Project Lionheart: The Story So Far…

We’re about two months into the project and we’ve accomplished quite a lot. We populated our backlog, completed an architecture spike, and completed several iterations of development. Continuous integration is running, we finished several value adding stories, and we made our first internal releases. The planned architecture is sketched on whiteboards around the office and several important design decisions are recorded as architecture decision records. You think now seems like a good time to reexamine our planned design based on what we’ve learned so far.

You schedule a question-comment-concern workshop during the next iteration. You start the workshop by reviewing the top five quality attribute scenarios. Next you ask us to draw some views of the architecture related to those quality attributes. Walking us through each scenario, you invite us to add sticky notes to the whiteboard drawings, capturing our questions, comments, and concerns. After 50 minutes we have a long list of issues that needs our attention.

To finish the workshop, you help the team think about next steps. We spend the last 10 minutes of the workshop creating an action plan to address the major issues we identified. Some of the actions include refactoring code that has drifted from our planned design and running an experiment to verify that we can correctly do phased deployments with no downtime.

You schedule another evaluation workshop two iterations as another checkpoint. We discuss design issues daily and everyone decides we should continue encouraging this practice.