Hang on to your users!

Tom Breur

6 July 2014

Agile methods like Scrum or XP center around the notion of collaboration. From Scrum we ‘inherited’ the explicit notion that our customer should “speak with a single voice”, i.e. you want to avoid putting developers in an awkward position of contending with conflicting requests and priorities.

By funneling the broader set of needs and requirements through a centralized prioritization mechanism, you avoid multi-tasking, and you also ensure that everybody on the team is working on the most important/valuable features.

Sometimes your Product Owner (or “Customer” in XP) is intimately familiar with business practices and needs. Sometimes he might want some help in a workshop like setting to flesh out the “why” behind requests. Collaborative specification ‘works’ because you leverage the collective brain of all stakeholders present. It also helps to ensure that everyone on the team understands the business requirements in the same way.

Both the Product Owner and end-users (domain experts) in collaborative sessions have an important role to play. The Product Owner ensures that the Stories chosen for this Sprint (“iteration” in XP) are indeed the ‘top’ priority. Only the Product Owner is in a position to judge that within the wider business context.

End-users contribute by providing more in-depth knowledge, and first hand experience, on how features will return value to the business. So keep everyone ‘on board’, as I pointed out in an earlier post. The people closest to day-to-day business are the ones who are in the best position to drive value to the business, our “number one priority” (Agile Manifesto).