August 2006

For various reasons, there are situations when there is no running away from a Bunker Buster. An agile team should therefore be watchful. Once the analyst finds a potential bunker buster, he/she will have only one parameter to tweak… The timing. Embracing a bunker buster is a a brave step, I would say. But then isn’t, bravery only relative to the preparation?? SymptomsHere are some tips out of my experience for identifying bunker busters. Note that these symptoms do not decide a bunker buster individually. Like gesture-clusters in body language, they work in combinations. VaguenessThe first and most probable characteristic… Read More »Embracing Bunker Busters

“Prevention is better than cure” and one good way of handling Bunker Busters is to avoid them. Agile teams seem to be wary of handling anything by prevention, as it requires thinking ahead and taking care of things to come rather than things that are. While this makes perfect sense for Grenades and Shells, Bunker Busters have much more potential for damage and it is worthwhile trying to prevent them rather than handling them when they come. There are areas in every application which can prove to be huge bunker busters if not handled in advance. Teams are even aware… Read More »Avoiding Bunker Busters

As agile business analysts, we try to keep our stories small, independent, testable and valueable. Once in a while, though, we come face to face with a Bunker Buster and everything starts looking scary. Impact Every story is likely to impact a certain portion of the developed application. Measuring this impact and using it to “time” a story well, is something commonly ignored by business analysts. This doesn’t mean that the analyst or the team doesn’t know the impact of a story but this measure is not used in planning exercises effectively. We can almost categorize stories to get a… Read More »Grenades, Shells & Bunker Busters