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Monday, August 25, 2003
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PleasingTheCustomer |
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All agile methods stress the importance of direct interaction between the developers of a system and customers who are its eventual beneficiaries. The agile manifesto said "Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project", which is there to stress the high frequency of interaction. Extreme Programming stresses this through its practice of OnsiteCustomer.
The main reason people give for this is that it improves communication of requirements. As the manifesto says: "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation." Interactive communication can avoid much of the misunderstanding that arises from documents or intermediaries.
But I think these arguments, while valid, have missed another vital reason for direct developer-customer interaction - enjoyment.
Immediately I can hear many people wondering who cares about whether developers enjoy their jobs. Actually I think it's very important. A team that's enjoying their work is a team that's motivated to do good work. In raw business terms, this translates to much higher productivity and better value for your development budget. I've always argued that development managers should devote a good proportion of their energy figuring out how to motivate and energize a development team.
One way to do this is to connect developers to customers. Every developer I know enjoys seeing his work used and valued. There's nothing more satisfying than having a customer tell you how your software makes her job more enjoyable, or have a business tie software to revenue. If all of you see of the customers is intermediaries, or worse still documents, then that motivational link is broken. |
[Martin Fowler's Bliki]
This is interesting to read from the point of a view of the contact between the developers and the customers. I like to think that I'm good at passing along the motivational feedback, but I am sure there are things and pieces of information I miss. Hhhmm...
9:24:59 PM 
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| UseCasesAndStories |
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What is the difference between UseCases and XP's stories?
This is a common question, and not one that has a generally agreed on answer. Many people in the XP community consider stories to be a simplified form of use cases, but although I used to hold this view I see things differently now.
Use cases and stories are similar in that they are both ways to organize requirements. They are different in that they organize for different purposes. Use cases organize requirements to form a narrative of how users relate to and use a system. Hence they focus on user goals and how interacting with a system satisfies the goals. XP stories (and similar things, often called features) break requirements into chunks for planning purposes. Stories are explicitly broken down until they can be estimated as part of XP's release planning process. Because these uses of requirements are different, heuristics for good use cases and stories will differ.
The two have a complex correlation. Stories are usually more fine-grained because they have to be entirely buildable within an iteration (one or two weeks for XP). A small use case may correspond entirely to a story; however a story might be one or more scenarios in a use case, or one or more steps in a use case. A story may not even show up in a use case narrative, such as adding a new asset depreciation method to a pop up list.
Do you need to do both? As in many things, in theory you do but in practice you don't. Some teams might use use cases early on to build a narrative picture, and then break down into stories for planning. Others go direct to stories. Others might just do use cases and annotate the use case text to show what features get done when | [Martin Fowler's Bliki]
9:19:58 PM
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Scott, can we use this?
NUnit v2.1 RC1 was released last night on SourceForge. From the release documentation:
* Support for the .NET framework versions 1.0 and 1.1
* The ability to run test suites across multiple assemblies
* New TestFixtureSetup and TestFixtureTeardown attributes
* Improvements to the GUI interface
* New command line switches for both GUI and Console runners
* Some degree of integration with Visual Studio
* Tests now execute in the same order as they are displayed in the gui.
* Substantial improvements in error and exception reporting.
* Now runs on Windows 98 [Darrell Norton's Blog]
9:11:16 PM
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I came across this article http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1023750,00.asp today that discusses IT Business Analyst positions, which is an area I’m really interested in. I like this description of the position/title:
Just what is an IT business analyst? In general terms, an IT business analyst acts as a liaison between non-IT employees who have a business problem to solve and the IT department, which is charged with finding the solution. Ideally, an IT business analyst is both tech-savvy and a great communicator because these two sides of a company often speak very different languages.
In addition to defining business problems, IT business analysts must be able to collaborate across divisions to build consensus about requirements, apply metrics and perform modeling to work out solutions, experts say.
8:39:30 PM
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This eve I went by to pick up some library books for tomorrow nights volunteering at the children’s home. Each month we read a book or two, do a craft and then have snacks. The kids are 7-10 year olds who have been removed. It's such a treat for me to get to do this 'cause it means reading through tons of children's books to find the perfect 1-2 to plan an evening around. I ended up going with a "Magician" theme and thought we could make construction-paper Wizard hats for the craft.
It reminded me of those mid-year goals. I definitely need to get busy on writing a children’s book. I’ve had trouble starting projects lately. Most people have trouble with completion and I’m pretty much the opposite.
8:29:45 PM
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The past couple of weeks one of my best friends has been computerless. Since we're 16 hours apart and we both dislike the phone (well, for conversations over 5 minutes), she's resorted to sending me letters. I had forgotten how exciting it is to get a real letter in the mail. To see the handwriting and drawn smiley faces rather than emoticons. And at the bottom she had to the side "B/F/F/E". She and I have been very close since elementary school together so we had hundreds and hundreds of notes/letters growing up, but it was a nice sentiment to see again. It's warming to know someone that you trust loves you tons to still call you their best friend.
7:39:24 PM
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More Adventures in Homebuying. Expect to spend a lot settling into your house.
More for my adventures in preparing to search for my first home.
5:11:45 PM
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Scott, you should do this again. They offer a discount.
ejection Hurts. Most common reasons people are denied credit and what you can do. [The Motley Fool]
5:11:06 PM
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Sometimes it's overwhelming to think about all of the possibilities that lie ahead of us. It can sometimes be easy to be caught up in the moment or to focus on the annoyance that get tossed our way. But, if you are able to focus on the things that exist for you to become or do or see or be…it’s amazing.
8:59:01 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Rebecca Schwoch.
Last update: 2/8/2005; 2:13:30 PM.
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