James Shore: Agile Book Club: Customer Involvement

In an Agile team, on-site customers—team members with the skill to represent customer, user, and business interests—are responsible for prioritizing stories and communicating requirements. It’s a big responsibility. In this book club session, we examine what it takes to succeed.

Reading:
📖 The Planning Game
📖 Real Customer Involvement
📖 Incremental Requirements

🎙 Discussion prompts:

• Agile is all about feedback and direct communication. What’s your organization’s approach to stakeholder feedback, and how has that helped or hindered your team?

• The book describes several different types of development, such as platform development, in-house development, vertical-market development, and horizontal-market development. Which does your team do, and how does it affect your approach to stakeholder feedback and involvement?

• Story planning—“the planning game”—is a meant to be a collaboration between people with customer and engineering perspectives. How have you seen that work, or not work, in practice?

• On-site customers are supposed to act as “living requirements documents” for the team, answering questions and providing details right when they’re needed. How does your team approach requirements, and how would you change it?

About the Book Club

The Art of Agile Development Book Club takes place Fridays from 8:00 – 8:45am Pacific. Each session uses an excerpt from the new edition of my book, The Art of Agile Development, as a jumping-off point for a wide-ranging discussion about Agile ideas and practices.

Visit the event page for more information, including an archive of past sessions. For more about the book, visit the Art of Agile Development home page.