"The Meal Planner Lives On!"

The Story Point Workshop that I lead this week seemed to go really well. I got some good feedback on it, in person, as well as high marks on the survey I handed out at the end of it. It was such a success, in fact, that now I have to do it again! Next week I have to pull another rabbit out of my hat, and create and present material on Story Points that's appropriate for our Product Owners and Project Managers.

For one of the two Story Pointing exercises that I did with the Feature Team representatives in this week's workshop, I needed a piece of software - real or imaginary - that the attendees could estimate feature enhancements and bug fixes for. I didn't want to use any of the products from our company, since that would create inequities between people who were familiar with it, and those who weren't. While I was scratching my head trying to think of what I could possibly use that wouldn't require a whole lot of work by me in order to define and describe it, it suddenly dawned on me that my beloved Meal Planner Java application would be perfect!

Since I know the application like the back of my hand - I designed and wrote it, after all! - I knew it'd be easy for me to play the Product Owner role, which was needed. It's also an easy enough concept to understand - you tell it what meals you eat, and how frequently you'd eat them, and it generates meal schedules for you with as much variety as possible - that I could explain it to a large group in only a few minutes. And, since none of them had ever seen the application, let alone the Java code for it, they'd all - Engineering and Quality Assurance reps, alike - be on the same level playing field to begin with.

And I'd say it worked extremely well! People quickly "got" it, and then the feature requests and bug reports I'd provided for them to size made sense to them. Whenever they had questions about the details, I was able to come up with them on the fly, or give them an appropriate "out" if I knew that the problem they were trying to solve was going to be too complicated for this hour-long exercise. I even had one person tell me that I should make the application available to all Feature Teams, so they could practice Story Pointing with it!

It was also fun to show them the real Meal Planner on my laptop, at the end of the session, and explain that yes, indeed, it's been providing dinner suggestions for Vicki and I for two and a half years, now. As I always say, I don't know how we ever got by without it!

And it was Boneman who, upon hearing of the use I'd put my application to, supplied the title quote for this blog entry.