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Day 2 at XP2004 - yesterday: I was attending the "Customer Collaboration" workshop. The topic is a vitally important one and the format was interesting - inspired by LAWST (Los Altos Workshop on Software Testing) - participants tell and refine stories with the aim of extracting practical lessons.

One story stood out for me, that of a project that had been using a hybrid of XP and Scrum, implementing features in prioritized order. About six months from ship date, the people in the customer and PM role left and were replaced. The resulting dip in velocity caused the new customer to eventually call for a reevaluation of the features' ranking by business priority. She sat down with the new PM and went through the backlog to reassess every feature in the light of the project's business case document, which had been revised around that time. Then she used the business case justification to assign a dollar value to each (fairly large-grained) feature description. This turned out to have a strong focusing effect on the technical part of the team, who henceforth had much more confidence in the solidity of the prioritization.

It seems to me that an even better way would have been to have the developers sit in on the prioritization meetings, which is what XP normally calls for; but this scheme - "dollarize business value", as I call the pattern - did wonders to focus the developers and improve the collaboration between the technical and business contingents.

That's the part of the conference that it makes sense to report in a blog entry - there's a lot more going on that you have to be here to appreciate ! For instance, I could tell you about the new Official XP Drink, or the forthcoming ban on giving anything (be it a book or a blog entry) a title conforming to the "X driven Y" pattern. But I won't... for those to be funny you just have to be there.