Fireside Chat #47: Are technical and business stories a false dichotomy?

At Codurance, our MDs Sandro Mancuso, Mashooq Badar and José Huerta regularly meet for informal chats after work. These discussions, where they share their personal insights, form the basis of our Fireside Chats, which you can find on our YouTube Channel.

This episode focused on the supposed or even false dichotomy between technical stories and business stories. Sandro, Mash and José discussed about how development teams contrast between business and technical stories.

Mash offered this example: “If you should compare software as a construction, it’s building the next feature in the most straightforward way possible and the quickest way possible. And often what happens is that the pressure from the business is so much that when we start de-prioritising the direct technical work, we are building one feature after the next without worrying about the structural integrity of the software and the systems that we are producing.”

Jose added: “There's a perception that technical work is not part of the business work. And vice versa like the business is not also a technical link. And I think this is a communication problem as well that goes beyond how you define it or whether you're using backlogs or not.”

The trio also discussed communicating the business value of the things that teams have to do, business protocols, measuring defects and trends on those defects or how the system goes down, complex systems, the idea of experimentation and hypotheses and the perception of value to the business.