I was recently able to implement a very interesting workshop “Offing the Offsite” by James Shore.

Its goal is to highlight the richness of conversation (implied to be generated by a user story in the agile mode) compared to the complexity of writing or reading a specification. I’ll summarize the exercise but I encourage you to go see James Shore’s page. He provides all the elements in PDF, as well as a scenario. We give half the participants an A4 sheet with a convoluted drawing, and ask them to write the specification that will allow this drawing to be created. 10 minutes pass, we call the other half of the participants and ask them to execute the specifications, they have 10 minutes. In exercise 2 we take care to change the convoluted drawings. Then we ask people to describe to their partner, through conversation, the specifications of the drawing. The “developers” naturally cannot see the drawing (10 minutes again). Unsurprisingly we will perceive the obvious richness of oral communication in the form of conversation, compared to the cold nature of a written document (I also refer here to the diagram proposed by Scott Ambler shown above).

On the second one it’s even more striking (by clicking on the images, you can get the full-size versions). I had to adjust the brightness or contrasts to bring out the lines (hence the smudgy effect…)

During this session I was able to bring out two pitfalls present during the written specifications phase that disappeared with conversation: terminology problems (“but what did he mean by that???”), imbalance problems between the over-quality of certain elements: we apply ourselves to do something we think we understood, and the absence of elements that we omitted. Conversation allows reformulation if there’s a terminology problem. It also allows us to say: “that’s good, that’s enough, no need to go that far”, and “you forgot this or that”. It’s obvious but always very instructive.

Elementary my dear Watson.