Release 2: the NoVNoS framework...too radical?

What about the NoVNoSNoP (No Value - No Story - No Product) approach? Would that be too radical?

I am spending a bit more time going over the case study I will present on the 25th November at XP Day 2004, and frankly, I can see some real added value in what we managed to achieve during this project.

For those who cannot attend the conference, here is in substance what I demonstrate:

Because our IT function declared it was "Agile", the "Business" thought they could throw anything at it and magically transform it into golden outcome. In other words "we don't really know what we want, we don't really know how much value there is in there, we don't really know if it plays towards our strategic corporate goal... but, we know how much budget we can give you (with capitalisation vs revenue split!!!), and how long you have to do it.

Whoah! Wait a minute, that just does not work!

XP states (sorry, most of XP practitioners state) that XP is really good at delivering business value... well, sorry, but this is completely wrong.

XP is really, really, really good at delivering the value which has been built into the story pack. If the story pack or basket is full of stories that deliver virtually no value to the business, then XP will be really, really, really good at delivering nothing at all (apart from good quality software).

Now, let's imagine a world where no XP team would start delivering before the value in the pack of stories is in line with the strategic corporate goals, and that the overall value of this pack is to a level satisfying strategic milestone objectives. That would be a good idea... I think.

One way of ensuring that companies build this story pack value the as efficently as possible may be to apply the NoVNoSNoP principle.

ONLY WRITE STORIES THAT DO CARRY VALUE (this is to be moderated by the fact that there are Minimum Marketable Features that might not carry any value but still need to be story boarded).

I have managed to apply this principle to one of my projects, with distrurbing results. If you want to know more, please visit the http://www.xpday.org/ website (session slides section), and download the eXtreme Analysis slides.