Quantum Jump

I was having Thanksgiving dinner with my sister.   My sister comments that she read my A little too incremental blog and thought it was pretty funny.  (I guess that is why I was still invited to Thanksgiving dinner).  She didn’t think it was accurate, though.

So, the conversation went as follows:

Her:  I read your blog the other day.

Me: Was it okay?

Her:  Well, it didn’t put me in the best light, but it was pretty funny!

Me:  Well, if it makes you feel any better, more then 1 person asked me if you wanted a job.

Her: Really?  It’s a shame I don’t live closer.  I did have 1 problem with the blog?

Me:  Problem? oh.  What was that?

Her:  It wasn’t very accurate.

Me:  Well, you know, it may not have been word for word, but I tried to get the gist of the conversation right.

Her:  No, you don’t understand.  It’s far worse then you portrayed.

Me:  What?

Her:  Really. I’m on the data modeling team.  We used to be part of the various development teams, but they kicked us off.

Me:  Huh?

Her:  They kicked the data modelers off of the teams.  Apparently we ask too many questions to be agile.

Me:  Too many questions?  What kind of questions?

Her:  You know.  Things like, “What type of data are you capturing for that object?”,  “What is the max length of that string?”, “Aren’t an employee, customer, client, and user all variations of a ‘person’.  Shouldn’t we be capturing a subset of the same data for each so that we can have some code re-use and give the data warehouse folks common data to search on?”.

Me:  Troublemaker!

Her:  So, now we aren’t allowed on the development teams.  We have to wait until they make changes to their copies of the database, then bring them back and reverse engineer the changes to figure out what they did.  Once we figure that out, we can start working on the business intelligence tasks.

Me:  So, let me get this straight, you need to reverse engineer the database to figure what is being done.  Since each team is doing this on their own, you could get conflicting changes, and…

Her: Oh, we have conflicting changes all the time.  We give them to our boss and he calls the lead for the affected development teams to get resolution.

Me:  Well, at least that sounds like it functions well.

Her: Actually, that is why we are on iteration 4 while they are on iteration 34.

Tags: Agile, process

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 8:20 pm and is filed under Archived. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.