Background
Some of the London Extreme Tuesday Club have been learning about a new sense making framework called Cynefin. One of the Cynefin techniques is Narrative Inquiry. In an OpenSpace session at Agile2005 conference we hope to share our ideas about using these techniques to create a story repository on agile practice in real projects.
The Cynefin technique involves gathering stories using indirect questions and then “indexing” the stories with archetypes gathered via a hexagon clustering exercise. It is important that the person who told the story indexes (tags) their own story.
Example of an indirect prompting question,
- imagine you are in a pub and are talking to a good friend who wants to start agile development, tell a story for or against,
- give me an example of a situation where you (or someone you know) developed a requirement that was not asked for by the customer and the users were delighted or not
Some notes about anecdote elicitation, it is important not to influence the anecdotes, structured interviews tend to produce anecdotes that conform to expectations. An alternative is Story telling circles although can be prone to exaggeration. From these you can identify stereotypes (characters, values, themes) that can be an input into the archetype elicitation exercise.
More on indexing questions, include factual questions such as how long person involved, organization size, age, etc (use number scales—-no more that 10 choices) and qualitative questions—-why was this story told ‘to attack, defend, inform’ etc.
Attendees
- Linda Rising
- Amr Elssamadisy
- Diana Larsen
- Scott Ambler
- Duncan Pierce
- Steve Freeman
Participants introduced their interests. Amr would like to increase process pattern language for agile software development. Linda is interested in the power of stories - we are wired to learn this way. Stories tell us about culture (Linda referenced Clifford Geertz). Stories can be condensed into Patterns. Stories join up patterns. In Linda’s book “Fear Less” talks of the role of storyteller/minstrel in organisation (also “Managing by Storying Around” book). Draw out story essence and polish.
Rachel and Duncan gave a summary of Cynefin for session participants. Apply Cynefin to intractable problems. Narrative Inquiry via naive interviews using prompting questions to eliminate interviewer bias. Indexing using archetypes (identify archetypes from stereotypes > attributes > cluster > name).
Start gathering stories with the assumptions that there are many uses for a narrative database.
Possible Uses
- Develop a common language to talk about agile software development.
- Cross-pollination between agile methods. Could develop a business case for agile software development.
- Just-In_Time Case Studies by “real people”.
- Trend analysis.
- Helping researchers find topics.
- Start to understand size of agile community.
- Get visibility of what is going on in industry.
- Might be useful in persuading management to consider agile.
- Gathering a body of evidence (size says something).
Problems
- Stories told by consultants can result in magazine articles that distort the experience.
- Open-ness and Attribution.
- Anonymity is hard because story details are give-aways.
- Context dependent language.
- Linda said that the patterns community planned to index patterns but this did not happen. “Our problems are unique”
General discussion about gathering stories. Retrospective pattern language - Retrospective facilitators might gather stories. Scott Ambler - Whiteboard Warrior. There are no agile database write-ups (maybe no time energy to do formal write-up?).
What is our scope. Stories from non-developers? Not limited to agile software development?
Moving forward
Try a small concrete experiment. Start use wiki a database. Brainstorm prompting questions on wiki (look at other Open Space topics for ideas). Then Open Space session attendees gather stories. Index later. Duncan has proposed Agile Narratives to Agile Alliance (this has been approved).
Later: Once we have this running we can promote on discussion lists. Run conference workshops.
Actions
- Duncan to setup wiki by 5th August (that’s the wiki where you are reading this page)
- Rachel to write up notes by 5th August (that’s this page)
- All - once wiki in place start brainstorming questions and gathering stories.
Further notes
Note cards Rachel had but could not fit into above:
- Dave Parnas - Irrational Deisgn
- Fly on Brutal
- Variation - not one pattern
- Interior decor rules impact on IT
- Difference between lesson indicated and lesson learned.
