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copied!<p>There is a real tension between Scrum and other agile dev methodologies and spec writing. I think there are two big points of tension:</p> <ol> <li><p>Because agile says everything should be on an index card, that means you have to have stuff planned out enough to <em>fit</em> on an index card. (E.g. you have to know how it's all going to work.)</p></li> <li><p>Some things don't make sense in isolation (what's the use of an upload file page without a manage uploaded files page, for instance.)</p></li> </ol> <p>You don't have to design the whole app all at once, but you have to have a vision of the whole app. Then, especially if you have a separation of designers and programmers, you do functional design for a sprint-sized chunk at a time. Those designs then have to be broken down to story-sized chunks. </p> <p>This is a lot of up front functional design, and I think that's overlooked in a lot of the talk about agile methodologies. Perhaps some shops have the devs do more of the design. Also, I think it's a lot easier to use scrum/agile for making changes/bug fixes to existing apps rather than building new ones.</p> <p>The thing I've found most helpful is to fight back on story size. A lot of organizations have gone crazy, saying stories need to be only a few hours. The original scrum book says 16 hours, I think, which is often large enough to fit an entire screen of a web app. So "implement manage my account" could be a story (as opposed to the hundreds-of-tiny-stories approach of "implement username", "implement password" etc.) Then reference your design doc for "Manage My Account" and make sure to have word-perfect screenshots/prototype/mockup so the dev can look at them and copy/paste the text directly into the code they're writing, and they know for sure which fields need to be there (or which links, or which pictures, or whatever).</p>

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