Comments on: Avoid the Abilene Paradox

By: How to use outside-in development to deal with the Abilene Paradox | outside-in-thinking

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 12:16:50 +0000

[...] In a recent post, Scott Sehlorst at TynerBlain discussed the Abilene Paradox (see Jonathan Babcock’s post on this as well). [...]

By: Scott Sehlhorst

Scott Sehlhorst — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 03:03:00 +0000

Thanks Tac and Carl! Make sure that Jonathan gets most of the credit – he wrote about the idea, I just tacked on a couple things about use cases and stakeholders.

By: Carl Kessler

Carl Kessler — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 17:37:20 +0000

This is a great way to describe a real problem – one that is often associated with a lack of formality in requirements assessment. One problem is, the more formal the requirements tracking, the less agile it can feel to the dev team. In the outside-in approach to software development, John Sweitzer and I described techniques that specifically address the Abilene Paradox (although we didn’t use that colorful name for it!).

We start with understanding WHO your project’s stakeholders really are. That tells you whose requirements to even consider. Then we suggest ways to prioritize them, using a tool we call the Stakeholder Goals Map. This approach also allows us to deal with changes over the course of a project: changing requirements (yes that happens!) and changing constraints (like budgets). Read more at http://outside-in-thinking.com/?p=50

By: Tac Anderson

Tac Anderson — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 17:23:18 +0000

Great article. This was pretty meaty for a blog post. I actually read it twice to take it all in.

How much easier would our jobs be and how many less meetings would we be sitting in if people just stated what their *real* goals were?