Rely on assessment when evaluating future solutions

During a planning game session, the team came across a technical requirement that called for replacing a service with another one based on a different technology.

While estimating the complexity of the story, developers raised and debated around various kinds of conceptual issues. Given that this was a pervasive service used in many places spread over several projects, the discussion could have easily bogged down under the weight of the problem of how to deal with all the clients of the code.

This issue indeed was briefly mentioned, but the discussion did not stumbled too much over it because one of the developers said: "That is a non-issue: we simply create a checker for it, and we ensure that we solve all occurrences through our daily assessment process". The discussion then continued to focus on the important conceptual issues.

Assessment should not be passive. When used right, it offers the tools to shape the future of your project.