Programmers are from Mars, Customers are from Venus: A Practical Guide to Working With Customers on Agile Projects

Angela Martin (Martin IT Consulting Limited), Robert Biddle (Carleton University), James Noble (Victoria University of Wellington)

Tutorials · Customer

Tuesday, 14:00, 3 hours 30 minutes | Renaissance East

This interactive and informative tutorial will introduce you to practices that will increase the effectiveness of the customer on your XP project. Customers have one of the most complex and difficult roles on a project, yet XP includes very few practices that support the customer in their role; the aim of this tutorial is to change that.

Over the last three years, we have investigated many projects around the world to identify how customers succeed in this complex and difficult task; discovering not what people think should have happened, but what really happened and what actually worked! This tutorial distills this research, grounded in practical experience, into a 3 hour session, so that by the end of this tutorial you will have gained:

• A realistic understanding of the complexity and difficulty of the XP Customer role.
• An understanding of the key roles required on a customer team; both what they are and why they matter.
• An understanding of the nine practices that enable customers to sustainably drive XP projects to successful completion; think XP practices BUT for customers.

Angela Martin is a consultant with over twelve years of professional software development experience; she works directly with programmers and customers on agile projects to deliver software that works. She is also completing her PhD research at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, supervised by James Noble and Robert Biddle. Her research utilises in-depth case studies of the XP Customer Role, on a wide range of projects world-wide. Angela is also an Agile Alliance Board Member.

Robert Biddle is Professor of Human Computer Interaction at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He has degrees from the University of Waterloo and the University of Canterbury, and has worked in industry and research organisations in Canada and New Zealand. His two main research areas are Human-Computer Interaction and Software Engineering. His main active projects are in agile methods for software development, and in the design of novel software systems such as videogames, wikis, and end-user development environments.