How Visualisation Can Help to Achieve a Common Understanding
The story of how visualisation helped in stressful times.
Software development can be stressful. It can be hard to keep track of all the moving parts. As a result, parts are put together that don't work.
This is the story of such a situation and how a common understanding helped us to reduce the risks.
A Standup Full of Information
Stand-up on a Thursday morning:
Frontend: The release candidate (RC) for the next scheduled release next week is ready for testing.
Backend for Frontend (BFF): The status of the corresponding RC is unknown.
Another Backend (from another team): A new release should be in production by now, but it hasn't passed acceptance testing and will be moved to Sunday.
A developer is working on a fix for a important production bug in the BFF that needs to be released as soon as possible. His fix currently relies on the upcoming Another Backend release.
The developer decides to implement a hotfix that works now and can be released tomorrow. The fix that works with the new version of Another Backend can be released on Sunday.
This and other information is given verbally.
What exactly is going on? How is it all connected? What is needed from whom and when? These were the questions that ran through my mind after the standup was over.
Should We Do Something?
I trust the people around me to do a good job.
I felt I couldn't do a good job if I didn't understand the situation. I like to know how testing can help. I want to reduce the risks that exist when there is no overview. I want to make sure that we have a common understanding. I want to make sure that we are putting the right pieces together.
So I shared my concerns with the team and we brought together the people we needed to gather that information.
Achieving a Common Understanding
It turned out that there was no common understanding of what was going to happen in the coming days. After several minutes of discussion, some things were clarified and others were left open.
I began to visualise my understanding of the situation and shared it with the other participants. Together we worked on this visualisation until everyone agreed that this is what we wanted to happen.
Thanks to the visualisation, we were able to point at things, see dependencies and the flow of time. It was much easier for us to have a discussion and make sure that everyone was on the same page.
Now that we had a plan, we also knew what everyone's responsibilities were. We knew when certain tasks needed to be done and what the dependencies were.
This plan allowed us to do a good job.
I felt the need to do something different and tried a new format with this post: telling a story.
Perhaps one day you will find yourself in a similar situation and this story will remind you of a possible solution to make things better.
Happy visualising,
Florian