The Empirical Manifesto - taking continuous improvement seriously
Recently I have been using the scientific method in a small team in a large program. When I say using it I mean all the time. Previously I paid lip service to an empirical approach, but I decided to make it the base of everything the team do. In this I was quite lucky that the team I'm in were keen and immediate management didn't resist. I am working in an environment where we are a snow-plough for a whole program. We don't know what does work, wont work, how to do things, where to sit etc. May sound familiar. Our response was to Guess, Test and Refine really rapidly. Scrum says Inspect and Adapt, but this is not enough, in fact it isn't science. This is one of the reasons I was not getting hard evidence for what I was doing and sometimes had to persuade stakeholders to go along with what the team were saying - "Just trust us, we've done this many times before". Clearly this is subjective and open to challenge and rightly so. It often means change