Thursday, July 1, 2010

XP 2010 Session Report -- Speak Like a Native by Yours Truly co-starring Deborah Hartmann Preuss

This workshop gave people the chance to work, in teams, on a real-life design problem with a customer who doesn't "talk tech". Thanks to Deborah Hartmann Preuss for helping me run this installment--we each played the role of an annoying customer. We ran two iterations of paper-based design through acceptance testing, followed by a de-brief to share what works and what doesn't.
In this second installment of Speak Like a Native, we had a much smaller audience than I've worked with in the past... but everyone seemed to get something out of it and we decided the low turnout was actually a marketing problem. We decided it would be better to call this session "dealing with annoying customers", and to discard the Speak Like a Native analogy--it doesn't really add much to the session. We generated some great ideas for improving other session mechanics--a big visible timer, timebox warnings, and an overview of all envisioned system requirements before working on the first release. We also confirmed my previous findings--that building a toolbelt is not an important part of this workshop--but talking about tools as part of the first debrief is useful. Here are the slides we used: Speak like a Native.

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