Comments for TastyCupcakes.Com

Comment on Collaborative Origami by Beth Parker

Beth Parker — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:58:42 +0000

It would be helpful if the article provided the origami instructions!
Otherwise, good article.

Comment on Resort Brochure by Gwyn Morfey

Gwyn Morfey — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:10:14 +0000

Thanks for your response. We’re planning to run a big session of this next week, so I’ll let you know how it goes. The idea is to run it as almost the last activity of the day, giving the trainees some practical experience in all the things we’ve been talking about.

Comment on Resort Brochure by Don McGreal

Don McGreal — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:40:56 +0000

Hi Gwyn,
I like having the whole team come up with a wish list of the ultimate resort brochure because it adds originality and fun. However, I then like to ask the teams, based on the creative mess they generated, if they have a clear vision for what the brochure will look like. This is a good time to introduce the role of Product Owner, which each team needs to select. The PO is responsible for prioritizing and reining in the backlog and establishing a vision. During implementation, the PO doesn’t do any of the tasks, but need to be available to the team for questions and feedback. The PO then accepts or rejects the work in the sprint demo. Over time, I have put more and more emphasis on the PO role during this exercise and have found that it enhances it quite a bit.

As a side note, I have stopped asking the teams to write their wish list in the form of user stories. I just ask them to write down what ‘features’ they would like. I have also found that having the PO more involved, I do not have to explicitly ask teams to write acceptance criteria. This simplifies the exercise while staying in step with Scrum, which does not prescribe any user story or acceptance testing templates.
This exercise, however, sets up a great introduction for both techniques later on.

As far as sample stories/features, here are a few common ones:

* Show off sandy beaches
* Show people having fun
* List amenities
* List activities
* Adults only. No Kids!
* Show room sample
* Display contact information
* Full bar
* Golf
* Resort layout/map
* Display distance from airport(s)
* Stands out from other brochures (non-functional)
* Can be mailed in standard envelope (non-functional)
* Nude Beaches!

Gwyn, I hope that helps. Please let us know if you have any other questions.
We would love to hear your experiences if you choose to use this one (or any others).

Thanks,

Don

Comment on Resort Brochure by Gwyn Morfey

Gwyn Morfey — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:28:33 +0000

Looks to me like the players start off as customers (or customer proxies) for the user stories workshop, then switch to developers and stay that way. Is that right? Would it be useful to remove the ambiguity by pre-generating the stories, or by having crew act as customer proxies?

If this is a good option, do you have a stack of sample stories for this game?

Comment on 99 Test Balloons by Mick Maguire

Mick Maguire — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:53:59 +0000

Tried this with my teams – a lot of fun, but there were questions of acceptance right up front. So, it’s good to have a strategy in mind to deal with that beforehand.

Comment on Thumb Wars by Doc

Doc — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:56:23 +0000

I like this one – now to find an opportunity to use it. Hmm…

Comment on Process Doodle by The Endowment Effect (Cognitive Bias) | The Doctor Is In

The Endowment Effect (Cognitive Bias) | The Doctor Is In — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:50:49 +0000

[...] one client I worked with recently, we had the group split into two teams, and had each team do a process doodle. As part of the exercise, each group explains their doodle. Both teams that participated explained [...]

Comment on Doggy Planning by Don McGreal

Don McGreal — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 05:01:45 +0000

Hi Russell,

Thanks for your comment!
No, I do not ever show pictures of the dogs. Although, I just realized that the write-up does not make that clear. I will update it.
It works better when voters are just giving their best guess at the relative size based on their current knowledge. This makes it easier to correlate to software features. I also like it when I get people voting on the poodle based on their initial assumptions (toy vs. standard). The votes expose the assumptions, so we clarify and re-vote. Having pictures of the poodle would make it harder to expose this.
With lesser known dogs, like the Newfoundland, some voters will actually google the dog in order to show others what it looks like before the re-vote. Again, a picture would prevent this.

I totally agree that relative sizing should be a learning point. I don’t know why I missed it. I’ll update that too!

Thanks for the great feedback Russell!

Don

Comment on People Polling by Mick Maguire

Mick Maguire — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:22:14 +0000

First attempt for me didn’t work so well. I put 375 dots on a small whiteboard then showed it to my audience. Estimates ranged from 150 – 400 dots with an average of 252. The average fell only just within the top 50th percentile of averages from the group and was not clearly more reliable than asking an individual. As you say “there is always a chance that the results could be off”, and it did lead to a good discussion about the exercise itself.

Comment on Doggy Planning by Russell Norlund

Russell Norlund — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 09:56:56 +0000

Hi Folks, I have a few questions about the doggy planning game:

- Do you need to show actual pictures of the dogs or do you just need story cards with the dogs names?
- I guess another learning point is that the game emphasises the relative size aspect of story points

Thanks for making this resource available.

Kind Regards

Russell