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description=Parallel delivery works when being wrong stops being punished and scope is split by volatility, not phase. How design, build and test start on day one. Tagged with ai, engineering, leadership, strategy.;
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Text of the page (random words):
by taking the penalty away we tell the team out loud and then again in writing that the client is going to change their mind not that they might across our engagements it lands somewhere around 15 to 20 of built scope moving after discovery and it has been consistent enough that we now put it in the plan and price it it gets estimated funded and scheduled in the same unremarkable way that testing or deployment does once rework is sitting there as a line item instead of arriving as an incident the arithmetic flips for everyone involved a developer who starts on day one and absorbs a change three weeks later hasn t failed at anything they ve done the thing the plan said they d be doing and nobody s opening a defect against them for it stop trying to prevent change plan the rework instead the client gets velocity and something real to look at early the engineering team gets to stop being defensive those two usually get framed as a trade off one bought at the other s expense and i don t think they are they both fall out of the same decision monday call tuesday prototype the economics here have shifted recently and more than people have adjusted to our standard now is that pre sale notes early client thinking and whatever half formed ideas came out of the first conversation get turned into a running build almost straight away if a client call is confirmed for monday we aim to walk into tuesday s meeting with something they can click not slides not wireframes an actual interface with their workflow in it that s only possible because prompt to ui generation has taken the cost of a structural first draft down from about a fortnight to an afternoon five years ago let s just build it and find out was reckless advice that i would have argued against the first version is now cheap enough that not building it is the more expensive choice the bigger effect isn t the time saved though it s what it does to the conversation clients are poor at reviewing abstractions and very good at reacting to interfaces hand somebody twelve pages of requirements and you ll get typo corrections and a comment about the order of two sections put a screen in front of them with their own process half implemented and you ll get the objection that actually matters usually inside ninety seconds and usually the one that would otherwise have shown up at uat four months later with three sprints of work sitting behind it the hatched blocks are handoff debt from episode 1 drawn to scale nobody writes those days down anywhere split by volatility not by phase sequential delivery divides work up by phase design then build then test on the assumption that the dangerous variable is time work done early is work done on unstable ground so you stabilise the ground first and then walk everyone across it in single file the flaw in that is that scope isn t uniformly unstable in any feature set there are things the client will never revisit and things they ll change their mind about twice before lunch and when you treat both as equally volatile you end up parking the entire team to wait for permission that only a handful of items ever actually needed so at the end of discovery before anybody opens an editor we spend twenty minutes going over the captured scope and asking one question of each item on it if the client changed their mind about this next tuesday what would it cost us you get two variables out of that question how likely the change is and what it would cost and between them they sort the scope into four piles rather than the two people expect twenty minutes a whiteboard and the four piles that decide how your week goes quadrant the strategy what belongs here stable core build it on day one expensive to change unlikely to change the safest work in the building domain entities and relationships authentication and roles the navigation shell integration boundaries and data contracts nobody wakes up on a tuesday and decides an invoice shouldn t have a customer decide first top of the decision queue week one expensive and likely to change get these answered before friday or parallel work really is a gamble multi tenancy and data isolation immutable versions vs in place edits audit and compliance obligations how money is represented volatile edge build the seam now fill it in week three likely to change and cheap to change as long as the seam exists approval thresholds and routing notification and escalation policy pricing and fee logic field level validation partial failure behaviour put it behind configuration a feature flag or a strategy interface just build it no ceremony required cheap and settled static copy standard crud on settled entities conventional form layouts admin and housekeeping screens most of what an agent scaffolds in an afternoon the decide first pile is the one that earns the exercise there are rarely more than four or five things in it and they re the entire reason the ba keeps a ranked decision queue rather than a flat list of open questions everything else can carry on while the client is still making up their mind which is the whole trick and in fairness the only genuinely clever part of any of this day one what each stream actually does every stream launches with one deliverable for the week and one hard constraint people remember the deliverable the constraint is the part doing the work the bottom row is the one teams skip which is a shame because it s the one preventing the collision stream 1 development ux ships by friday a clickable frontend with real navigation real screens real interaction and stubbed data behind it in practice this is tuesday s prototype cleaned up and hardened into the actual product shell the guardrail the application is the design artifact designer and developer work on the same running build in the same repo in the same week and no files get exchanged so there s nothing to drift apart must not do implement volatile business rules if somebody is hardcoding an approval threshold in week one the volatility split didn t work and you ve already booked the rework stream 2 requirements ships by friday elaborated stories and rules against the stable core plus a ranked decision queue with the decide first items sitting at the top of it the guardrail the ba runs the client back and forth exactly as before review cycles still take days the stakeholder nobody mentioned still turns up in round three with opinions all of it still happens it just stops holding three other people hostage while it does must not do treat the running build as the spec once the ba starts writing down what got built rather than what was meant the model has quietly inverted itself and in my experience nobody notices for about a month stream 3 test ships by friday scenario level coverage pulled from the qa notes taken during discovery so risks boundaries and failure modes along with test data preparation and automation scaffolding the guardrail write outcomes rather than clicks a partial batch failure commits the clean rows and returns an error ledger will survive every redesign between now and the gate click upload then confirm then check the toast text will not survive the first one the suite stays scaffolding until sign off and at the gate it gets aligned to the signed requirement and locked must not do run executions against