Part 2 of my series on Iterative Delivery
Congratulations, you have a goal! Now what?
Now, it is time to write down what your goal means to you. What measurable things will be true about your system by the time you achieve your goal. What measurable things will be false?
Picking measurable characteristics allows you to iterate towards the goal.
Each one should be 1-2 sentences; short enough that you can still explain them quickly and long enough to remove most ambiguity.
For example, if you are attracting clients that are 10x the size you are used to supporting, a good goal would be something like: We should be able to support clients of any size!
Your characteristics would be something like:
- Pages in the UI render the same for any size client. The site should never be ponderous or slow.
- API endpoints respond to requests the same amount of time for clients of any size.
- Backend processes always complete fast enough that the customer doesn’t notice them.
Like goal setting, you don’t need to know how to achieve your characteristics. They still don’t need to be achievable!
You need a general idea of how you will measure the characteristics, but you don’t have to measure or set up measurement tools before proceeding:
Pages in the UI render the same for any size client. The site should never be ponderous or slow.
Page rendering time can be measured with tools like Chrome’s Lighthouse and network logs.
You should come up with 3-10 characteristics before moving on to the next step, implications.
