A scrum team has many decisions to make, all the time. Should we focus on usability or new features? Should we fix the bugs that are driving our current customers crazy or develop the new features that will help us land the next big customer? Should we use PHP or Ruby on Rails? There is a lot of pressure to make the best decision, the choice that results in the most valuable result. Something many people miss, is that when we make the decision will often impact the value of the result. Should we make the decision now? Or wait a bit and keep our options open? One of the sessions I led at Agile Open Northwest was titled “When Should We Decide?” and it examined this very question.
We explored the idea, using a simple casino game. Each player places a single $2 bet on the outcome of two coin flips. The choices are: heads-heads, heads-tails, tails-heads, and tails-tails. If the player guesses right, the house pays $8, otherwise the player is paid nothing.
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