un signed off stories or unstable builds and log what comes back as defects this matters more than it sounds like it does testing against fluid requirements manufactures churn out of nothing punishes the developer for having started early and walks the blame myth straight back into a process built specifically to get rid of it of all the ways to lose this model it s the fastest three collisions three guardrails parallel work doesn t fail in unpredictable ways it fails in three recognisable ones and none of the fixes is a meeting mostly because rituals quietly decay the first time a deadline gets tight and structure doesn t three failure modes three structural answers not one of them is a standup 1 design drifting from build the designer produces screens that can t be built at a sensible cost or engineering invents patterns nobody specified drift needs distance to happen and the file exchange is where the distance comes from a figma handoff is still a handoff it just has a friendlier name put both people on the same running artifact in the same repo and whatever gap is left closes in a ten minute conversation because the thing being argued about is right there on screen and clickable 2 requirements diverging a rule lands in week three that contradicts something built in week one you can t prevent this and i d be suspicious of anyone claiming otherwise what you can do is make it visible and make it cheap which takes two things the seam so it lands somewhere editable rather than in the foundations and a broadcast rule so that any change to shared understanding gets announced on the day it s decided rather than the day it s documented silent absorption is what hurts a ba updating a story quietly because it obviously should have said that all along is how you end up with an integration surprise 3 the test suite churning qa writes step level cases against an interface that s still being designed and then rewrites the suite three times before the gate the intent never actually moved only the steps did what replaced the daily standup we don t run a daily standup across the three streams we did try and within about a fortnight it had turned into three people reporting progress to each other with nothing to decide which is a meeting i ve sat in enough times to recognise early now what we run instead is a divergence sync three times a week capped hard at twenty minutes with one question asked of each stream what changed in your understanding since we last spoke and who does it affect not progress not blockers just deltas in understanding if nothing changed that stream says so and we move on and some weeks the whole thing is over in six minutes which is a good sign rather than a wasted slot anything that can t be settled in the room goes onto the ba s decision queue for the next client session where ai actually sits running three streams in parallel used to mean roughly tripling the headcount which is why the idea stayed academic for about twenty years the pillar article split every role into three parts production memory and judgment agents have absorbed the first two judgment stayed human and named and accountable and that split is the only reason any of this is affordable now development ux coding agents scaffold the shell the crud the routing and the stub data configured with our house conventions that s most of what a week one clickable build consists of the engineer reviews it corrects it commits it and owns the commit requirements a story authoring agent drafts impact aware stories in minutes with the prior decisions already in context it also does something people reliably don t which is remember in week nine why a constraint was added in week one the ba reviews and signs off before anything enters the baseline test an agent proposes coverage from the discovery notes and flags gaps in scenario space qa reviews it prunes it and locks it later an execution agent runs the first cycle in minutes and qa validates every finding by hand the rule is the same in all three and it doesn t bend the agent drafts the human reviews and owns nothing gets into the baseline not code not a story not a test case not a test result without a named person s signature on it how teams quietly revert to the chain nobody announces they re abandoning this it decays instead in a handful of familiar ways and slowly enough that all the ceremonies stay in place while the thing underneath them stops working the design approval gate creeps back in somebody asks for sign off on screens before development carries on it sounds responsible which is exactly why it works and it rebuilds the first link of the chain a stream gets borrowed qa gets pulled onto manual regression for a different release loses two weeks of parallel prep and arrives at the gate with nothing these streams need protected capacity or they re just a diagram in a deck let s wait for the doc it ll be ready thursday it is always ready thursday for a team that spent a decade waiting waiting is the most natural thing available convergence findings get logged as defects this is the serious one and it s what the next episode is about give a developer a bug ticket every time a requirement legitimately moved and they will stop starting early not loudly and not in protest but rationally and permanently the blame myth doesn t come back through the process it comes back through the defect tracker measure the system not the people four numbers will tell you whether this is actually working if you only track one of them track the last one read the second one carefully because it s the one people get backwards you aren t aiming for zero divergence zero means the team waited which is to say you bought certainty with calendar time and then described it as discipline a stable predictable band is the healthy result and a number that swings wildly month to month usually means discovery isn t doing its job rather than that delivery isn t the fourth is the early warning system for everything else in this article if every piece of rework is going into the tracker as a defect the culture has already reverted whatever the process documentation still says the three streams don t stay aligned because the people running them coordinate especially well they stay aligned because the work got divided up so that being slightly wrong is cheap and because nobody gets punished when it happens get those two right and parallelism stops being a risk you re managing it just becomes how you work in this series the ai augmented parallel sdlc the full blueprint discovery once three parallel workstreams one gate episode 1 the handoff chain why your team is mostly paying handoff debt episode 2 the joint discovery session why five perspectives beat one requirements document next up episode 4 the quality gate and the one word that decides whether your parallel model survives its second quarter which is why convergence findings have to be logged as requirement gaps rather than defects what s the split in your current sprint how much of what you re building is genuinely volatile and how much of it has just been waiting for permission the ai augmented parallel sdlc 3 part series 1 the three parallel workstreams how design build and test start on day one without colliding 2 the handoff chain why your team is mostly paying handoff debt 3 the joint discovery session why five perspectives beat one requirements document top comments 0 subscribe personal trusted user create template templates let you quickly answer faqs or store snippets for re use submit preview dismiss code of conduct report abuse are you sure you 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