Monitoring Requirements Volatility

[Pete Jones]

I am all for evolving requirements as we develop, learning as we go in order to produce the best possible product to meet our users needs.  For me this evolution is about adding detail as we learn.

I am currently trying to deal with a mindset that seems entrenched in waterfall behavior where the requirements themselves are evolving even whilst a story is being developed and delivered. This feels like the business is moving the goal posts. Clearly, there is a level of change which makes any estimate or commitment worthless.

My feeling is that we have an underlying issue related to mindset or perhaps more significantly the behavior we are seeing indicates that we do not really have a team (we do have some issues in the relationship between the business guys and the developers)

Is there a mechanism whereby I can be notified of changes of content, for example, after estimation.so that I can take a view of the materiality of the change and if appropriate try to bring the people involved closer together?

Pete

[Joe Pitt]

If you have notifications for editing the issue you should get notified. The downside is you'll probably get many more than you want to. If you only want notifications on a few fields you can remove them from the edit screen and only allow them to be updated via a transition. create a new notification event and fire that event in the post function of the transition. Set that notification event to notify you and any others that want to know when those fields are updated. 

[Pete Jones]

Thanks Joe, I will sleep on that one and then have a go in the morning.  I will let you know how I do.  It is a good approach though.

Based on your comments I am wondering if it might be better to use a transition when a ticket is estimated and make it harder to change the business requirements once there is a developer commitment. 

Not so agile, I do feel the need to move on from my current "everything is fluid all of the time" situation, if only to get people collaborating rather than blindly dumping stuff in the tool.