I recently encountered a situation where we had three development teams working on the same product. Two separate clients that were supposed to act as one had jointly financed the project and were planning to individually sell it to educational institutions in their respective states (Texas and New Mexico). Needless to say the goal of acting as one never happened and conflicting requirements became the norm. Conversations were not working as the clients could not agree amongst themselves; prioritization wasn’t working as the clients had different short-term needs and were afraid that the other client’s needs would be given preference.

The Product Owners produced stories that followed the: “As an [actor], I have to do [action] to cause [effect] in order to achieve [business goal]” format. But this did little good for the team as they are not collocated and had a difficult time getting clarifications and details from the Product Owners. The result was significant in-iteration thrashing and a velocity that was close to negligible.

A “Come to Jesus” meeting, where being brutally honest about the observed behavior and its impact on the teams and on project progress, helped change the dynamics. Of course, losing the clients was a very real possibility but it was worthwhile taking the risk — we weren’t making any headway the way we were operating.

To reduce requirements churn, we decided that before the start of an iteration, candidate stories must meet the following criteria if they were to be scheduled for the upcoming iteration:

1. Stories defined in the Agile project management tool
2. Acceptance criteria specified
3. Fitnesse tests / executable requirements specified
4. UI design/storyboards completed
5. Applicable business rules listed and referenced or defined
6. Non-functional requirements specified
7. Assumptions and constraints specified
8. In/out of scope delineated
9. Test data / sample files provided

This level of upfront definition for a story before the start of an iteration is definitely an overkill in most situations. But Agile is all about “the art of the possible” to get the job done; it just made sense to go counter to an important Agile principle (customer collaboration and face-to-face conversations) to get things back on track.

What ultimately matters is a pragmatic outlook — sometimes you have to bend the rules or even break them to move forward. A good coach can guide you during these rare but crucial moments.