Are you on a team that struggles with getting the right level of clarity when you’re generating Acceptance Criteria for your Product Backlog Items? You’re not alone. I see a number of teams (new and seasoned) that still struggle with Acceptance Criteria. One thing that I found can help is a game I created called The Imperfection of Language. It teaches a team how to have better conversations by taking a closer look at what they wrote down when they produced their Acceptance Criteria.
How It Works
After a team has captured their Acceptance Criteria for a Product Backlog Item (user story, spike, retrospective action item,…), they self-organize into pairs or triples and go on a hunt for vague words and phrases in what they generated. For example, can you spot the vague words and phrases in the following sentences.
- Test screen load times.
- Research the new services.
- Get stories to test earlier.
While vague words can provide a nice open slate when it comes time for a team to develop a solution, they can also be a dose of ambiguity that hampers the team’s ability to be successful.
This is where the concept of the Imperfection of Language shows up. The phrases above are sentences. They are grammatically correct. The words are spelled right. They could be considered “perfect”. The language, however, might contain imperfections from a Scrum perspective because it may not provide the right detail for the team. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we need to be perfect in our wording. I’m saying that we should learn to celebrate these imperfections when we see them. They are the gifts that will lead us to better conversations.
Here’s what a team might flag as the vague words from the above phrases.
- TEST screen load times.
- RESEARCH the new services.
- Get stories to test EARLIER.
After the small groups debrief what they found, they go back to behaving like a single team and walk through the imperfect language item by item together. I teach them to ask each other things like “are we aligned on what X means” or “what is our assumption about X”. If they all feel that they’re aligned and no rogue assumptions emerge, then the level of detail is probably OK. When a team isn’t aligned on their assumptions, you’ll see questions start to emerge.
- How will we measure screen load times?
- What questions do we have about the services?
- What’s the earliest we could get a story to test?
The emergence of questions from the vague words and phrases signals that there are probably good conversations that we still need to have. When the team steps into those conversations, they are championing their own ability to reduce ambiguity and replace it with more clarity.
Wrapping Up
The Imperfection of Language game isn’t something I use with all teams. Some teams already do a great job of having the right discussions. Where it plays well is when a team is rushing to size Product Backlog Items or they’re having conversations that don’t reveal the dependencies, uncertainty, and complexities hidden in the work.
The Imperfection of Language game can help a team learn “how explicit” they need to be in order to improve their likelihood of being successful together. The answer for each team is unique, but it always lies in the spectrum between extreme ambiguity (too loose) and extreme detail (too tight). When teams get aligned on their Goldilocks Zone for having effective conversations, their world will get BETTER. 🙂
Let me know if you have any comments or questions. You can reach out to me via email at FrankS@FreeStandingAgility.com.
Thank you for reading.
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