I participated to a workshop on agile requirement exploration by two XP coaches, there in Mechelen. Even if it was supposed to be something very basical, I learned a lot. First of all, I'm not so cute as I believed in writing user stories... establishing a team from scratch is always a challenge. We forced our customer to answer closed questions instead of eliciting what he wants (or, "treat the customer as an adult" principle, don't frighten him). Customers want to be understood as much as developers want do understand. They have the same goal. We should never forget.
But we were not alone: other teams were lost in useless discussion and details, as the possibility of changing team composition (!) or the nominee of a developer proxy in order to talk with the customer-on-site to avoid communication noise (consider that every team was made by four people, plus the customer). Nevertheless, some observation are worth mentioning, in my view.
Unique Product Owner Principle. It is important that there is a unique person who has the right to say the final 'yes' or 'no', otherwise the team can't syncronize itself with the coustomers' need.
Business People are Like Us. As Dave said, business people live a dynamic world like agile teams. They are more like us than traditional IT departments, and that's why it is better to work directly to them instead of talking CS jargon with IT departements.
We should be passionate as a father telling a (User) story to his children.
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