Visiting customers

As part of our plans, me myself and two of the developers are meeting some of our customers. We're showing them what we're doing and they share ideas and questions. And here we can see what agile development has meant for my company: instead of shoving over a thick document of written specifications and visio diagrams you need to be insane to understand, we show screen dumps from the actual application and sketches of our most recent thoughts.

Using a written specification, you give the impression that you are so sure. it's like using Microsoft Project: those unfamiliar with the calculations behind the program you as a viewer of a Gantt chart can be lead into the belief that the person presented this has used some kind of scientific method to come up with the perfect solution. Not to mention it's boring to read text and visio diagrams. So the customer think: they seem to have thought this through very well. It must be correct.

So, we just use images and words: explain from the pictures using the right word for just that customer. I spent 20 minutes finishing the Powerpoint presentation. It consisted of less than 10 slides. But we got more questions and good ideas than I would ever have gotten from a 100 pages long document. If I was not interested in spelling corrections that is.