This session was a Goldfish bowl discussion where we debated the issue of why no customers are involved or participating in the Agile community, the implications of this and how we could encourage them to be more involved.

Conclusions

• Still an unanswered question
• XTC should do something to get some customers together (like "bring your customer to XTC" evening)
• Should completely change the language when talking with customer (i.e no XP, Scrum etc.)
• Choose your customer carefully
• We work with different customers in different ways
  • Need to be able to identify what type of customers you have
• No one surprised customers are not here - something is not right with Agile

Full session output:

• No customers at XPDay. If so much success why aren't they here?
• Some customers like participating, others not much
  • Often it's not their biggest problem/pain point
• Only a small part of a customer's role to be an "XP customer"
• Customers percieve we don't have an interest in their processes?
• Caused by discreet little points of contact
• How do we engage/bring customers to XTC?
  • smaller events?
• Often expect us to know what we're doing
• Only a few of us been to conferences where customers would attend
• Why would customers come to XTC/XPDay?
  • Should we go to their events?
• Need to think more like customers
  • we are all customers of software
• What do we mean by customer?
  • stakeholder?
  • end user?
• Customers don't care about process
  • they have a process - shout a lot!
  • we're not giving them a process they want to work with
• If you start thinking about money it's not difficult to think like a customer
• How about getting paid for what you deliver
  • makes you focus on what it means to be a customer
• 20% of audience have "invited" customers to retrospectives
  • but they didn't continue coming as felt it wasn't worth their while
• We characterise it like customers don't know what they want
  • we don't offer them anything to help them do that
• Our terminology and processes have been created with no collaboration with customers
  • breeds cycnicism
• XP and Scrum designed for dysfunctional environments
• "Don't need to understand the process of building a car"
• Language designed for selling to developers
• Lawyers and doctors have their own language - is just an uncomfortable truth?
  • Exp. of lawyers - they don't use their language in front of customers
• We don't have our own language - it's mostly re-used
• Can we simplify things? Probably not...
• Is there a mediator role?
  • Business anylysis?
• Why aren't the BAs here?
  • We've rejected them - role no longer compatible
• Translation role
  • Don't agree with translation - info gets lost
  • Dev's should learn customer's language
• Being a succesful customer is hard = don't get this with a Doctor
• Don't talk about acceptance tests - ask what the system should do
• Don't see understanfing the needs of customers as a principle behind agile
• Should be easier to meet needs when a customer is "informed"
• Some of the best software is when the customer and developer are the same person
• maybe we know better?
  • it's our responsibility to know better
• should be possible for a customer to have a "gem" of a project and between us terun it into something
• How to help customers make the most of their investmenr
  • if we took a % we would be aligned
• Why do we have such big IT departments?
  • We're not the customer so we can't answer
  • IT different to software
• Engagement - does the customer care?
  • If you have an input get satisfaction & greater collaboration
• We're not collaborating - should be more involving
• Scrum pisses off customers with meetings
• Run the risk of not likeing what we're going to here
• Customers fear giving us too much empowerment

Photos of flipchart output