Short video introduction to my sessions at Agile Eastern Europe 2010

In about 3 weeks I'll be flying to Kiev and meeting some of the best Agilists in the planet. But it won't be just fun and games for me. I'm already stressing about my sessions.

Check out the video introduction of my sessions at Agile Eastern Europe and, while you are at it why not book your flights and hotel and joining us there?

See you at Agile Eastern Europe in Kiev!

Introduction to my sessions at Agile Eastern Europe 2010 from Vasco Duarte on Vimeo.

User Stories are representations of a conversation, not a list of requirements!

Great post by Martin Fowler about a hidden aspect of the User Story flow within a team. 

Many times I see teams that expect the Product Owner to behave just like a Requirements manager did in the past. Come up with the content, put it in the tool and stay out of the way! That's wrong!

In this article Fowler calls our attention to a key aspect of Agile SW development: the fact that it is a constantly ongoing conversation between the team (that implements) and the person/people that hold the product's vision (typically: product owner):

This notion of product owners coming up with DecreedStories is a profound misunderstanding of the way agile development should work. When we were brainstorming names at Snowbird, I remember Kent suggesting "conversational". This emphasized the fact that the heart of our thinking was of an on-going conversation between customers and developers about how a development project should proceed.

Photo credit: jakuza @ flick

Demos, not memos!

An interesting story over at 37signals' blog about a company/site that was started against someone's better judgment because the people involved saw a working version of the site not a requirements document!
My favourite quote:

1. Ideas are cheap and plentiful. Execution is hard.
2. Meetings suck.
3. Requirements documents suck.

Read it. You owe it to yourself!

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!

Only build products you would *NEED* to buy!

This may be the reason why so many people love Apple. This thing is that those that build Apple products love the products they build! If it happens to be a failure? So what? Let's build another one that will not be a failure.

Steve Jobs clearly has an influence on this culture because he did the same at Pixar!

So, in summary: the only way to build great products is to get the people that build them to be excited about the product (truly excited, not "corporatese" excited).

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...

Apple vs. Nokia, spot the differences

Being in Finland I'd love for Nokia to continue to be a big player in the mobile phone and mobile Internet access market. I lover their N810 device (just don't get why they did not put a GSM chip in it...), and have been a loyal customer of their mobile phones.

But that is about to change (and I'm not talking about me being a customer). Indeed, more and more Apple is showing Nokia how late they are to the "consumer" game and to the whole "digital life" ecosystem. It's not enough to have a product, you have to have the right product, the one your customers want. Check this article for a comparison of Nokia's and Apple's stores in London. The pictures in the post say it all...