Communicating with your non-Agile co-workers

I read a nice post by Jurgen Appelo today on communication.

The money quote: "Real communication includes making sure that the meaning that is assigned to a message is the same on both sides."

This is something that we've struggled with quite a bit. My team, which uses Agile methods and terminology, has stumbled many times when talking to our customer--the Test Engineering team.

I think the biggest problem has been with the definition of "done." The software that we write is used internally. As is common with internal tools, there is a desire to say something is done as soon as it hits the bare minimum of functionality/usability and move on to solving the next problem.

We don't do it that way. We expect our code to be tested, robust, and maintainable before we call it done. Several times over that last 3 years we've put up prototypes of tools that did have the bare minimum of functionality and usability. Then people were surprised when we said there was more work to do and that it wasn't finished yet.