Agile and story huddle

Question

We have adapted agile methodology for development. User requirement are captured in the form of story which can be picked for development by developer. Before picking a story a developer is suppose to have a huddle with Business Analyst and Quality Assurance member. A lot of time is wasted waiting for business analyst and QA member to be available. There are advantages of huddle with QA and BA since it gives better understanding of the story for developer, it helps QA to write better test cases. But waiting time seems to me as under utilization of development time. Has anyone encountered similar kind of issue? I would like to know what would be the best possible way for a developer to start working on a story?

Answer 1

I've been on projects that tried using that technique before. We had the same problem you mentioned. We tried a few ways of fixing it.

Have B.A./Q.A./Dev office hours. Pick an hour a day where no meetings are scheduled and everyone should be findable. If you have a daily standup you could do this right after that. So huddles will have at least one time each day that will work. Obvious draw back is that you might have to wait until the next office hour time to do your huddle.

Relax the rule. A dev can get started on a story without the huddle but should have the huddle as soon as possible. If your stories are a day or so long this might be okay. Usually there are some obvious things to do for the developer.

Have a set of small tasks that require no BA/QA huddle. bug fixes etc. The dev can use those to fill the time until the BA/QA are available.

In the end we dropped the practice of requiring it but most people still tried to have the huddle. That was a few years ago. Now we make sure the team has a good enough understanding of the stories before they become stories.

Answer 2

One way is to escalate this bottleneck to management by showing it's costing you real money. Not consulting with the BA can cost you in terms of rework, waiting to consult can cost you in idleness. Get some actual metrics with how much time is spent reworking or how long is spent waiting - it may make sense financially to hire another BA, for instance.

UPDATE:

Of course, this will only matter if the BA really is your bottleneck. If the developers and BAs worked together perfectly only to hit a huge QA bottleneck immediately afterward, then it's not the BA constraint you should be concerned with.

Answer 3

I'd suggest having the developer upon grabbing a card, write out what the end result would be that the B.A. and Q.A. can use. IOW, what do they get to see that can show them that this is done? There may be the need to schedule some time after that for the huddle to check that the developer is on the proper track and if not, do a course correction in terms of changing the expectations.

Answer 4

I would like to know what would be the best possible way for a developer to start working on a story?

You need to get your story READY and this is theoretically one of the responsabilities of the Product Owner. If you product owner is not succeeding at this exercise, help him. If you don't have a Product Owner, someone has to do his job. In fine, you need to get your BAs and QA people more involved. How can your management expect the development team to deliver on time if BAs and QA are not available? This is a huge impediment that needs to be solved. Just show to your management how much it's slowing you down and how much money it costs, I'm sure they'll figure out a solution.

Answer 5

Get the top boss to tell the managers of the QA and BA groups that the time wasted by the developer waiting on their people will come out of THEIR budgets.