The customer is part of the team

Most software tools and project management tools focus on those doing the work or those who manage them. These tools deal with requirements, milestones, track hours and have a lot of reporting functionality. But, is that enough?

Involving the customer

The customer is not only the one who orders the software under development. Neither is he the one who is just interested in getting it done on time and on budget.

The customer is the person who has a vision, expectations, and is a valuable source for feedback. Smart teams want him involved and in Extreme Programming people have gone so far to have him sit amongst the developers day in, day out.

In Caimito One Team we have implemented a number of things to help a customer or stakeholder to become involved - even over the distance.

Voting is the most democratic form of involvement

In Agile development requirements are captured in many little user stories that usually describe an objective, the expected outcome or the reason for the objective and include a role. Such a user story can look like the following examples:

As a user I want to cast my vote on issues so that my favorite issues get resolved faster

As a traveler I want to reserve a car and get a confirmation message sent to my cellphone so that I don't have to carry a printout with me when I show up at the car rental agency counter

In Agile software development you assign a business value to stories so that you can sort them and work on the most important stories first. That might be something like Business Critical, Important, Nice to Have, Just an Idea. That helps, but you set the business value usually once when you capture the story and maybe once in a while you talk to your customer and modify business values on some stories because he explains to you that it had changed. We think that's not enough.

Sort by importance

In Caimito One Team user stories get sorted by importance. Importance is defined as a combination of business value and votes cast for a story by stakeholders. If a story is Business Critical and has many votes, then it truly is a critical one. If it was deemed to be Business Critical but has no votes, then you can safely put it further down in your backlog.

People change their mind

What about stories that have been deemed as just an idea and suddenly stakeholders start voting on them? Caimito One Team alerts the Product Owner of this "someone has changed their mind" event: the story in question gets displayed in the backlog with a red background. As Product Owner you now now that you should call the customer to figure out more details and reprioritize the story.

Caimito One Team highlights stories with business values of Nice to Have and Just and Idea, if these stories start receiving votes.

Always work in order of importance

When stories are moved into the current iteration after estimating and planning has been done, they maintain their order. Although team members can't see how many votes a story got from stakeholders, a story with more votes on it than another with the same business value still is kept on the top of the iteration backlog. That way a disciplined team will deliver the most important solution first, which makes stakeholders happy.