Agile is about customer delight

Today on twitter I got into an interesting conversation with @jeffpatton. The discussion was about whether Agile, as a family of methodologies and a value system is (or isn't) directed at customer delight.

@JeffPatton's point was that it is not. Here's one of his replies to me on this subject:


Later on during the day I had a face to face conversation with @mvonweiss and tried to crystalize in my mind why I disagreed with @jeffpatton. And the point is this: I believe that one of the core values in Agile is exactly about customer delight.The third value of Agile reads that Customer Collaboration is a preferred way to work in a software project. That customer collaboration is there for a reason.



The idea is that only through dialogue with the customer can we understand their needs. That is achieved by having close and continuous dialogue with the customer and through the delivery of software early and often (see principles 1, 3 and 4, for example). This continuous delivery of a working product builds the feedback loops we need. These feedback loops are directed specifically at providing an opportunity for the customer to interface with the team and help us understand what needs to be changed in order to provide, you guessed it: Customer Delight!

Real customer involvement patterns

Of course, there are many different types of projects that we work on. Custom software, Integration projects, shrink wrapped software, web-sites, etc. All of these projects have different "distances" to the customer (see figure below). But those distances can be bridged with many techniques so that the Agile values and principles are still applied and we can still get feedback early and often.



I've worked on many projects of the shrink-wrapped kind where we have teams working in an organization away from the customers (consumers). In these cases, interacting with "all" customers is impossible. But we already have many techniques that help us understand our customers better even when we can't be in direct contact! For example: customer surveys, usability testing, requirement exploration techniques, user persona development, etc.

Some people in the Agile community have been pushing us to consider these methods, David Hussman (@davidhussman) is but one example, but there are many more (including @jeffpatton, of course).

If @jeffpatton's point is to emphasize the need to consider the customer more fully in Agile projects, then I am in total agreement. But one thing is for sure, Agile methods are much more directed at Customer Delight than many of the other methods available today.

Another post in favor of another User Story format

Some time ago I wrote a post supporting the idea of a new template for the User Story. In that post I tried to explain why we should bring the "value" (because) clause to the fore, to make it the most important clause of the User Story template.

Then John Arrowwood commented on that post and made a reasonable argument to stick to the "old" (or traditional) format for User Stories.

This is a second post in defense of the new template, where I try to explain why the "value" clause in the user story should be brought to the fore, to be the most important clause in the User Story. Here's the template I propose:

• In order to "benefit/why/value"
  
• As a "user role"
  
• I want "feature/functionality"
  

Although I don't see any logical flaw in John's argument I don't agree with it. The reason is that in reality I don't see that people understand the ultimate goal of the User Story which is to justify every functionality in terms of what value it brings to the user.

No matter how much we stress the need to have the "value" properly described I don't see anyone (literally) using it. Normally the User Story writer will not understand the real "value" for the user before I do the 5 why analysis on the "feature" so that the person understands the deep reason why that "feature" is valuable to the user.

I also see that people don't spend anytime writing the "value" part of the clause, they tend to use banalities and obvious things. Writing an obvious "value"-clause delivers zero value when communicating the user story. Remember that it is the "unexpected" and "non-obvious" that actually delivers value, because it contains information that was not obvious to the reader.

Here's an example: everybody knows that as a user of Yahoo! e-mail client I want to save emails sent and received because I may want to return to some business-critical information later on, what not everybody knows is that as a Gmail user I prefer not to have a folder structure to archive old e-mails because it's easier to search than to create a folder system for archiving.

If you take as value the "archiving" then you will create a stupid folder structure for people to be able to "store" old e-mails. However if you take the "finding easily a relevant e-mail" as the value people are looking for, you may start to think twice and ask yourself if all users (all over the globe) are really librarians that think in archive-system terms. Guess not.

When you write a User Story start from the value. Always. No Exception. Ever. Start by asking yourself what does the user/customer really want to do. I mean really! (hint: seldom customers are happy with just using your product, they normally want to accomplish something!)

The value part of the User Story should be the non-obvious part of that value, the obvious explanation for a User Story does not deliver any information to the person downstream that will read the story and have to implement it.

I don't expect everybody to understand this, then again I don't expect all companies to create great products.

Learning to be better is not mandatory. Then again, neither is survival...

Apple on unfair claims in advertising

Part of being a cool company is that you respect your customers. This is not a show of respect by Apple. Seriously, this is just used car salesman tactics. Apple, shape up!

Why Apple should watch out or lose it's newly acquired customers

Apple had a considerable amount of credibility when they started they iPod "offensive" some years ago. So much credibility that people were willing to overlook critical customer-back stabbing such as the iTunes being DRM ridden, the iTV (ooops, apple TV) being more expensive in Europe even if there's no content for it at all in most countries (seriously!) or even the latest MobileMe quality problems, not to mention the least than honest statement by Apple about the "push" feature in MobileMe.

Now, they've stooped to a new low. They have started outright lying (or "hiding the details" if you listen to PR).

Apple, come on! We love your products, but there's only so much back-stabbing we can take! Get your act together and start honoring your promises of creating great products for those of us that have a "digital life". Seriously, our patience is running out...