XP doesn't help the customer

I’ve been thinking a lot about Tom Poppendiecks statement that “XP provides little information/help for the customer” to misquote him. This is so clearly bang on and explains some of the smells I’ve seen on other projects, where we’ve made it through but I felt it could have been better for the customer.

Interestingly, we had Gerard Meszaros (from Clearstream) run training courses for our customers (SPOCS) at the beginning of this project to help them identify *how* to write a story, how to write tests and how best to interact with the team. But really, there are no rules for mindfulness other than it should provide “business value” and “do the most important things first”. I’ve seen our customers struggle with those concepts and it is even harder on a project this large.

So I’m revisiting Eric Evans’ Domain Driven Design, Toms paper, agile modeling, and Managing the Unexpected with customer “mindfulness” on my mind!