A Practical Exercise

Form 2 groups of 5 people each group.

• 2 end users
• 2 developers
• 1 product owner

Each group will build an internal Calendar for a fictitious company. One group will build a physical calendar and the other group will build an electronic calendar.

The exercise starts with a quick customer interview between the Product Owner and the two users. The Product Owner will ask questions on how the users would like the Calendar to be (4 minutes) 

The development starts with a meeting where the Product Owner describe the vision for the product for the 2 developers (3 minutes meeting).

The first Sprint starts with an Improvements meeting. The two developers describe the first feature each one would like to implement first. The Product Owner and the 2 users will vote with thumbs up or thumbs down in each developer's task. (2 minutes per developer)

In case of a thumbs down, the person that vote negatively will justify the vote. Than each person can reply the justification and than the group votes again. If the thumb down persists, the Product Owner decides if the feature will be implemented or not by the developer that proposed the feature. (4 minutes per negative vote)

The developers start to implement their tasks. They choose one feature to develop first and they pair develop both features. (4 minutes each task). For the electronic calendar they can build just the wireframe.

The Product Owner can spend the development time researching about similar products already available and others ideas on how to implement the product. Also can keep interviewing the end users or answering developer's questions.

The developers provides the features for the users to use the calendar with real data. The developers and the Product Owner observe the users using the features. (3 minutes)

After the usability session, the developers and the Product Owner can make questions and the users can provide comments on their use of the features.

The second Sprint now starts with the Improvements meeting again. All the process above is repeat until satisfactory.