The Agile Samurai

Enter the Inception Deck

The inception deck (Figure 2, ​The Inception Deck​) is your flashlight for dispelling the mist and mystery around your agile project. It’s a collection of ten tough questions and exercises you’d be crazy not to do and ask before starting any project.

Figure 2. The Inception Deck

We used it often at ThoughtWorks to cover an area of project initiation that agile methods like Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum were silent on—project chartering. We knew heavy six-month analysis and requirements-gathering exercises weren’t the way to go, but we didn’t have any lightweight alternatives. It was in this spirit that Robin Gibbons ...