Writing examples, take 4

Today, while starting up our fourth iteration, we again work with our examples. Our coach, Jocke Holm, is now stepping back more an more, enabling us to take more and more control. The situation is similar to being the kid learning how to walk. It is so nice to be carried around all the time but you at the same time crave the freedom of making it on your own. I salute Jocke for making it a smooth ride for us: it is not easy seeing your kids fall and hurt themselves but the hurt they feel if you haven’t allowed them to doing so under controlled situations is so much harder.

This time I had prepared myself and actually written something of a skeleton for an example. Jocke told me not to show it straight away and this was a good thing: I new some of the tweaks I wanted to catch but I still wanted to see if the guys came to the same conclusions as I did.

I then presented the guys to two of our new personas which we have developed at TUI Nordic. We have more personas but these two have very different objectives and behaviors when consuming the services we are developing for them. Together we just made some quick notations of their different needs and then we headed for the examples.

One of the guys started writing about the happy scenario and when we felt comfortable about this, I started adding some of the complexities which are necessary to exemplify the features. The guys ended up with a semi-similar example compared to my first draft. The differences were important and good.

It’s a good thing for me to do some initial drafting before discussing with the team since I then have thought of some of the most important details but it was also good to start from scratch while working together. I actually found that the scenario was not focusing on the thing I had expected and this is not the first time I find myself in this situation while working with examples. The methodology  really turns my head sometimes, making me see what the real issue is instead of assuming that the problem is how the wanted feature is as it’s explained by the customer.