Saturday, August 7, 2010

The Most Important Role in Scrum: The Product Owner - Part II

I came across an interesting observation in a book I have been reading lately [1]. Alan Shalloway wrote "imagine having completed a software development project, only at the end to lose all of the source code".

Although a scary scenario, it illustrates well that the hard work in a software development project is not the writing of the code itself but figuring out what the software is really supposed to do.

Alan goes on stating that it would probably take less time to write the software the second time than it took the first time. I have lost source code in the past, not the whole project though, but rewriting the lost code was faster than the first time, and its design more elegant.

Nowadays losing code should not be a common occurrence because of all of the infrastructure we put in place for a project, but I'm sure that this simple observation will still resonate with developers.

So, if coding is not the bulk of time spent, then what is it? Most of the time is spent on product management activities like discovering the customer needs and on finding ways to realize those needs and not necessarily writing the code. In other words, the time is spent on minimizing the biggest risk in any project: building what the customer doesn't need.

The product owner role is not only responsible for understanding and uncovering customer needs, but communicating them to the team (communication is the second biggest risk). This will take the shape of Minimum Marketable Features in the beginning of the project, User Stories during the project and Acceptance Tests (hopefully with the collaboration of QA staff) closer to the development of software.

After two blog posts about the importance of product owner's role, I hope that this oft neglected role is a little more important in the reader's mind, and in fact, bring it to the same level of attention as the Team and Scrum Master roles.

References:

[1] Lean-Agile Software Development, Alan Shalloway, Guy Beaver, James R. Trott

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