magine a project team of between fifteen and four hundred people. There are user representatives, analysts, programmers, database designers, and testers, arranged in a pipeline. The user analysts talk to the users, and then to the analysts, who write down user stories. The analysts write lots of notes on each user story, since it will be a full iteration or two before any programmer will pick up the user story. The notes are between one and ten pages long. Eventually, a programmer picks up a user story along with the supplemental details, code them up in an iteration, integrate them into the growing code base, and mark their velocity. In the same or a later iteration the database designers do the same. Eventually the integration test team comes along, runs tests on the whole thing, and feeds bug reports back into the programmers’ work queues. The users or project sponsors may see the outcome every few months if they are lucky.
