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I don't know what I'm going to need next week let along 3 months (or whatever) from now. Doesn't this reflect some much deeper problem with the product plannin

I don't know what I'm going to need next week let along 3 months (or whatever) from now. Doesn't this reflect some much deeper problem with the product planning or management? If you literally can't plan even a week in advance that suggests there simply is no plan, and even the most scatterbrained business environment doesn't change that fast. I'd say customers being able to stick to a coherent story about what they want for more than a week would be a key need in any successful IT project.

pflenker 7y ago
Not necessarily. The idea here is that the customer has an idea about what he wants, but has only a vague idea about what he actually _needs_, and no idea about what is technologically possible. Methods like XP embrace that by allowing requirements to change over time, to account for the customer accumulating more knowledge about all three areas.
- repolfx 7y ago
  But you can nail those things down before coding begins, just through talking with them. You don't need to literally change the code completely every week - iterating a plan is much easier than iterating a codebase!
  - afarrell 7y ago
    But with 2 weeks of coding, you can save yourself an hour of planning.
  - pflenker 7y ago
    Not necessarily, and it really depends on the customer and on the software. You feed the learnings from one iteration into the next - it's not intended to change the code completely every week, but to allow maximum flexibility in the backlog.
mikekchar 7y ago
There is a difference between not knowing what I need for an API next week and not knowing (vaguely) what I need for the business. My backlog stretches out about 4 months at the moment, but I don't do technical design until much, much later. But as a sibling post rightly points out, not all of the stories on my backlog are going to get done. 4 months is a long time and the business is hopefully gathering more and more data about what it needs. Frequently opportunities arise that overtake what I have in my backlog. Since I always have more in my backlog than I can actually do, that means that the stuff on the bottom drops off. If I were to estimate, I would say that about 1/3 of my 4 month backlog is practically 100%. It drops off to 0% by the end.

pflenker 7y ago

Not necessarily. The idea here is that the customer has an idea about what he wants, but has only a vague idea about what he actually _needs_, and no idea about what is technologically possible. Methods like XP embrace that by allowing requirements to change over time, to account for the customer accumulating more knowledge about all three areas.

repolfx 7y ago
But you can nail those things down before coding begins, just through talking with them. You don't need to literally change the code completely every week - iterating a plan is much easier than iterating a codebase!
- afarrell 7y ago
  But with 2 weeks of coding, you can save yourself an hour of planning.
- pflenker 7y ago
  Not necessarily, and it really depends on the customer and on the software. You feed the learnings from one iteration into the next - it's not intended to change the code completely every week, but to allow maximum flexibility in the backlog.

mikekchar 7y ago

There is a difference between not knowing what I need for an API next week and not knowing (vaguely) what I need for the business. My backlog stretches out about 4 months at the moment, but I don't do technical design until much, much later. But as a sibling post rightly points out, not all of the stories on my backlog are going to get done. 4 months is a long time and the business is hopefully gathering more and more data about what it needs. Frequently opportunities arise that overtake what I have in my backlog. Since I always have more in my backlog than I can actually do, that means that the stuff on the bottom drops off. If I were to estimate, I would say that about 1/3 of my 4 month backlog is practically 100%. It drops off to 0% by the end.