We are creating a family of portals and a publishing system to manage their content. We have two sets of users. There are end users - the people in the public who read the content of these portals, and there are editors - employees in the organization (and its partners) who publish content to the portals. The Editorial Director is our Product Sponsor and the Senior Editor is our Onsite Customer. We're part of a product stream so we're colocated with the editors, our Customer and our Product Sponsor. Consequently collaboration is predominantly conversational, by that I mean it's relaxed and happening all the time. We also have some set pieces that occur throughout the iteration, which also help us collaborate with our Customer, the editorial team and the Product Sponsor.
Our Customer and the editors have day jobs and every now and again they're not available for a conversation. We have to respect their flow time. This doesn't happen that often because we have a great sense of team across the product stream and everyone knows we're in this together. Nevertheless, if we can't get feedback when we ideally want it, we can always rely on the Clinic Time at the start of each day. This is a 15-minute time slot at 9:30am, immediately before the daily stand-up, where everyone in the product stream is available. It provides the team with a sure opportunity to seek out the feedback they need and there's an open invitation to the Customer and editors to drop into the bullpen and get previews of where things are at in the iteration, share ideas and get feedback, and raise any issues.
To help us understand the editors' jobs and how they work individually and together we shadow them twice a week. For an hour at pre-arranged times, a pair of developers and testers sit with the editors observing them doing their jobs and asking questions. This reveals many important things about their workflows, their behaviour and how they use the publishing system, which are a great help when we're designing how functionality will work.
Our iterations start on Wednesdays and on Wednesday afternoons our testers hold a Playshop for the editors where they get to play with the functionality showcased by the team the day before. We only do this while we're building that first release of product. Once the first release is live we deploy to the production environment at the end of every iteration. What we're working towards is more user-centred design within iterations but that's another post.
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